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This past weekend Leonard Richardson (of BeautifulSoup fame) and Sumana Harihareswara released Thoughtcrime Experiments, a 100% independent, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licensed F/SF anthology. It's pretty rockin', in both concept and execution.

Ararche Jerico beat me to it by a couple days with his e-book editions of Thoughtcrime Experiments, but what I lack in speed, I make up in obsessive-compulsive attention to trivial details. Thus I present to you the Thoughtcrime Experiments EPUB pedant edition. To what sorts of trivial details does this edition attend? Glad you asked!:

• Book-optimized stylesheet. I created a new stylesheet for the book from scratch, roughly following the design of the Thoughtcrime Experiments PDF/print edition. Beyond just looking more "book-like" (paragraphs marked by indentation rather than vertical whitespace, etc), I've also ensured that all body text maintains vertical rhythm, lines appearing at the same positions even following headings, breaks, and so on.
• High-quality art. Includes higher-quality version of the artwork than used for the Web edition, providing some degree of future-proofing for larger e-book reading displays. I've also taken pains to display the art nicely, despite the best efforts of the CSS standard to the contrary.
• A beautiful, fully-scalable SVG cover. Ok, the SVG cover actually looks like crap / doesn't display at all in everything but AdobeDE. But it looks quite nice there, thank you very much.
• Hand-corrected HTML->XHTML conversion. The source HTML had a handful of missing-tag etc. issues. I individually validated each file and hand-corrected it, ensuring perfect markup.
• Fully normalized punctuation. The source HTML contained some variation in punctuation conventions and handful of punctuation errors (a missing opening quotation mark, two hyphens instead of an emdash, etc). I've corrected the errors and normalized to a single set of conventions.
• Squeaky-clean metadata. Not only passes epubcheck1, but does so with panache! Includes all required metadata, identifies each contributor with a separate metadata entry, and includes a metadata table of contents which mimics the structure of the PDF/print edition TOC.
• Embeds a font. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but the OPS spec doesn't actually require that EPUB reader systems provide a default set of glyphs for any particular set of Unicode characters in any particular typeface. This means that embedding a font is the only option if you want to be certain all the characters in your book will display properly. I chose TeX Gyre Pagella because it's (a) free-as-in-freedom and (b) looks nice and sassy2 at 10 points.

Enjoy!

1 Actually not completely true at the time of writing, due to what appears to be a bug in NCX validation.

2 By which I mean "legible."