Unleash Your Inner Author: A Step-by-Step Guide to Modifying EPUBs for Free with Sigil

How to Edit EPUB Files with Free Sigil

Posted by Ada Wang on 12/8/2014 8:56:08 PM.

You may find EPUB books downloaded from torrent sites or converted from another format are filled with spelling or formatting errors, which makes the reading experience very uncomfortable. This guide will tell you how to edit EPUB files with free Sigil.

About EPUB

EPUB is actually a compressed file, which (the extension EPUB) can be directly changed to “zip”. Once decompressed, there will be generally 2 folders and 1 mimetype file generated. The content files (HTML or XHTML) are saved under ops / xhtml. If you are familiar with HTML language, you can directly use any editting tool, such as Dreamweaver, to edit the HTML / XHTML files.

About Sigil

Sigil is a powerful EPUB editor supported on multi platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. It can be used to not only edit EPUB files but also create EPUB books.

Edit EPUB files step by step

1 Download Sigil .

Make sure to download the correct version on your computer (with “Featured”). Here I take Sigil for Windows (the third item) for example.

2 Install Sigil on your computer.

Uncheck “Associate ebook files with Sigil” and “EPUB” on the “Select Components” screen. Or every time you open an EPUB file, it will be opened with Sigil by default.

3 Open your EPUB book with Sigil. Right-click the book, select “Open with” -> Sigil is a …

4 When the EPUB is opened, the cover page will come in front of you. All content pages are listed under the “Text” folder on the left-hand side.

5 Double-click each html / xhtml content page to open and edit. You can edit the EPUB files like other editting tools, such as MS word.

The icons on the upper tool bar are easy to use as well.

Click here

6 Click “Tools” -> “Metadata Editor”, you can manually edit the EPUB information / metadata.

Besides “Title”, “Author”, you can click “Add Basic” or “Add Role” button on the right-hand side to edit more metadata.

After finishing editting one page, you’d better close the corresponding page tab. Or Sigil might crash due to a shortage of system resource. The closed page will be saved automatically.

7 When all editting is done, click “File” -> “Save” to overwrite the original. Or select “Save as…” to save as a copy.

Click here

Conclusion

Sigil delivers an easy way for users to edit EPUB files manually, although the whole editting progress is a bit slow. If you know about HTML and CSS, a basic editting tool like notepad, would be enough.

![author](https://www.epubor.com/images/uppic/1-22-2013 12-03-06 AM.png)

Ada Wang works for Epubor and writes articles for a collection of blogs such as ebookconverter.blogspot.com.

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7 Comments

hoda

Re:Edit EPUB Files with Free Sigil

03/19/2015 01:56:23

thank you very much! your clear instructions made my day! I gave you 5 stars!

Andrew

Re:Edit EPUB Files with Free Sigil

12/24/2015 07:58:15

I cannot get itunes to accept any edits I make to metadata using Calibre. iTunes insists on its own idiot processes. It also won’t seem toa ccept any changes I make using iTunes itself. Will this prgram allow me to edit or delete all known metadata so that I can outsmart iTunes?

Epubor

Re:Andrew

12/24/2015 20:12:33

iTunes books are protected by Apple DRM, which can’t be removed, so you can’t do anything on an iTunes eBooks except reading it with iBooks app..

Andrew

Re:Epubor

12/25/2015 02:34:34

These aren’t books I bought from the store, they are epub torrents i snagged from the pirate bay.

Tommy

Re:Edit EPUB Files with Free Sigil

10/9/2016 10:19:19

there is no sigil version with featured, only deprecated. should i get it?

Tommy

Re:Edit EPUB Files with Free Sigil

10/9/2016 10:19:24

there is no sigil version with featured, only deprecated. should i get it?

Thomas Neviaser

Re:Edit EPUB Files with Free Sigil

02/17/2022 00:47:43

I have an epub I’m trying to upload to Draft2Digital and they tell me I have a file, iTunesMetadata-original.plist, that must be deleted or added to the Manifest in the content.opf before they will accept it.
I am using Sigil and can not find this file anywhere in the epub.
Can you help me?
Thomas Neviaser

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Unleash Your Inner Author: A Step-by-Step Guide to Modifying EPUBs for Free with Sigil