Sorry to deprive you of the challenge Greg, but I've made epub versions
(automatically) of issues 1 through 12. Right after epub was first
mentioned, I starting considering how I'd go about converting the site to an
epub package. Of course the holidays intervened, but given it's Jan 2, I put
some spare time towards it et voila!

Download a first draft of the journal in epub here:
https://github.com/LouisStAmour/journal2epub/downloads

Site maintainers may be interested in the error logs. Look for lines saying
"referenced resource missing in package". Sometimes it's my fault (e.g. an
absolute image reference I missed in 3.epub) and sometimes it's a typo (e.g.
a link to drupal.org that actually points to <a href= in an issue 12
reference). Before posting these epub files live on the site, we should run
through the logs to fix things, perhaps hand-tweak and recompile the HTML as
epub, make sure images are sized correctly on non-iBooks readers (e.g. my
Sony Reader), perhaps add cover art, copyright & table of contents with
abstracts.

Source code is mostly one file (it hasn't been refactored), under MIT
license (from Expat):
https://github.com/LouisStAmour/journal2epub/blob/master/journal2epub.rb


Louis St-Amour
York University Digital Media BA student & Osgoode Hall Law School student
webmonkey
http://www.lsta.me/ or on Twitter, @4Lou

On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 12:42 AM, Greg Williams <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Karen's right, EPUB content is basically XHTML/CSS/graphics, so converting
> from web->EPUB shouldn't be that difficult.
>
> The hardest part would be properly constructing the required
> manifest/metadata XML files.  After you do all that, creating an EPUB
> archive
> is basically a matter of packaging all the files into a ZIP archive and
> changing
> the file extension.
>
> If you already have the HTML/CSS/images, a tool like Calibre (
> http://calibre-
> ebook.com/) should do a basic conversion.  If you wanted to do a bit more
> customization, something like Sigil (http://code.google.com/p/sigil/)
> could
> also help simplify the task of gathering/organizing content, automatically
> creating required metadata/manifests, etc...  I'm sure there are many other
> tools out there, those are just the two I've been playing with recently
> while
> preparing for an upcoming presentation on EPUB.
>
> I, for one, would welcome an EPUB version of the Code4Lib journal; I read
> Pragmatic Bookshelf (http://www.pragprog.com/magazines) and Hacker
> Monthly (http://hackermonthly.com/) every month in EPUB format (on an
> iPad), and really find the experience much more enjoyable/engaging than
> reading the same content in a browser on my desktop/laptop.
>
> Time permitting, I might be persuaded to put together a sample EPUB issue
> of
> the journal, if there was any interest...
>
> -Greg Williams
> West Linn Public Library
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
> On Sun, 26 Dec 2010 07:41:34 -0800, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> >Epub is essentially HTML at its root, which should make this easier. I
> >think that the Internet Archive may have done this -- they are
> >exporting books in ePub format. I'll forward this question to some
> >folks there (rather than putting their emails in a public list).
> >
> >kc
>