opubWriter

The opubWriter Library screen, when you first see it, is shown below.

Library Screen

The controls visible on this screen allow you to add a book to your library either by uploading an existing epub or by creating a new one in the editor.

To upload an existing book, click on the Browse button. This will allow you to locate the book on your computer. When you have found it, click on the Upload button. The book will appear in your library.

To create a new epub book from scratch, you click on the New button. This takes you to a screen where you provide some initial metadata for the new book.

The New Epub screen is shown below.

New Epub screen

The first three items are mandatory, according to the Open Packaging Format, so you should provide values if you want your book to be valid. These are a title, an identifier, and a language code.

The title is your choice. So is the identifier but, to help you, opubWriter provides you with a globally unique code which you can either accept or overwrite. For instance, if you have an ISBN or you use an in-house numbering scheme, you can use it to overwrite the identifier.

The language code should conform to RFC 3066.

Following the mandatory items, there are opportunities to insert other metadata items of interest. They can all be left blank if you wish, but there are good reasons for entering some of them. The items you can specify are:

• Creator – enter the name of the author. This value will be inserted automatically in a copyright document, and will be identified in the publication with the role of  ‘author’ [aut]. As we will see later, there are many more roles that can be associated with creators of the publication and you will be able to add as many of these as are relevant.
• Description – obviously an overall description of the book.
• Publisher – enter the name here or leave it blank.
• Date – this date will be entered into the metadata with an event type of ‘publication’. You can change this later if you need to.

When you have completed the metadata, click the Create  button to generate the book. When the book is ready, it is added to your library and the application takes you to the Library screen, as shown below.

Library after adding a book

Now, the book you have just created is listed. All the books you have uploaded or created are shown here. Each title has four small action buttons beneath it. They are:

Edit – which opens the book to show you its contents. Here you will add and remove content documents (e.g. chapters of a novel) and edit their content.

Delete – which lets you remove a book from your library. Be careful; your book will be deleted permanently, so you might want to save a copy of it first using the next button:

Download – save a copy of the book on your computer. Different browsers give different results; Internet Explorer opens a ‘Save As’ dialogue which lets you specify the folder and name where the book will be saved; Firefox and Chrome write to a ‘Downloads’ folder. It’s assumed that you are happy with the way your chosen browser handles this.

Validate – this option is not currently active. It is intended that your book will be validated against the epub standards using algorithms similar to the epubCheck package with problems displayed in a report.

You access a book by either clicking on Edit or by clicking on the title of the book. This takes you to the Content screen, but from that point you can select any of the other menu options that apply to a single publication: Metadata, Media, Styles, Style Usage.