eBook Snobs

There is a bit of snobbishness out there when it comes to creating eBooks even among the liberal and very welcoming self-publishing crowd. It has to do with creating an eBook from Microsoft Word as opposed to hand coding it with HTML or using some other sophisticated publishing tool.

Those in the anti-Word camp rile against its inflexibility and formatting frustrations, and I've had my share, so have some sympathy. But the the fact is, most authors write their books in Word and two of the leading online  eBook distributors, Amazon and Smashwords both accept uploaded word documents, which they then convert to their own eBook formats. So if your book is narrative text, then Word can be a perfectly fine starting point in creating an eBook. You do not need to know any HTML to create and self-publish an eBook and anyone who tells you different is a goose... and perhaps worse a techno-snob.

That said, if you are creating an eBook that needs some design features, utilises images, has lots of references and other more advanced features, then Word can be cumbersome to say the least. In this case you do need a more sophisticated tool than Word, but do you need to know HTML or other programming language? Not necessarily. There is a terrific new free eBook creation tool which can provide great assistance - PressBooks.

If you are familiar with the popular blog platform WordPress, then PressBooks basically has the same user interface and features with the additional feature allowing you to export your blog entries (chapters of a book for example) into eBook formats such as ePub and PDF. Because it is a web platform it is designed for creating interactive, media rich projects and so it is much better at handling these elements than Word.

PressBooks lets you easily author and output e-books in multiple formats (no techy knowledge required) including EPUB, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML, and InDesign-ready XML. It is still in Beta, which means that the people developing it are still refining the features and functionality but when I had a slight problem exporting a file, they were very responsive.

While PressBooks is not going to satisfy all your eBook design needs at the moment, it is a terrific step in the right direction for those out there determined never to touch HTML or any other programming language in the creation of an eBook.

Here is a book that I recently published with PressBooks http://brokeandbroken.pressbooks.com/ The images don't look great online but they seem to come out well in Kindle.

Are you a techno-snob? Love to hear your thoughts :-)