Archive
2026
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There is no podcast app for books
Every week I rehearse with a singing group. Mixed ages, mixed comfort with technology. At some point in most rehearsals somebody is pinch-zooming a PDF on their phone — a scan of handwritten sheet music — trying to find their line. What…
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EPUB is everyone's export format and nobody's native medium. That's a strange fate for a format this good. Well established as the way novels get distributed, EPUB 3 is quietly a general-purpose container for durable documents: built from…
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A new release of the SEED.html app for creating EPUB 3 books in your browser is now live. Find it (v0.5.1) at the new domain: Readit Ina Book! Key features in this release: Full metadata editing (including Accessibility) Built-in axe-core…
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Transforming plain text to SVG for EPUB 3
The guiding principle of the SEED.html app's data handling is that plain text source content, stored inside the EPUB file, is transformed at authoring time to its xhtml representation. The previous blog post provides an overview of how…
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Transforming plain text to HTML for EPUB 3
This post summarizes the formats that I've experimented with in the SEED.html app to create EPUB 3 books. I'll present a minimal goal HTML fragment, and show what the plain text source looks like for each format and what it generates as an…
2025
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Last week I read for the first time about Invisible XML . (The first place I saw it referenced was on mastodon - @ndw@toot.wales ) "Invisible XML is a language for describing the implicit structure of data, and a set of technologies for…
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I was listening to a podcast recently - Episode 11 of The Digital Publishing Podcast with Simon Mellins and Simon Holt. They were speaking with Laura Brady about her work improving accessibility in publishing workflows and outputs and…
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I recently stumbled upon this slide deck by Jim McKeeth from September 2012. It provides an illustration of how the EPUB 3 platform has (and hasn't) changed in the last decade and I'm here for it. Hacking iBooks and EPUB with JavaScript by…
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EPUB 3 provides a rich media environment and a cost-effective digital platform for language education resources. Cross-platform: There are EPUB reader apps available for all operating systems including iOS and Android, No software:…
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Rapture of the Nerds in EPUB 3
Here's an experiment in working with longer-form material in the SEED.html app. The book ' Rapture of the Nerds ' by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross was published in 2012 and distributed (among other forms) as a DRM-free EPUB 2 file. I've…
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Easy Hypertext for Genealogy in EPUB
This sample project illustrates the SEED.html app set up to create a family history book where each person gets a chapter, and relationship links between parents/children/siblings/partners are defined in script objects, and rendered as a…
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This post is just to embed the Digital Choir Resources file that I'll be using at a workshop on using EPUB for accessible sheet music. There's nothing new in this sample project that hasn't previously been illustrated in earlier blog…
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Vakhtanguri Practice Materials by Ensemble Adilei
A post I wrote last month included a video capture I made on my android tablet of an EPUB containing audio practice materials by the Georgian folk ensemble Adilei. You'll find Adilei's recordings and those practice materials specifically…
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Simple script for responsive layout
responsive.js is a script I am using in all my EPUB 3 work that gives me a simple way to control layouts at different breakpoints which accounts for page width and font size setting. The effect of the script is to add a class to the…
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One of the assumptions I'm making with the SEED.html app and the content it produces is that the underlying rendering software for EPUB 3 will be based on web standards and provide modern CSS and JavaScript features. Here's what I know of…
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Here's a video preview of an EPUB recorded on an android tablet in the Cantook app. It presents an audio recording made by my father Jim Haines when he was in Africa in 1962. The EPUB 3 file passes epubcheck validation. It's presented…
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I was playing around with presenting CD booklet-style liner notes in EPUB and made this. (Obviously this is copyrighted material that I don't have permission to distribute, so please don't look at the EPUB in the embedded viewer below.)…
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This is a preview of all the sample EPUB files from the SEED.html app page Presenting them here like this is a bit out of context. You're supposed to read them in the SEED.html app but it's a bit lower-commitment to read them here. Click…
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This sample reflowable EPUB 3 file includes some CSS animation of an SVG element, but also a Reading System script that loads and plays a Lottie animation from a json file. It validates as EPUB 3, but will only be animated as designed in a…
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Tasteful dynamic content in EPUB 3. This sample reflowable EPUB 3 file includes some Reading System javascript to toggle the visibility of some text content. The dynamic content is in the second chapter, which is a recipe for the Georgian…
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EPUB Screenplays for Table Reads
Using fountain.io as a transform script to convert plain text in 'fountain' format into html, then some light javascript to extract character names, and add some highlighting and internal navigation links. See the sample EPUB embedded in…
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This is a test post for the blog for me to work out how to embed the sample EPUB files using epub.js It works surprisingly well. If you want to edit this sample EPUB you will find it on the SEED.html app page. ‹ › Download EPUB
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This is a project close to my heart, and probaby driving some of the design choices I've made with the SEED.html features. In my non-software development time I sing with some Melbourne-based vocal ensembles. We largely sing folk music…
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Responsive Music Notation in EPUB3
Music for Every Reader: Responsive Notation in EPUB3 Imagine reading a digital book where the text doesn't adjust to your screen. You’re constantly pinching to zoom, scrolling awkwardly, and the text is either too small or too large. This…
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LaTeX to EPUB 3 with SEED.html
Do you write in LaTex for academic publishing? Are you interested in producing EPUB 3 for its superior accessibility? The SEED.html app has you covered. This is what an EPUB3 file can look like when generated from LaTeX formatted source…
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Using Markdown for EPUB authoring
The SEED.html app enables writers to create valid EPUB 3 packages from markdown source files. There's a sample project called 'Introduction to Markdown' on the app's home page here; stewarthaines.com/epub Find it under the 'Writers' group…
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Allowing HTML in EPUBS I filled out the survey a few weeks ago and I didn't feel like my responses there were particularly pro or con HTML in EPUB. But the idea has been on my mind since then and this thread on mobileread.com clarified a…