Nice Books

Hi! I like books. I like how digital books are easy and free to distribute and share. But I've been a bit disappointed with how typical EPUB files look on my e-reader.

I miss the intentional font and layout choices of physical books. I miss the nice big chapter headings and the beautiful drop caps. I miss the feeling of each book having it's own little personality.

I'm in the process of trying to bring some of that magic back to the e-books I read. The avenue I've taken so far is to design aesthetic templates that can be used to transform the raw text of a book into pretty PDFs. This work is on GitHub, at zchsh/epub-from-md. It's currently a private repo, though I'd be happy to open it up if anyone asks.

For now, I only have a single template, based on the first edition of A Room of One's Own. I've tested this template on some work-in-progress PDFs. These should work nicely on a Kobo Clara. Here they are:

• a-room-of-ones-own.pdf
• pride-and-prejudice.pdf
• the-conquest-of-bread.pdf

If you've somehow found this page, and you have a different e-reader that you'd like a special PDF for, or you have a different public domain book you'd like to read, you can email me at hi@zch.sh. I'll be excited to hear from you, and happy to help format your book nicely!