Now that I’ve completed the images and text for my children’s picture book, and caught the typos, I’m working of validating my ePub file. I tried an online validator that required me to upload my entire eBook, all 75MB of it. It passed. The site claims to immediately delete the files one they’re validated. I hope that’s true. In a suspicious moment, I thought, “Are they going to steal my book?”
With that doubt gnawing at me, I decided to validate all future ePubs myself using the EPUBCheck program available on Github. EPUBCheck is the official ePub validator used by publishers. To run it on my Mac, I had to install Java. I went to the Oracle site and downloaded Java. After I installed Java. The next task was to compile the EPUBCheck program, which requires Maven, which I installed using the Brew package manager for Mac.
brew install maven
Once Maven was installed I could compile epubcheck by running a few commands in a terminal.
mvn clean install
Once EPUBCheck was compiled, I could finally validate my ePub file and recored any errors in the epub-errors file.
java -jar epubcheck.jar ~/Documents/eBook-v2.epub 2> epub-errors