PUBLISHING

Creating the required files and directories
Now that we’ve seen the internal structure of an EPUB by unzipping it, we can
also work the other way round and make the files and directories ourselves,
thus creating a simple EPUB. We will work from our Documents folder where
we will add subdirectories as in the image above, and create the necessary
files using a text editor.
1. Create a subfolder in the Documents folder and name it Example.
2. Create two more subdirectories under the one you’ve just created,
one called META-INF and the other called OEBPS.
3. Using a text editor, create a plain-text file and type (or copy-paste)
the line ‘application/epub+zip’ (without quotation marks) in this file.
4. Save this plain-text file and name it mimetype (without a filename
extension). Save it in the same folder (named Example) as the two
subdirectories created in step 2. This way the e-reader device or application
can see that these elements together constitute an EPUB.
Now there are the two directories and one text file, just as we saw when we
decompressed the EPUB which we used as an example.
container.xml
Next we will create the file container.xml, the XML file (located in the
META-INF folder) that directs the e-reader device or application to an inventory
of all the files present in the publication.
1. Again using a text editor, create a new plain-text file and save it to
the META-INF folder with the name container.xml.
2. The file container.xml contains a simple structure definition written
in XML. Below is a complete version of the XML, followed by an
explanation of its separate components. (The technical explanations
are not essential to understanding the text and may be skipped.)
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