It takes some effort to get your book in the EPUB format. Sure, it is made much simpler with great free software like Calibre but it still doesn’t happen by itself.

So when you discover that you have a handful of misprints in your document and you want to clean them out (you want the best possible for your readers, right?) the last thing you want to have to do is go back and edit your original Word document and go through the whole EPUB conversion process.

Sigil to the Rescue

Thankfully, you don’t have to. I had this exact scenario today and after initial attempts to do this the slow way, I found a great piece of Open Source software called Sigil. Simply download, install, and open your EPUB. That’s it! Your EPUB is presented to you on the screen as a book broken into sections. You can go through and make your correections, click save, and everything is done.

No fancy editing, no setting up images again, no mess and confusion with multiple versions of your proofs. Just a simple editor that works efficiently and fast.

What the Sigil Website Tells You

Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format.

Now what does it have to offer…

• Free and open source software under GPLv3
• Multi-platform: runs on Windows, Linux and Mac
• Full Unicode support: everything you see in Sigil is in UTF-16
• Full EPUB spec support
• WYSIWYG editing
• Multiple Views: Book View, Code View and Split View
• Metadata editor with full support for all possible metadata entries (more than 200) with full descriptions for each
• Table Of Contents editor
• Multi-level TOC support
• Book View fully supports the display of any XHTML document possible under the OPS spec
• SVG support
• Basic XPGT support
• Advanced automatic conversion of all imported documents to Unicode
• Currently imports TXT, HTML and EPUB files; more will be added with time
• Embedded HTML Tidy; all imported documents are thoroughly cleaned; changing views cleans the document so no matter how much you screw up your code, it will fix it (usually)
• An actually usable user interface
• Native C++ application
• Bugs
• And a lot more…

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I am a happy customer. Thanks to this little find I can get on with my next novel.