1. Last year I started a wireless mesh network in my Cambridge neighborhood.

2. It was a fun experiment, and a few months later, after I bought a Kindle, I decided that I would try to write an ebook about it. I wanted to write something from scratch that took advantage of the fact that this new ebook platform could handle hypertext, and was connected to the Internet

3. The obvious starting point for me was the Kindle platform, so I followed a link off the Amazon homepage to the “Digital Text Platform”

4. One of the formatting options, along with Word and plain text, is html, which cheered me up since I know basic html and I wanted to experiment with hyperlinks, and integration with the Web. I wasn’t interested in just porting a flat text document to an ebook platform.

5. Once I wrote a draft, all I had to do was fill in some boilerplate information, save my html document and images in a folder, zip it up and upload it to the Amazon server.

6. This is what my first ebook folder looked like

7. And here’s the html. There are a few proprietary Amazon tags, like “page break” but otherwise it fairly straightforward html.

8. And here’s what showed up on Amazon 72 hours later
And here’s what showed up on Amazon 72 hours later. Honestly, it took a lot of trial and error before the ebook displayed up on the Kindle looking and acting exactly the way I wanted it to. But basic process was straightorward – it just took a number of round trips before I felt I got it right.
So now I was on the Kindle platform. But what about the rest of the ebook world?

9. Next I set my sites on Mobipocket, which has ebook reading programs for a bunch of different platforms, including a variety of smartphones and Windows PCs. It also has a free “creator” program – unfortunately not available for Macs – which works in a similar fashion to the Amazon program, which isn’t surprising since Amazon owns Mobipocket.

10. You bundle up your html file and the image files

11. Like this

12. Fill out the metadata

13. and upload it to the Mobipocket server.

14. There you are, on Mobipocket’s store..

15. Now I was on a roll, so I set my sights on the. pdf format
Now I was on a roll, so I set my sights on the .pdf format. A Google search turned up a bunch of html to pdf converters. This should be easy, I thought naively.

16. It wasn’t. Some of the converters underlined the hyperlinks, but didn’t make them hyperlinkable

17. Others couldn’t display images

18. One conversion program just saved the html code as a pdf. Great
One conversion program just saved the html code as a pdf. Great! That looks inviting.
At this point I started to feel kind of stuck. I talked to one designer about helping me, and he said he could do it, using Adobe InDesign -- but it would take him 22 hours at $35 an hour. Now I felt really stuck. I was at a dead end.
I had two slightly different-flavored html files, one for Amazon, one for Mobipocket. $770 would get me a .pdf, version but then I’d be at another dead end.
That’s when I decided to take a step back and check out xml and .epub, the open ebook platform.

19. I started by downloading a trial version of the Oxygen XML Author program.

20. I loaded my html file into Author and started changing the markup to xml tags.
It took me awhile to get used to the structural rigor of xml, but eventually I started to enjoy the valid, well-formed lifestyle. And things really improved when I discovered the DocBook schema, which I could easily associate with my xml document. The name alone gave me hope -- Doc “Book -- and it had tags for things I recognized, like “table of contents” “preface” “chapter.”

21. There’s also tons of helpful DocBook documentation on the Web, including the O’Reilly book, which is now out of print, but still alive on the Web.
But I still had a problem – how to get from xml to epub. As you may know epub is actually three formats bundled into one, so that was going to make things challenging

22. By this point I was reading the O’Reilly TOC blog and I noticed that some of the contributors were consultants who seemed to know exactly what I needed to know, like Liza Daly, who has a consulting company, based in Somerville, which is right next to Cambridge.

23. She also runs Bookworm, an online ebook library.

24. I contacted her and she said that she was familiar with DocBook and said that it was “relatively trivial” to convert DocBook to .epub.
She told me that there are already open source stylesheets that will convert partially from DocBook to ePub, so she wouldn't have to start from scratch.
So I sent her my DocBook file, and she created a program that runs the existing conversion and adds the final steps of properly zipping up the ePub , which can’t be done by the stylesheets alone.

25. Liza and I very quickly developed a workflow: I create an XML document in Author, using the DocBook schema, and send it to her, She runs a few scripts and sends back an epub. It only takes her a few minutes, so the consulting time doesn’t add up. Recently we came up with a date/edition convention so that we can keep track of revisions.
As the conversion tools improve, I may be able to do it all myself. But the important thing is that I now have a workflow that allows me to continue to experiment.

26. I’ve now got 3 more short ebooks in various states of development, and I’ve been able to put up a companion Web site, using Drupal, that allows me to integrate these ebooks with the Web.
Since I’m now working in xml, I’m confident that I can easily export these projects to Amazon’s format or to Mobipocket …or even .pdf.
And now that I’m working in xml, I feel like I’m in a much better place to experiment than I was back when I was a serial ebook converter struggling with proprietary formats.
Thanks for listening.