Astute readers will have noticed that we’ve begun publishing our in the ePub format. Now, some of our best essays and interviews are available as lightweight and portable files, and can be read on any electronic reading device that supports this open standard. And who better to undertake the task of converting our library than your friendly opensource.com intern? This summer, I’ve refined what I consider a simple, reliable method for creating eBooks the open source way. Today, I’d like to share it. Our task This guide explains one method for creating electronic books ('eBooks') in the format using open source tools available on most popular computing platforms.

• Development As Freedom Ebook Pdf Template Printable

EPub is the open standard for digital book publishing, and most major electronic reading devices support it (except for the Kindle—sorry, Amazon fans!). But more importantly, formatting an electronic book as an ePub guarantees that many online eBook marketplaces will host and distribute the work. The method I outline here reflects two desires: to create open eBooks in open formats using open tools, and to avoid unnecessary complication by involving as few of these tools as possible.

As a result, this guide describes a rather specific procedure—one for collecting and editing content in the OpenDocument format and turning that content into an ePub eBook. You will need. The word processor. The for LibreOffice. An (like or ) One additional note before we begin: I could not have done this work as quickly or as easily without the help of, the Auckland-based writer and editor who's. When I began imagining how I might accomplish this project, I read (several times) many of, which were immensely helpful. Any open source project worth its salt must acknowledge its debts; Scott has my gratitude.

Development As Freedom Ebook Pdf Template Printable

Let’s get started. Preparing content First things first: your eBook needs content. You might be composing fresh content for your eBook project. Or maybe you’re repurposing content you’ve already published on a blog. In either scenario, LibreOffice makes for an ideal tool.

Regardless of how you get your content into LibreOffice, remember one crucial point: you must use styles to format your document. 'Styles' are more than font choices and line-height preferences; they’re statements about the logical and meaningful structure of your document (for more on this, do some reading on ').

Some might think using a word processor to create electronic books is a bit looney, but here's the thing: quickly and efficiently formatting text is what word processors are designed for. Unfortunately, most users never learn to use word processing software properly, applying text formatting (like font sizes or text colors) to individual elements willy-nilly. If you’re one of those people (I was!), then you should do yourself a wonderful favor and study LibreOffice tutorials on. Applying styles In LibreOffice, press F11 to toggle the Styles and Formatting pane. When this pane is visible, it will display the styles currently in use in your document.

To make an ePub file, you’ll need to designate at least the following elements:. Headings. The title of the book and its major chapters should be set in 'Heading 1.' All chapter sections should be set in 'Heading 2.' For subsections, choose 'Heading 3.' While LibreOffice allows writers to designate up to nine heading styles, you shouldn’t move beyond the first three. Most ePub makers won’t recognize anything but these.

The text of your book should receive the 'Text body' style in LibreOffice. Monospace text. Some text—computer code, most notably—requires special formatting to maintain its spacing. It should be designated 'Preformatted text.' . Extended quotations.

Some types of writing feature block quotes. These should be set in the 'Quotations' style. No element in your OpenDocument should be unstructured.

Be sure that every heading, every quotation, and every paragraph are properly designated as such. Bonus: if you’re copying text from a source that’s already been marked up semantically—say, a web page—then LibreOffice should recognize the styles from the source document and apply them in the target document.

Forget fonts Don’t worry about how the elements of your document look. You can spend all afternoon finding the perfect font for your chapter titles, but you’ll be wasting your time. EPub files contain; they're designed to allow electronic reading devices to apply their own preferences to books, allowing readers to specify their font styles and sizes. In short, how something looks is not as important as how something has been designated.

Be sure every element in your OpenDocument has been marked up, but don’t fret about things like margins. When you’ve finished putting all your content into LibreOffice, save your work. Editing content Before generating your eBook, you’ll want to edit it. Of course, your readers will appreciate a thorough copy edit, but your software will reward you for the time you spend tidying your markup. Beware the invisible In LibreOffice, press Ctrl+F10 to make 'nonprinting characters' visible.

Nonprinting characters are simply those invisible indicators that the word processor uses to keep track of text formatting. By toggling this feature, you’re able to spy every errant space, line break, and carriage return that may have crept into your document. Remove any of these that aren’t necessary, like a space at the end of a paragraph’s final sentence or a blank paragraph between chunks of text. You’ll want your ePub file to be as clean as possible not only so it looks great, but also so that the OpenDocument-to-ePub conversion process proceeds smoothly. At this point, be sure to save your work. Generating your ePub We’re now ready to generate an ePub file from the OpenDocument source. Thanks to the handy extension for LibreOffice, doing this couldn’t be much easier.

Download and install Writer2ePub by clicking the appropriate download link on the project page. If the extension saves to your computer, double-click the download package and Writer should do the work of setting up the plugin for you.

If you’ve properly installed Writer2ePub, then LibreOffice should now feature a new ePub toolbar. With only three buttons, it’s easy to miss—so look closely. First, click the blue button to set your eBook’s metadata. This is not only important but essential, as Writer2ePub won’t let you proceed without doing so. At the very least, you must specify:. An author's name.

The book's title. The book's language Additionally, you can specify a cover image for your book. By default, Writer2ePub searches your document for images and creates a cover from the first one it finds.

It gets rather ornery if you ask it to do this when your book contains no images, so be sure to select 'No Cover' to avoid trouble in this case. When you’re satisfied with the parameters you’ve set, click 'OK,' then save your OpenDocument. Finally, press the green button on the Writer2ePub toolbar, and watch as this magnificent plugin does its thing.

