About ePub Zen Garden
No one denies that printed books are irreplaceable. They can be lent, traded, displayed and enjoyed for decades.
But electronic books have their place as well. They're portable, adaptable, infinitely customizable and —whether you like it or not— they're going to live side-by-side with printed books for years to come.
We want to dispel the myth that digital books can't also be crafted works of visual design. Just as web design has evolved and matured, so too will ebooks, and book designers have a new medium available in which to express their creativity.
The Zen Garden is a place to showcase this new way of designing stories.
Use the dropdown at the top right to switch between different styles.
History
When Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were just gaining wide browser support, Dave Shea launched CSS Zen Garden as a way to convince web designers that CSS was the future. It's hard to imagine that anyone wanted to hold on to the clunky tabular look of websites prior to CSS, but adoption was slow. We believe ebooks are at this turning point now.
Until the widespread adoption of the ePub standard, there was no open, cross-platform method of marking up and styling digital books. Because ePub uses many existing web standards (including CSS), mature tools are already available to create and style digital books.
All of the book designs presented here were created with standard image tools like Photoshop and basic web design tools used to create HTML. No proprietary ebook software necessary.
The designs
Threepress Consulting commissioned three web graphic designers and one former book designer to create the styles you see here.
All are available licensed as Creative Commons Attribution, meaning you can use them for any purposes as long as you provide attribution to the ePub Zen Garden and/or the original designer.
The book
This edition of Middlemarch by George Eliot is derived from the Project Gutenberg ePub edition, but was re-structured to better fit the constraints of the designs and to be chunked into individual chapters.
This ebook is in the public domain and may be used for any purpose.
The code
The reading engine is a variant on epubjs, an open source JavaScript library that can read and display uncompressed epub files. It is available for download at Google Code.
Contributions
Like the original CSS Zen Garden, the ePub Zen Garden encourages you to submit new designs to be added to the site. Please see how to contribute to ePub Zen Garden for more information.
Browser support and bugs
The styles and UI will work best in recent versions of Firefox and Safari, with some support for IE 7 or greater. Please report bugs to epubzengarden@threepress.org.
Credits
Designers
- Jeremy Canceko (Noir)
- Chris Drackett (Swiss)
- Misty Granade (Springtime)
- John McCoy (Wallpaper)
Contributed styles
- Keith Fahlgren (Terminal)
- Martin Jenny (Traditional)
- Reece Dunn (Modern 1)
- Reece Dunn (Modern 2)
- Kirk Biglione (GBS)
- Adam Scott (Gibson)
- Mike Fallows (Carter, Jost, Seneca)
- Gordon Grace (Tribute)
- Kristof Schmit (Reclaim, in the style of the German Reclam)
Software engineering
Concept
All site images from BiblioOdyssey. Used under the terms of their Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike licensing.