The EPUB or (ePub) is a popular free eBook file format developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It is contained by the OEBPS Container Format (OCF; Zip).
It works on several eBook readers, and viewers, which make it popular among digital bookworms and readers.
Many independent publishers, companies, and agencies use this format to publish their eBook.
The difference between PDF and EPUB formats.
While PDF "Portable Document Format" file format is a popular format for e-books, it is not reader-friendly nor open-source. On the other hand EPUB is developed to work on many digital e-book readers and viewers, and offers better customization than Adobe's PDF format.
Build your EPUB book.
To build your e-book in EPUB format, you need a special editor that compiles your text, media, links, and organize everything in one single EPUB file.
About this article
In this article, we offer you a rich list of open-source ePUB creators and editors, for professionals, developers, and independent writers.
1- Sigil
Sigil is a feature-rich open-source, free EPUB editor for professionals. It offers a full UTF-16 support, allows exporting in EPUB2, and EPUB3 formats.
Sigil is a fairly easy to use, which does not require any learning curve to start diving in and rendering your own eBooks.
We published a quick review about Sigil, with more details about its features.
The Sigil Team
Hamza Musa
2- Booktype
Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any reader within minutes.
With Booktype, you can import DOCS, EPUB files and convert them to a single HTML file format for online editing and proofreading.
booktype3- Magic (Desktop)
Magic is an EPUB editor and creator, it is a fork of Sigil but with more features. It works for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
One of its unique feature is: a built-in simulator that allows user to test the eBook on different mobile phones.
luojilab4- Bookstack (Web-based)
The Bookstack app is a web-based collaborative book writing and authoring platform, that anyone can download, and self-host on his own server.
5- ePub Creator (Browser)
The ePub Creator is a free, open-source browser extension for creating eBook in ePub formats directly from the browser. It is currently available for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
NiklasGollenstede6- Calibre (Desktop)
Calibre is a popular open-source eBook management and cataloging application for Windows, Linux, and macOS. The app offers a great editing and format conversion tools that helps user convert text documents into ePUB formats with one click.
7- PageEdit (Desktop)
PageEdit is an ePub visual XHTML editor based on Sigil's Deprecated BookView. It uses WebEngine instead of WebKit. It works for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
8- Google Chrome EPUB editor
This is a free Google Chrome extension allows users to create offline e-books from web pages and 'overdrive.com' with a single click on the icon.
9- epub-tools (CLI)
The epub-tools is a command line tool for building ePub files. It is written with the Haskell programming language and can be used to generate large EPUB files.
10- Go-epub
The Go-epub script is a Go library for creating, editing and rendering eBooks in EPUB file format. It supports EPUB 3.0, and EPUB 2.0 versions, image, CSS, and custom fonts.
11- Ebookmaker
Ebookmaker is the tool used for format conversion at Project Gutenberg. It builds EPUB2 and Kindle files from HTML. Also, it builds HTML4, EPUB2, Kindle, and PDF files from reST sources.
12- jEpub
The jEpub is a free, open-source JavaScript library that allows developers to build, edit EPUB files within the browser.
13- Node.js EPUB generator
Node.js EPUB generator
Node.JS and JavaScript developers can use this lightweight package to generate eBooks in EPUB format from HTML files.
14- ePUB Creator (Node.js)
Another lightweight JavaScript that can be embedded in any project to create digital books in ePUB 2.0 format.
15- AsciiDoc
AsciiDoc is a text document format for writing notes, documentation, articles, books, ebooks, slideshows, web pages, man pages and blogs. AsciiDoc files can be translated to many formats including HTML, PDF, EPUB, man page.
AsciiDoc.py is a legacy processor for this syntax, handling an older rendition of AsciiDoc. As such, this will not properly handle the current AsciiDoc specification. It is suggested that unless you specifically require the AsciiDoc.py toolchain, you should find a processor that handles the modern AsciiDoc syntax.
AsciiDoc.py is highly configurable: both the AsciiDoc source file syntax and the backend output markups (which can be almost any type of SGML/XML markup) can be customized and extended by the user.
AsciiDoc.py is free software and is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).
16- transpect (SDK)
The transpect is a developer-friendly open-source framework for parsing and converting documents from and to several formats that include EPUB 2/3, PDF, Office Open XML, OpenDocument (ODT), InDesign Markup Language (IDML) and DocBook XML format.
The tool is a meant for developer to be used within larger application.
17- epub-gen
With this tool you can generate EPUB books from HTML with simple API in Node.js.
EPUB creators and editors are essential tools to create reader-friendly portable e-books. Open-source ones save enterprises, agencies, professionals, and freelancers a huge deal of resources.