Building a Better Bible Ebook

I have been interested in the Lexham English Bible that was published by Logos in 2010. So I recently downloaded the ebook (epub) in order to have it on my tablet and be able to read it. As I looked at the epub file, I saw that while they had done some good things with it, there were a number of shortcomings. In a sentence, I thought I could do something better.

First, let me describe what is good about the epub file that can be downloaded from the Lexham English Bible website:

• The title page is nicely formatted.
  

  A nicely-formatted title page in the original epub

• The entire New Testament is included.
• The ebook “spine” (which shows the table of contents) includes all the Bible books – a nice touch.
• The ebook is free! Who can complain?

That’s about it. Now, what about the problems?

• The epub file contains two complete copies of the Bible text, but without making use of the second copy. As a result, the epub does not validate with epubcheck, and the file is over 2 MB rather than around 1 MB as it would be with just one copy of the text.
• The table of contents page has no links. You scroll through this page on your way to Matthew, but you can’t click a link.
• The text formatting is very rudimentary:
• Superscripts are large and create extra line space.
• Poetry is set with double-line-space.
• The in-text headings are strangely small.
• The textual footnotes are formatted with a lot of extra, unnecessary space.

Since the Lexham English Bible is free to distribute, I decided to see what I could do, using the XML sources as a starting place (i.e., rather than creating a derivative epub, I built one from scratch using my own workflow). You can download the resulting epub file here. A couple of notes:

• The table of contents page is linked.
• The resulting Bible text is formatted beautifully: headings, poetry, and superscripts are set correctly and proportionally, and paragraphs look like paragraphs, with no extra line space or strange formatting.
• The textual footnotes look good, too.
• The file is 1.2 MB rather than 2.2 MB, and it validates against epubcheck.
• Each chapter heading includes a link back to a book table of contents, which is a list of links to each of the chapters of the book.

Before	After
Matthew 4 in the original ebook.	Matthew 4 in the new ebook.

I’m very pleased with this result, and in the spirit of sharing (well, actually, for bragging rights, and because the license requires free distribution), I am offering this ebook for download here (1 MB epub).

Lexham English Bible, new epub (1 MB)