The best place to look for public domain ebooks to produce is Project Gutenberg. If downloading from Gutenberg, be careful of the following:
There may be different versions of the same publication on Gutenberg, and the best one might not be the one with the most downloads. In particular, there could be a better translation that has fewer downloads because it was produced later, or there could be a version with better HTML markup. A great example of this phenomenon is the Gutenberg version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. The most-downloaded version is an old translation widely criticized as being slapdash and inaccurate. The less popular version is a fresh, modern translation dedicated to the public domain.
+There may be different versions of the same publication on Gutenberg, and the best one might not be the one with the most downloads. In particular, there could be a better translation that has fewer downloads because it was produced later, or there could be a version with better HTML markup. A great example of this phenomenon is the Gutenberg version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. The most-Vdownloaded version is an old translation widely criticized as being slapdash and inaccurate. The less popular version is a fresh, modern translation dedicated to the public domain.
Gutenberg usually offers both an HTML version and an epub version of the same ebook. Note that one is not always exactly the same as the other! A casual reader might assume that the HTML version is generated from the epub version, or the other way around; but for some reason the HTML and epub versions often differ in important ways, with the HTML version typically using fewer useless CSS classes, and including <em> tags that the epub version is often missing.
se build-images takes both ./images/cover.svg and ./images/titlepage.svg, converts text to paths, and embeds the cover jpg. The output goes to ./src/epub/images/.
Once we built the images successfully, perform a commit.
git add -A git commit -m "Add cover and titlepage images"
The table of contents is a structured document that should let the reader easily navigate the book. In a Standard Ebook, it’s stored outside of the readable text directory with the assumption that the reading system will parse it and display a navigable representation for the user.
-For now, you can copy and paste a ToC file from a different Standard Ebook to get an idea of what they should look like. Once you’re done, commit.
git add -A git commit -m "Add ToC"
- content.opf is the file that contains the ebook metadata like author, title, description, and reading order. Most of it will be filling in that basic information, and including links to various resources related to the text.
se print-manifest-and-spine --in-place .
The manifest is already in the correct order and doesn’t need to be edited. The spine, however, will have to be reordered to be in the correct reading order. Once you’ve done that, commit!
git add -A git commit -m "Complete content.opf"
The table of contents is a structured document that should let the reader easily navigate the book. In a Standard Ebook, it’s stored outside of the readable text directory with the assumption that the reading system will parse it and display a navigable representation for the user.
+Once you’ve completed the <spine> element in content.opf, you can use se print-toc to generate a table of contents for this ebook. Since this is the first time we’re generating a ToC for this ebook, use the --in-place flag to replace the template ToC file with the generated ToC.
se print-toc --in-place .
+ Review the generated ToC in ./src/epub/toc.xhtml to make sure se print-toc did the right thing. You may have to make changes by hand for complex or unusual books.
+
Once you’re done, commit:
+git add -A git commit -m "Add ToC"
+ se create-draft put a skeleton colophon.xhtml file in the ./src/epub/text/ folder. Now that we have the cover image and artist, we can fill out the various fields there. Make sure to credit the original transcribers of the text (generally we assume them to be whoever’s name is on the file we download from Gutenberg) and to include a link back to the Gutenberg text we used, along with a link to any scans we used (from archive.org or hathitrust.org, for example).