Video Tutorials for eBook Production

Posted on 2012-Sep-07

Are you the Do-It-Yourself type who wants to learn how to make professional eBooks yourself? Don’t waste your time with magical one-click publishing solutions for EPUB and MOBI files. We assure you—they never work. In preparation for the release of Paul’s upcoming book on eBook production, BB eBooks has put together some videos to provide a brief overview on crafting an eBook from the ground up. These videos are intended to be used in conjunction with the written tutorials on the BB eBooks Developers page. There are also numerous references to the one and only Ron Swanson.

HTML Video Tutorial

This video covers the basics of creating HTML for the content of your eBook. It includes:

Using a Quality Text Editor [:05]
HTML Template [3:15]
Paragraph Elements [5:45]
Heading Elements [9:00]
Escaping Dangerous Entities [10:50]
Images [13:30]
Tables [20:20]
Lists [23:30]
Comments and Line Breaks [26:15]
Hyperlinks [28:10]
HTML Validation [34:00]

CSS Video Tutorial

The CSS tutorial shows you basic styling elements to make your eBook content look professional. It includes:

Adding a Style Sheet [:05]
Element Selectors [2:30]
Bold, Italics, and Underlined Text [3:45]
Using the span Element and class Attribute [4:30]
Text Alignment [8:25]
CSS Specificity [9:40]
Font Size Adjustments [10:25]
Text Indentation [12:00]
Margins and Whitespace Considerations [13:30]
Multiple Element Selectors [17:15]
CSS Validation [19:05]

Regular Expressions Tutorial

The Regular Expression tutorial shows you how to harness the power of the regex engine like a pro to save you time in your eBook production workflow. It includes:

What are Regular Expressions [:05]
The Find and Replace Window [1:00]
Multiplying Operators (?, +, *) [2:05]
Special Characters [4:40]
Sets [7:50]
Anchors [9:00]
Alternations [11:55]
Substitutions [12:55]
Practical eBook Usage of Regular Expressions [16:05]
Whitespace Clean Up [16:45]
Adding Paragraph Elements [19:15]
Adding Heading Elements on Chapters [20:40]

Complete Workflow Tutorial

The workflow tutorial takes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from a source Word document and converts it into a valid EPUB and MOBI file without the use of any third-party software. This 1-hour tutorial covers the following:

Approaching the Source Document [:05]
Adding Fancy Quotes, em dashes, and Ellipses [1:30]
Preserving Italics, Bold, and Underlined Text [6:45]
Reformatting the Word Document into a Text Editor [9:35]
Adding HTML Markup to an eBook’s Content [12:30]
Applying CSS to HTML Markup [20:10]
EPUB Directory Structure [24:00]
OPF XML Creation [26:55]
Splitting HTML files into Numerous HTML Files for Faster Parsing by eReading Devices [31:40]
Adding an HTML Table of Contents [36:35]
Adding XML to Manifest, Spine, and Guide Section [41:25]
Adding a toc.ncx Table of Contents [44:00]
EPUB Compression [48:25]
EPUB Validation and Troubleshooting [51:50]
Previewing Your EPUB eBook [56:20]
Generating a MOBI/KF8 eBook from a Source EPUB with KindleGen [57:10]
Previewing Your MOBI/KF8 eBook [1:04:40]

We hope that these video tutorials are useful, and please feel free to provide any feedback.

Label: Technical and Design