Oh, the power…

Google has asked for .epub files for Google Editions (which might, actually, some day, really launch!) by August 6. Plus, I’m looking to sign up with Kobobooks directly, and they need .epub files.

Adobe InDesign CS5 will export to .epub. But I wanted some hands-on control of the output. I’ve learned xhtml (my blogs, BLUM and author website are all xhtml-compliant), but hand-coding the html Kindle files is enough of a pain. It would be nice not to have to crash-learn the whole .epub protocol (I want to learn it, eventually) and do every book manually by August 6.

So, I girded my loins and braved Adobe’s scary Help resources. In about ten seconds, I found this:

InDesign creates a single .epub file containing the XHTML-based content…The .epub file is essentially a .zip file. To view and edit the contents of the .epub file, change the extension from .epub to .zip, and then extract the contents. This is especially useful for editing the CSS file.

I’d done a test .epub file, so I tried renaming it .zip and then clicked on it. Bingo. StuffIt! (which I’d just recovered and re-installed along with some other things that got lost during the Hard Drive Reconfiguration) popped the file open…and there it all was. xhtml file, fonts, css file, and all of it opened right up for editing in Notepad. So, I can access the components, tweak them, rezip and rename the file…I can totally control my .epub files! But InDesign will start out doing all the work. How cool is that?!?

And I can convert other people’s books for them, for pay. I’m a coder, I can solve any format problem, even if I have to go in and edit the code line by line. It’s a snap for me. Another free-lance skill set! I should start an online portfolio. 🙂 (Do you have a book you’d like converted to .epub? Contact me!)

I am so happy that I bought Adobe Creative Suite CS5–it was a big chunk of change to drop, but man, it’s saved my sanity a dozen times already. I don’t know how I was managing without it!