4 ms·
Having just wrote a blog last week, "E-books are not easy!" I really can't tell you that it's going to be easy :) I wrote mine by looking at the EPUB format an
by DanielBMarkham 15y ago
Having just wrote a blog last week, "E-books are not easy!" I really can't tell you that it's going to be easy :)
I wrote mine by looking at the EPUB format and setting up gedit and a bash script. Here's a nice guide for all of it: http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/Introduction.shtml http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/Introduction.shtml. Once you run the script, there's a nice little epub-checker over here: http://threepress.org/document/epub-validate/ http://threepress.org/document/epub-validate/
From there, Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/ http://calibre-ebook.com/) will load/translate your epub file. Also it will load it to your devices for checking. As much as I like complaining about formats and such, I found this process very similar to writing a website -- lots of xhthml and xml. Nothing too tough.
Once you're done, then there's finding a publisher. Amazon will take a MOBI file, LuLu takes an epub, etc.
There are a zillion details to writing an e-book. If your question is narrowly-targeted at "how do I physically make an e-book" then the answer is not so bad. I did it all from scratch. There are a bunch of third-party tools that will help you also.
- mixmax 15y agoThanks Daniel :-)
- DanielBMarkham 15y agoOne note -- one of the mistakes I made early on was moving to xhtml too soon. I found it was easier to edit and rewrite in MS Word (or whatever), then copy-and-paste over to xhtml when I was getting close to publish. Otherwise, if you're doing it all by hand and have a bunch of chapters and formatting and such, refactoring can be a bear.