HTML entities broken in PubIt! nook previewer! : So You Want To Make An eBook?

ebook_cover_200Title really says it all, doesn’t it folks?

I found out the hard way this morning (after fixing a typo in Spec The Halls – go check that charity fundraiser out!) that HTML entities are currently breaking the PubIt! previewer.

I’d switched out the HTML entities for smart quotation – specifically:

’ to ’
“ to “
” to ”
… to …

The previewer stopped rendering after any of those. I switched ’em back – but I’m concerned about this behavior, especially with older readers not always being able to render unicode characters properly. This is also opposite to my advice in my guide, as well as a change from what some other retailers would like to see.

Of course, there’s one simple, easy way to make sure something as simple as punctuation doesn’t bork your eBook.

Let’s all say it together…

“…we don’t need so-called smart punctuation in order to read our books.”

Because, y’know, that last sentence was so hard for you to read.