Thanks to a Sigil user (Bryan) I now have in hand a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Thanks Bryan for sending me a copy of Windows! The plan is to get RC 2 builds out this weekend.

About Formatting Tips. A common embellishment used in print books is to have the first letter of the first paragraph in a chapter appear much larger then the others. In addition to the letter being larger than the rest it also falls below the baseline. The rest of the paragraph will wrap around this first letter. To achieve this we will use a little bit of CSS and a span tag....

About Formatting Tips. When creating an ebook using EPUB paragraphs default to looking like they do on a web page. Each paragraph is separated by a blank line and there is tab indent. It’s relatively easy to format your ebook to look like a printed book. The first paragraph of a chapter should not have an indent but all subsequent ones should. Also, there should be no blank space between paragraphs....

Formatting Tips is a series of articles focused on helping format an ebook to make it visually appealing. The major focus will be on EPUB. However, these articles will not always focus on that format. I plan to touch on ebook creation in general too. EPUB internally uses of XHTML and CSS for formatting. I recommend using Sigil for formatting your EPUB ebooks. However, I will try to keep the information in these articles focused on generic so that the techniques can be applied using any editor, even a basic text editor like Notepad....

Tonight I was able to fix bug 813 (see 837 for details). This is the last blocker bug for the 0.4 release. I merged a few patches there were sitting around. I’ve also fixed and issue with changes to metadata not being relayed to the GUI as the file having been changed. With these bugs fixed 0.4 is in a state that I feel is ready for release. I have little experience with building releasable, binary packages for OS X and Windows....

The other day it was announced I am now the maintainer of the Sigil. Back in June Strahinja announced that he was looking for someone to take over the project. I highly respect the work Strahinja has done with Sigil and this is a project I don’t want to see die. I myself use Sigil one occasion and when dealing with e-books I often find myself recommending its use. After seeing the announcement by Strahinja that it was time to move on I contacted him about taking over in his stead....

This week saw some more work on Get Books. Once change is not user visible but makes it easier for new stores to be added. The other change is user visible and was suggested by a user. I’ve added a base class for OPDS OpenSearch based stores. It will use the OpenSearch url and retrieve all results. It then puts them into a SearchResult object for use with Get Books. Individual stores will need to do some massaging of the results because I’ve found that the results are often inconsistent from store to store....

Introduction Over the past few years I’ve been asked numerous times about my position on DRM (Digital Rights Management). Mainly I’ve been asked this by authors looking to start selling their works as ebooks. I’ve been sending the same email with more added each time in response to this and I’m tired of it. Here are my thoughts on DRM and how it is perceived by different parties. Since this relates to ebooks I’m going to focus on the publishing industry but I’m not going to ignore lessons learned by other industries....

Introduction When Barns and Nobel (B&N) announced the All New Nook, the Simple Touch Reader I was interested. When I heard it was going to be an e-ink device I became very interested. I’ve desired owning a Nook for a long time but I’ve never bought one until now. The 1st generation Nook with the dual screens looked like a good product but I passed on it. The battery life and e-ink screen compared to the Kindle 3 (I was in the market for a new reader a while back, when I broke my Bookeen Cybook Gen 3) just weren’t enough to get me to buy it instead of the Kindle....

This is a list of ideas I’ve had or suggestions I’ve received from people about what to do with “Get books” in calibre to make it better. These are all ideas and may or may not make it into future release. OPDS set of classes that makes it very easy and quick to add new stores that support OPDS. Basically, the plugin author would only need to specify the base feed url and this class would take care of finding the search feed....