Creating and editing e-books with Sigil

They're not for everyone, but e-books have become a regular part of this world. Typically, you purchase e-books as finished products that can't be modified. You can attach notes and bookmarks, but what if you want to write an e-book from scratch? The free Sigil [1] e-book editor lets you do just that. Version 0.6.2 of this remarkable software debuted in December 2012.

EPUB Format

Apart from proprietary e-book formats, such as those Amazon uses (see the "Amazon Exception" box), the Electronic Publication (EPUB) open standard is widely used [2]. It's essentially based on a number of other open standards and uses a ZIP container for the formatted content (Figure 1). The content structure is based on XML, XHTML, and CSS stylesheets. EPUB borrows from only parts of these standards, which limits the design, but simplifies the implementation.

Text can be UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoded, uses XHTML tags and is formatted via CSS stylesheets. For the sake of clarity, the source code is distributed across multiple files (which typically end in .xhtml ) that combine to form an e-book.

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