Anatomy of an ePUB

What is and epub?

"EPUB (electronic publication; also sometimes ePub, EPub, or epub) is a free and open e-book standard, by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). Files have the extension .epub. EPUB is designed for reflowable content, meaning that the text display can be optimized for the particular display device. The format is meant to function as a single format that publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for distribution and sale." (source: wikipedia)

Technically, an EPUB is just a compressed ZIP file, containing a bunch of XHTML and XML, so it's easy for anyone to make your own with a wide range of tools (including the most basic text editors) and this simplicity built on top of open standards is an attractive solution for the publishing industry to support it.

Try some epubs

download some epubs from Project Gutenberg
Test on the various readers
unzip the epub - what's inside?

Practical ePub dissection: font embedding

Font embedding is the technique that gives the opportunity to an ebook designer to provide and use his/her own set of fonts. This feature is not yet totally supported by all readers, but no worries the limited reader will use then its own fonts as fallback. So there is not reasons not to start using this feature!

One ePub will be selected to demonstrate how it is possible to manually tweak the ebook CSS in order to use your own fonts in your ebook. Students are asked to follow the different steps using their own epub and a font of their choice.

For example:

 @font-face {
   font-family: "Linux Libertine";
   font-style: normal;
   font-weight: normal;
   src:url(LinLibertine_Re.ttf);
 }