Robot school
The robot is teaching me how to edit Epub files.
The thing that surprised me most when I first learned about EPUBs is that they are not really a document format at all. They’re more like a miniature website zipped into a single file.
The thing that surprised me. ChatGPT is such a card! Anyhoo, it’s right – an Epub file is a bunch of xhtml and css and image and media files all zipped together – literally! If you rename a book.epub file into book.zip, you can open it and poke around in it.
I may have mentioned it before. What I didn’t know before is that the best way to edit them is using an open source tool called Sigil (pictured above). It makes it really easy to see the structure of the file and edit the various components directly.
Why was I doing this? I have downloaded a series of Victorian books which are behaving badly on my preferred Kindle reader (which is, for the record, a Remarkable tablet).
(Oh, who am I kidding? I just like to dissect files and Frankenstein them).
Posted: August 3rd, 2026 under personal.
Comments: 5
Comments
Comment from ExpressoBold Pureblood
Time: August 3, 2026, 8:26 pm
Dear Weasel:
“Dead Pool Round 199: the heat wave breask” is missing its deadpool tag…
Comment from Uncle AL
Time: August 3, 2026, 10:13 pm
@Stoaty — In your Dr. Frankenstein role, have you found a way to save an Amazon-downloaded book so that Amazon can no longer reach through the ‘net and grab it back? I sure do prefer OWNING a book, even a digital book, over licensing the content which is how it works these days.
Comment from QuasiModo
Time: August 3, 2026, 11:11 pm
Comic book *.cbz files are just a collection of JPG files as well…you can make your own and read it in a comic reader, just zip a bunch of sequentially numbered JPG files and rename it to *.cbz.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: August 4, 2026, 4:54 pm
A month ago I would have said yes, Uncle Al. Amazon books downloaded to a specific folder and a Chinese tool called BookFab (you may remember DVDFab) which converted them into open pdf. But Amazon has changed their DRM and broke it.
Which pisses me off because I paid for it.
(I’ll fix it, Espresso Bold).
Comment from Uncle AL
Time: August 4, 2026, 7:54 pm
Dang. Wish the news were better but thanks for the update, @stoaty.
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