I have had an arse of a day, or perhaps several arses. A wealth of buttcoins.
ePub is a cursed format. This is particularly the case when you’re caught between:
- the author of Calibre, who thinks epubcheck is broken nonsense that doesn’t meet the ePub spec and takes literally years to fix bugs, and he’s completely correct on this;
- the Apple Books store, which insists your ePub passes epubcheck anyway.
So I spent yesterday and today generating an ePub, then editing the XHTML by hand. If you ever have to do this, you know you’re living your life wrong.
But, I made it through — and the ebook has been queued in the Amazon, Draft2Digital and Smashwords stores, and the paperback on Amazon!
(TO DO: get the PDF onto the Google Books store.)
If you’re a $5-a-month patron, you have the ePub in your email right now. THREE DAYS EARLY.
If you’re a $20-a-month patron, you should make sure your shipping address on Patreon is up to date, okay.
[click the Patreon link, you know you want to]
It’s a good book. You thought Facebook were hubristic Silicon Valley tech bros — but you had no idea of the sheer depths of their techbro Silly Valley inanity.
In the meantime, my true and loyal assistant Inch the Inchworm and I are having a glass of Writer’s Friend. We’ve earnt it.
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Congratulations, David. The book is a huge accomplishment, and I truly enjoyed reading the draft. You are now the world expert on Facebook Libra. Here’s to you, my friend.
I may, at one point, have written some code that ingested a variety of formats on one end, and emitted a variety of formats on the other. It was definitely the case that one of the output formats was “epub” and among the input formats were “plain text” and “LaTeX”.
I have (for good or bad) forgotten most about what I learned about he epub format, apart from “it is really hard to convince most ZIP libraries that you want to have one file (or “file”) not compressed at all”.
oh gawd, that bloody mimetype file, that has to not just be uncompressed but first in the zip.
(usual way by hand: create with zip -0 and just the mimetype file, then add the other files)
the hard part turned out to be obscure parts of translating a complex word processor file into an ePub. Calibre is the best software for this job, but its author has some opinions.
I second those congratulations.