If you're looking to publish eBooks for fun or profit, one question you might ask is what authoring tool to use. The average writer is probably using something like Microsoft Word...pushing a button to import it into the various ebook stores and hoping for the best.
But if you're a programmer, you might be looking for a vetted programmer's solution. You'd like to write your book in something that looks a bit like MarkDown--perhaps with some LaTeX thrown in. You'd like to keep the chapters of your book under version control in git. And you'd like to run one command and have all the different formats for the eBook build automatically. A version that you can just put up on the web as HTML would be nice too.
One open-source solution that does all the builds is called Softcover, which is under an MIT license. You can see samples of the output here.
Note
In addition to the software package, there is also a publishing and sales channel site that integrates with it called softcover.io. One interesting angle they have that's not really on other ebook sites is that if you want to make the web version free, they'll host that build of it. Then they provide the back end for upselling on associated media...things like screencasts. It's a revenue model that has worked for railstutorial.org.
Beyond the tie-in with screencast media, the other differentiating factor from the popular gitbook.io toolchain would be its extension of MarkDown using LaTeX:
Hartl's Tenth Rule of Typesetting - Any sufficiently complicated typesetting system contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of LaTeX
In any case--the cross-format-building software itself is independent of the service, so you don't have to use it to use softcover.
I made a fresh Xubuntu 14.04 VM to install Softcover, and here are the steps:
Get Ruby and Gems
Softcover is written in Ruby (although for some programs it uses, it has dependencies on other systems like Node.JS and Java). It's distributed as a "Ruby Gem". So first you'll need to get the Ruby and Ruby Gems packages:
sudo apt-get install ruby sudo apt-get install gems
Install native gem building dependencies
Some of the gems you're going to need to install are going to require building native code. So be sure you have both a C++ compiler and the
ruby-dev package installed:sudo apt-get install g++ sudo apt-get install ruby-dev
Note
I don't know whether gcc would also work, I just always install g++. You might be able to get away with just gcc.
You will also be needing the
libcurl and curl/curl.h. According to this upvoted answer on StackOverflow, this should cover you for all your curl development needs:sudo apt-get install libcurl3 libcurl3-gnutls libcurl4-openssl-dev
Note
There may be a more minimal set than that, but monkey see...monkey install. Disposable VM. :-)
Install the Softcover Gem
The source for Softcover is available on GitHub, but the gem installation is the easy way to get it installed with all of its dependencies:
sudo gem install softcover --pre --no-ri --no-rdoc
If you don't add that
--no-ri and --no-rdoc, then the process can wind up taking a ridiculously long time. It will sit there building local documentation files for all of the gems that Softcover depends upon, and all the gems they depend upon. I don't know about you, but I look everything up in the web browser anyway. So disabling that saves disk space and time.
You should now have enough to make the HTML and EPUB builds of a book. But there are more dependencies if you want MOBI for the Kindle and PDF. The command
softcover check lists things you can install and URLs to install from, but most are available as packages on Ubuntu; here's the quick versionInstall Turnkey Dependencies
The biggest nuisance is how long LaTeX takes to install and that you have to "pick a Java" instead of just being able to say "sudo apt-get install java". But these commands should "just work":
sudo apt-get install imagemagick sudo apt-get install default-jre sudo apt-get install inkscape sudo apt-get install phantomjs sudo apt-get install calibre sudo apt-get install texlive-full
Note
Yes, you can type them all on one line, but fixed fonts don't word-wrap here.
Install Node.JS as "Node"
One trick in installing Node.JS is that the package name is
nodejs and it is installed under that name, but softcover wants it to be named node.Note
You can find the routine where Softcover checks for dependencies in utils.rb, and see it's using
which node to find it.
So install
nodejs, but then create a symbolic link so that Softcover can find it under the name "node":sudo apt-get install nodejs cd /usr/local/bin sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs node
Install EpubCheck
EpubCheck is looked for in a
/bin subdirectory of your home directory. So install it with:cd ~ wget https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck/releases/download/v3.0/epubcheck-3.0.zip unzip epubcheck-3.0.zip rm epubcheck-3.0.zip
Install Amazon KindleGen
It's pointed out in the Softcover manual that Amazon's KindleGen tool has rules over the use of it to generate books you will sell on sites other than Amazon. Calibre is the open-source alternative, and can substitute for it and build MOBI files.
If you want to be principled about rejecting that rule, don't bother with KindleGen and use Calibre. If you are worried that it might be buggier or less optimized, or lead to some kind of bad blood with Amazon if you upload books with it, then that could be a reason to install it.
The link for downloading requires you to tick a box. At time of writing, KindleGen is 2.9. So:
cd ~ wget http://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/kindlegen_linux_2.6_i386_v2_9.tar.gz tar -zxvf kindlegen_linux_2.6_i386_v2_9.tar.gz rm kindlegen_linux_2.6_i386_v2_9.tar.gz cd /usr/local/bin sudo ln -s ~/kindlegen_linux_2.6_i386_v2_9/kindlegen kindlegen
Note
I'm assuming here you're downloading things into your home directory. Adapt if you're not working in a VM solely for Softcover and care about directory organization.
That should be it!
That should work. From there, just follow along in the Softcover Book. You should be able to do:
softcover new example_book cd example_book softcover build:all
The only thing that was a bit confusing was that there were a lot of warnings while LaTeX ran. But the output products in the "ebooks" directory seemed to be okay.
