Sigil: an Open Source eBook Creator

Free ePub creator

I’ve been looking for a simple, intuitive e-book creator to examine the functionality of electronic texts at the college, primarily for supplemental content. And I may have found the answer thanks to a presentation done by John Raible and Amy Sugar at the Educause 2013 Annual Conference. John and Amy presented the session titled DIY eBooks Using Open Source Tools. The session featured Sigil, a free, open source ePub creator.

Sigil was developed in 2009 as a multi-platform e-book creator supporting Windows, OSX, and Linux. Sigil incorporates several handy interfaces including WYSIWYG and code-based editing as well as the importing of HTML and plain text files. Sigil was formerly hosted by Google Code but is now available on several alternate sites such as GitHub and CNET.

The presenters developed a nine page e-book for the presentation to demonstrate the versatility of Sigil. They suggested that an e-book be laid out initially in a word processor using the appropriate formats such as lists, tables, headings and fonts. It was also suggested to use placeholders for images, audio, and video files for later input into an e-book.

Example text page

All multimedia content should be properly formatted prior be placement into a Sigil doc. This includes image resizing and the trimming

of audio and video clips. The presenters also suggested using mp3 for audio, mp4 for video, and jpg and/or png for images. The placement of content into Sigil appeared to be quite easy and required minimal reformatting.

Getting the e-book into the hands of students requires either an ebook reader on a mobile device or the Readium program installed on computers. The demo ebook opened without issue on my Windows 7 computer running Adobe Digital Editions. The look was clean and navigation was flawless.

Example text page with image

Sigil is definitely on the “technologies to try” list. There are possibilities for supplemental content and online training texts. 

Thanks to John and Amy for making us aware of another great resource. Their presentation resources are freely available through a Creative Commons license.