Added an EPUB file for phones!


I've added an EPUB download of Borealis, for phones and book readers. I think EPUB format is immensely important for distributing readable files to people, for one very big reason: you can read it on your phone. I'd love to see us normalise making EPUB versions of TTRPG files available as well as PDFs. Yes, PDFs get all the formatting and layout beauty, and that's great, but it's so hard to read a PDF on your phone! Two column text, zoom in the whole time; it's super infuriating. An epub version of a file is readable on any phone with every ebook reader, and it reflows, meaning that you can change the text size, scroll up and down, and read it in a way that you can actually see. Keep the PDFs too, sure; you want all that lovely graphic design to not go to waste! But provide an EPUB so that someone can open your carefully crafted ruleset or game or module on their phone, because that's where they're actually going to do it, half the time. Give them both files: epub on phone for quick reference and planning or to browse through on the commute to work or while sitting down for some other reason, and PDF for big display on their laptop while they're running the game or to print out a copy on the colour printer at work.

As to how I did it... LibreOffice, which is what I used to design Borealis, has "Export as... > EPUB", so that was easy. How you export an EPUB depends on your creation tool; InDesign has it built in, I believe, as does Scrivener and MS Word. (If you're given the option, be sure to choose reflowable as the way to make your epub; this is what makes it readable on a small screen, rather than the fixed-format that a PDF is.) It's worth making sure that your EPUB has chapter markers and a table of contents; the LibreOffice exporter does this, but I don't know about others. The Calibre book reader can import your EPUB and has a metadata editor and a book editor which can add these things if your design tool of choice puts out EPUBs without them.

Files

Borealis.epub 777 kB
May 10, 2022

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