My Second Children's Picture Book Has Been Submitted to Ingramspark

My eBook passing inspection

Today I submittedThe Butterfly Who Airlifted His Friends Over The Wall for publication by Ingramspark. The biggest obstacle with the eBook was getting the it to validate without a TOC (table of contents). I had the TOC configuration set to “None”, but that generated an error. For future reference, the correct setting in InDesign for Table of Contents is “File Name”.

The print book had three errors caused by files that were too hi-res…600dpi. I ran them through Photoshop and reduced them to 300 dpi and the book passed perfectly. Now I’m waiting for the proofs. If everything looks good, the book will be available for sale. Hooray!

This setting prevents a validation error

Validating My Children's Book ePub

Now that I’ve completed the images and text for my children’s picture book, and caught the typos, I’m working of validating my ePub file. I tried an online validator that required me to upload my entire eBook, all 75MB of it. It passed. The site claims to immediately delete the files one they’re validated. I hope that’s true. In a suspicious moment, I thought, “Are they going to steal my book?”

With that doubt gnawing at me, I decided to validate all future ePubs myself using the EPUBCheck program available on Github. EPUBCheck is the official ePub validator used by publishers. To run it on my Mac, I had to install Java. I went to the Oracle site and downloaded Java. After I installed Java. The next task was to compile the EPUBCheck program, which requires Maven, which I installed using the Brew package manager for Mac.

brew install maven

Once Maven was installed I could compile epubcheck by running a few commands in a terminal.

mvn clean install

Once EPUBCheck was compiled, I could finally validate my ePub file and recored any errors in the epub-errors file.

java -jar epubcheck.jar ~/Documents/eBook-v2.epub 2> epub-errors

My book passed all tests. I feel that InDesign did a good job of exporting a very complicated ePub 3 file. I’ve looked far and wide and I can’t find a free, open source software that can compile an ePub3 file.

In other news, I sketched another poster today, this time it was the awesome “Nord Express”(1927), by Cassandre. Here’s the original poster.

And here’s my version in pencil and ballpoint pen. Using the ballpoint pen was a definite mistake, another live and learn moment.