Last summer when John Schember, Sigil’s lead developer, gave me the bad news that Sigil was dead, I cried. Literally. It’s the only time I have ever cried over the loss of a piece of software.

Despite the cessation of development, Sigil was still the best out there for building ePubs, and so, with the threat of Sigil losing its place on Google Code a very real possibility, I asked John if I could host the program on my website. Unfortunately I then ran into the problem of this WordPress site not allowing such a large file to be uploaded; luckily Sigil remained available on Google Code.

Development had ceased because John was burned out due to a lack of assistance; however, in late September, programmer Kevin Hendricks came on board and development began anew. So far it has been restricted to fixing bugs and adding plugin support, the latter a stopgap measure to keep the program progressing, but there are plans to move Sigil toward ePub3. Nothing has been announced yet, and unless other programmers join the team, Sigil may suffer another relapse for the same reason as before: programmer fatigue.

In this respect it is important for users to remember that, although Sigil is open source, open source should not be equated with free. If the program works for you, if you are using it regularly, then please recognize its value and donate.

Sigil has moved off Google Code and onto Github and can be downloaded here. And earlier this month John launched a blog devoted to Sigil.