Delivering the goods … 1, 2, 3 (PDF, Kindle and ePUB)

I've been busy working on style sheets and formatting guides for eBooks as you can tell from my previous posts. I now have the first free eBooklet from Gylphi online. It can be downloaded from http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry/index.php for those of you who are interested. Simply scroll down the right column until you reach the free download section. Add the Kindle and/or ePUB versions to your cart and click checkout. You will be asked to enter your name and then the free download will proceed.

If you wish to download straight to your device you can try: http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry/cork.epub and http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry/CorkKin.mobi I know using the first link in Safari on the iPad (with software fully updated) you will be prompted to open in iBooks, but in Safari on a Mac you will be faced will a jumble of code, and it will be treated like a text file even with a right(ctrl)-click.

Here is probably the place to note the final tweaks needed to get the books online. Firstly, I discovered that ePUBs do not pass the validation test when using the <blockquote> tag. Liz Castro doesn't use it in her book (I had wondered why!); second Sigil - http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ - is an amazing piece of software that saves huge amounts of time and keeps ePUBs valid no matter how much messing about you do with the file; third as Joshua Tallent tells us in his book you cannot alter font-size or any other CSS element in <sup> tags - however, if you enter CSS for this element it will have an effect in the Kindle Apps and desktop software, so might be worth doing all the same to avoid ugly spaces between lines, and let's hope Amazon address this at some point for the actual Kindle.

Finally, there is no DRM on these files, feel free to crack them open, and if there is enough interest I will post the XML files that I imported into InDesign as well for this project, so that you can see how much (or how little) alteration was necessary to generate three formats in this fairly manual way.

(You can also see photos from the three versions at http://www.facebook.com/innovativepoetry)

I hope these files will be useful for editors looking to edit academic work, which includes footnotes and references, and has a simplicity of style.

Ideas for improvement most welcome. Please post in comments.

UPDATED

As requested by Ian, here is the entire CSS for the Kindle version of the publication.

/* Copyright belongs to Gylphi Limited, http://www.gylphi.co.uk, for original CSS and XHTML layout. Acknowledgement goes to Joshua Tallent's book Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle, ISBN 978-1-4404-8888-7, the developers of Sigil, Amazon for their Kindle Preview and KindleGen software, and the #eprdctn team on Twitter for sharing tips and tricks*/

body {
}

h1 {font-family: "GillSans", sans-serif;
margin-top: 1.5em;
margin-bottom: 0em;
font-size: 150%;
text-align: left;
}

h2 {font-size: 115%;
margin-top: 0em;
margin-bottom: 0em;
text-align: left;}

h3 {margin-top: 1em;
text-transform: uppercase;
font-size: 80%;
text-align: left;}

h4 {font-style: italic;
font-size: 65%;
text-align: left;}


/* .text class elements */


p.first {
margin-top: 1 em;
font-family: "Baskerville", serif;
text-indent: 0em;
line-height: 130%;
}

p.center {text-align: center;
}

blockquote {margin-top: 1em;
margin-bottom: 1em;}

p.noind {text-indent: 0em;
text-align: left;}

/* .logo class */

div.logo {
text-indent: 0;
text-align: right;
margin-top: 1em;
margin-bottom: 0;
font-size: 65%;}

/* logo end */

div.figure {
width: 50%;
float: right;
margin: 0 0 0 .5em;
line-height: 2em;
}
/* .copyright class */

div.copyright p {
text-indent: 0;
text-align: center;
}


img {
max-width: 100%;
}

p.right {text-indent: 0;
text-align: right;
margin-top: 0;
margin-bottom: 0;
font-size: 80%;
}

div + div {margin-top: 1 em;}

ul {
margin-top: 1em;
}
li {text-align: left;
}

sup.small {font-size: 70%;


}