Converting an O’Reilly iOS app to EPUB

I am currently learning Ruby on Rails¹. Instead of diving right into Rails, I decided to learn the fundamentals of Ruby first by reading The Ruby Programming Language from O’Reilly². Doing a bit of comparison shopping showed that purchasing the book as an iOS app³ was the best deal at $6.99.

I downloaded the app and started reading and this is what I saw:

Umm…completely unacceptable for a programming book. Since the app uses Stanza underneath the hood, I decided to crack open the package⁴ to see what’s going on.

mkdir ~/ruby_book
cp ~/Music/iTunes/"iTunes Media/Mobile Applications/Prog Lang 1.0.ipa" ~/ruby_book
cd ruby_book
unzip "Prog Lang 1.0.ipa"

Digging around revealed the Open Publication Structure⁵. Some Googling quickly led me to Bob DuCharme’s blog entry⁶ about the proper way to create an EPUB file.

cd "Payload/Prog Lang.app/book/"
zip -q0X "The Ruby Programming Language.epub" mimetype
zip -qXr9D "The Ruby Programming Language.epub" *

Voilà, our very own EPUB book that can be viewed using iBooks:

1. mintyfresh posted this