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Dublin Library

The Publishing Project

Quick and dirty ebook creation script

 

After creating all the content for an ebook there is still more work to do and I can't always remember the exact commands to run to finish the book. I do remember that I have to do the following:

  • Delete the existing version of the book (if any) to make sure that changes are picked up in the final product
  • Delete all .DS_Store directories created in my Mac. This may not always be necessary but avoids epubcheck errors if you forget to remove the directory from one of the files being compressed
  • Zip all files to the zipped epub container
  • Runs epubcheck on the resulting epub file

[code lang=bash] #!/bin/sh

#1. removes the existing epub file (if any) rm -rf mybook.epub echo "book file deleted"

#2. Remove .DS_Store file find . -type f -name '*.DS_Store' -ls -delete echo "deleted mac specific files"

#3. Zip the necessary files and directories zip -r -X mybook.epub mimetype META-INF OEBPS

#4. Run epubcheck on the resulting file from step 3 java -jar /usr/local/java/epubcheck/epubcheck-3.0/epubcheck-3.0.jar mybook.epub

#5. All Done :-) echo "All Done"

#open mybook.epub [/code]

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