About

I was unable to find any ebook version of Bernadette Perrin's translation of Plutarch's Lives. Fortunately I found Bill Thayer's transcription on his website LacusCurtius. With that along with BeautifulSoup I created this epub edition of Plutarch's Lives.

I haven't read the entire book yet, so please let me know if you think you've found an issue.

The code isn't pretty, but it gets the job done and only has to run once. It handles stripping the unneeded html elements and editing the links so they'll work on an ereader. The css I used is hand picked from the sites's css. I used Sigil to create the content.opf and toc.ncx files (see below) and zipping everything together.

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MediaFire

What does an epub consist of?

I couldn't find a simple overview of what makes up an epub2 file, so here is quick summary.

  • content files: usually xhtml and css, but can also include images, audio, and video.
  • content.opf: this file contains the metadata (e.g. author, title), the manifest (a list of the content files, an alias for them, and their media type), and a spine (the order in which the content will be layed out).
  • toc.ncx: this file specifies the table of contents.