osx free epub3 creation software

Question

Any good recommendations for free software to create epub3 files on osx?

Calibre has been mentioned in some articles, but it seems that it's not particularly suited to creating epub3 files from scratch.

Adobe InDesign is probably the biggest recommended software but it's quite expensive.

What else am I missing?

Answer 1

Sigil

is a multi-platform EPUB ebook editor. Ive used it, is built for making ebooks

Pages does a reasonable job of exporting an Epub if you follow basic Epub formatting (headings)

Answer 2

One possibility is to write your content in ReStructuredText then use Sphinx to generate the epub 3 content, see the FAQ & the rst Primer.

• Free, gratis & open source
• Cross platform - works on Windows, OS-X & Linux
• Very similar to using the markdown on Stack Overflow
• ReStructuredText is suitable for version control
• Can also produce other formats from a single set of files, e.g.: html, epub2, LaTex suitable for pdf generation, man pages, etc.

Answer 3

Pandoc is a very powerful and flexible tool which can read a wide variety of input formats and output EPUB, among others. Among formats it can take as input are Word, Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, and others. It is freely available—Homebrew is a convenient way to install it and keep it up to date—and it easy to use from the command line/Terminal on OS X.