epubcrush 2.0.3

Compress EPUB files

EPUB Crush

Compresses EPUB files to reduce size.

By default, all images, fonts, scipts, and styles will be removed from the EPUB.

Installation

This package is available via PyPI and can be installed from there.

pip install epubcrush

Performance

File	Original	txt	txtz	Images q=100	Images q=50	No Images
1	589kB	27kB	12kB	584kB (99%)	257kB (44%)	27kB ( 5%)
2	589kB	88kB	30kB	584kB (99%)	285kB (48%)	47kB ( 8%)
3	87kB	89kB	34kB	75kB (86%)	49kB (56%)	39kB (45%)

Why?

EPUBs may include features that may not be desirable from a privacy or efficiency standpoint. Publishers may choose to include high-res images, custom fonts, styles, scripts, and other features that bloat the size of EPUBs beyond what is needed for the text content of a book. This application strips away everything but the plain text content.

Why not use plain text?

EPUB adds a number of useful reading features (table of contents, metadata, etc) that are useful and not available in basic plain text. EPUBs are also compressed, so they will often be smaller than simple plain text.

Method of Operation

• Iterate files in container
• Remove all files that are not part of the document text or part of the EPUB structure
• Parse XML files
  • Remove the following tags
    • link
    • meta
    • style
    • picture
    • audio
    • video
    • script
  • Replace img tags with their alt text in a p tag