On the road to Booktype 2.0, the Booktype team has released a new Python library, EbookLib. After a fruitless search for an open source library that would meet the needs of the online collaborative book publishing platform, Booktype developers Aleksandar Erkalović and Borko Jandras wrote their own library and made it available to the Python community via GitHub. EbookLib is released under the Free Software GNU AGPL v3 license. This library can read and write both EPUB2 and EPUB3 format files, with support for reading the Kindle's Mobipocket format under development in the 'mobi' branch.
The EbookLib API is designed to be as simple as possible, while making complex projects possible too. It has support for covers, table of contents, a spine, guides and metadata. Sphinx documentation is now available at Read The Docs for developers interested in using EbookLib in their own Python applications. Already, EbookLib has been spotted in the wild as part of the sprits-it! speed reading application, as well as the fanfiction2ebook tool and deboutlesgens website based around a Django CMS.
Packages of EbookLib 0.15 for GNU/Linux are also available in the latest development repositories of Debian sid and Ubuntu Utopic under the name python-ebooklib, with the next version of the Ubuntu distribution expected to be released in October 2014. In time, it is hoped that EbookLib will become part of the standard open source toolkit for handling digital books.