Best Free Ebook Software Now More Awesome

Sigil, the gold standard in (open-source) ebook-editing software has had an update. That may not float your boat, but this is major news, with a BIG new feature – integrated ebook validation.

I use Sigil for building and editing ebooks, and you should too – but its lack of validation was a slight Achilles heel. Now you can build a snazzy ebook with the user-friendly WYSIWYG or code editor, and know that you’ll get a perfectly valid ePUB package at the end of it.

To be honest, I’ve never had any problems with any ebook I’ve built with Sigil, but this way you get a nice little report from the “FlightCrew” – a bit like doing a “preflight” on large Adobe documents and layout (we do that in some part of journo-land).

Improvements include:

• added a small “Donate” button to the toolbar and a related entry in the Help menu
• added a .desktop file for the make install target (courtesy of Richard Gibert)
• this time *really* worked around a Tidy bug that added blank lines to the start of <pre> and <style> elements (issue #655)
• updated ZipArchive from 4.0.1 to 4.1.0
• fixed a regression crash bug with loading extremely rare HTML content documents that have an internal DTD subset
• added a workaround for a crash bug caused by invalid epubs that use obfuscated fonts but with incorrect UUID URN key syntax (issue #709)
• integrated the FlightCrew epub validation library; a new toolbar icon triggers epub validation and displays the results (issue #28)
• fixed a rare input truncation problem when the input file contains a unicode nbsp and also specifies standalone=”yes” in the XML declaration (issue #677)

So use Sigil and rejoice (And donate. I have. It’s excellent)

Calibre has also had another decimal point upgrade. It’s under that much development that it isn’t huge news, but I’m constantly impressed on how actively it is upgrade. Microsoft – listening?

Calibre’s New Features

* Reduce startup time when using a composite custom column
* Template language: Add a list_item function for use with tags like columns. See User Manual for details
* TXT Input: Attempt to detect the input encoding when not specified. Auto detect paragraph structure and formatting markup.
* Search & replace: Add ability to manipulate number and boolean columns.
* Add type ahead completion to the advanced search dialog.
* Double click on plugin in Preferences dialog to customize
* Allow customization of the SONY driver to send thumbnail to the device. Useful with newer SONY readers
* Smarten punctuation: Convert double dashes to em dashes. Preprocessing: Various tweaks

Bug Fixes

* Fix regression causing the template formatter to intepret a missing format letter as ERROR instead of ‘s’.
* Fix regression that broke conversion of PNG images in PDF files on OS X.
* Content server: Fix improper XML escaping of category titles in the OPDS feeds
* When decoding XML if the XML starts with a UTF-8 BOM decode as UTF-8. Fixes parsing of FB2 files with UTF-8 BOMs
* E-book viewer: When scrolling to a bookmark and the content is wider than the window, do not scroll in the horizontal direction
* E-book viewer: Fix next page skipping the bottom of chapters when the content is wider than the window.
* FB2 Output: Insert covers.
* Content server: When serving OPDS feeds handle html descriptions that have namespaced attributes.
* When downloading metadata from isbndb.com, download a maximum of 30 results rather than 1000
* Fix sorting of tags column
* Change search/replace to show commas instead of vertical bars as the separator for multiple authors
* Template language: Make all column names case insensitive
* Fix bug that prevent the Disabled option for Tag Browser partiotining from working in the Preferences dialog
* Fix bug when using tags like custom column in the template language
* Fix bug where composite custom columns using general_program_mode fields are not evaluated correctly when used in a template.
* ImageMagick interface: Don’t crash when asked to open empty image files
* Kobo driver: Add TXT,CBZ,CBR to supported formats list
* Don’t uneccessarily scroll the book list horizontally when re-selcting previously selected rows.