Examining your ePub Writer2ePub will take control of LibreOffice and begin converting your OpenDocument to an ePub file. Naturally, the time required to do this varies depending on the length of your book and the number of images it contains. When it’s finished, locate the folder that contains your OpenDocument source file. Next to it should be a brand new ePub with the same filename. Open that file with your ePub reader of choice.

Most folks like, which available on Windows, OS X, Linux, and Android. You might also consider installing your ePub reader as a browser extension (as you might with the aptly-named in Firefox, for example). Doing this allows you to open links to ePub files on the web without switching applications. You’ll now want to inspect your eBook carefully. Be sure to examine its:. Table of contents (Is it complete? Are all headings properly ordered?).

Chapter and section headings (Do their maintain proper hierarchies? Is their capitalization consistent?). Hyperlinks (Do they point where expected and function properly?) I’ve noticed that Writer2ePub will occasionally produce errors when confronted with inordinately long hyperlinks, or links that point to things other than HTML files (like PDFs).

I’ve also noticed that the plugin doesn’t react well when a chapter or section concludes with a numbered or bulleted list. In these cases, enter a blank paragraph at the end of the offending list to avoid complications. Finally, validate your ePub file with the IDPF's. Next steps You now possess an eBook produced the open source way—with open tools, in an open format.

Next, you might consider:. Sharing it with friends. Uploading it to or. Converting your ePub to an, like.

Thanks, Marcio, for clarifying this. I should have provided a more nuanced explanation here. The IDPF does include CSS specifications as part of ePub accessibility guidelines. CSS is valuable in this context because it allows users or other agents (i.e., ePub readers) to apply their own formatting in accordance with the classes outlined in the style sheets.

But this is not to say that styles (or style sheets) are an unimportant aspect of ePub publishing—just that ePub creators should be aware that the styling they select may not be what readers ultimately confront. This is an important point; I'm glad you raised it, and I updated the guide to reflect it. Sorry but excepted a very few apps like FBReader - which has an interesting approach in 'be the typographer of your ebooks' but fails miserably as it doesn't respect CSS support, which makes it the worst EPUB reader ever - apps and devices have quite succeeded in honoring CSS style sheets while offering readers to modify some details (line-height, font, font-size, etc.). Truth is you must get an in-depth knowledge of apps and devices so that you do not screw readers' overrides, but you just can't create some ebooks without advanced styles or you will provide with a sub quality reading experience. And that is the reason why writer2epub offers users to create their own styles by prefixing their LO/OO styles with w2e for example, and why version 2 will get a CSS editor and allow fonts' embedding (BYW, that is something you can already do by exporting the EPUB file writer2epub exports in EPUB format with calibre, even if the resulting file is not top-notch regarding HTML markup + CSS). The problem with styles is that since the old kindle mobi7 format was insanely limited, then everybody claimed ebooks' styles were pretty useless.

Sure EPUB suffers from infuriating overrides (on the vendors' side) as overrides are not dealt with in the specs, but saying 'styles are not important' will just make ebooks the cheap brother of paper books (bad typography, even worse layout not facilitating the understanding of some passages, etc.). Note also that wellknown brands of tablets or ereaders CANNOT accept the ePub format, but almost all of them accept PDF (a few of them will also accept the DejaVu format, notably for high-resolution quality scans, notably when the content is also very graphics, such as comics books). This howto completely forgets to say that the ePub format is not universal, and that ebooks shouldbe proposed at least in a secondary format (PDF is the second one, and for the PDF format, which is now open, there are also lots of producton tools, many more than tools that produce ePub documents). Sorry, Phillippe, but I think you're overstating the case.

According to Wikipedia, among hardware only Amazon's Kindle line, the Sony Librie (released in 2004 and now discontinued), and the Samsung Papyrus (released in 2009 before.epubs really took off) fail to read the.epub format. Source: Wikipedia does not have a similar comparison available for software, but does have a short list of available apps and applets that support the format: There's a much longer list in the same article of editing apps. Getting a bit quibbly here. My book, Green Comet, is available in ePub, but I also provide PDF and ODT, as well as OGG for those who'd rather listen. The only people who have reported a problem were the people with Kindles. Some were skilled enough to convert the file to the correct format, but for others Amazon provides an automatic conversion service. Members send the file to their Kindle email and it does the conversion for them.

It's just not that dire. Here's the link again, if you want to try it out. Wonderful article, Bryan. Thanks for sharing the workflow you developed. I was excited when I went to the FBReader site and saw that the version number was now up to 0.99.4 (the last version I used was 0.12). But then I was a little disappointed when I saw that only the Qt4 interface was supported now (it used to have Qt and GTK interfaces; not a big deal to me, but some people care about that kind of thing). Super disappointed that the version of FBReader in Fedora 19 is version 0.12.

I'm going to try installing FBReader and (a python/gtk3/webkit based e-reader) from source. Yes, Calligra is up to version 2.7 which was released just a few days ago. I just had a chance to play with. Very promising. Not up to 'snuff' concerning LibreOffice in terms of some of the more 'professional' aspects of a world class office suite. However, what is very intriguing is the uniformity of the various modules' interfaces.

Plus they have an 'infant module' which is an offshoot of the word processor 'Words' called Calligra Author which is more geared to e-publishing. The main Calligra portal is here And the info on Calligra Author is here Oh.BTW.thanks for the article.very helpful.

Great article (and not just because I'm mentioned!). There are a few resources in there that I haven't taken a look at, but definitely will.

I've found with Writer2ePub that I often need or want to tweak the CSS a bit. The look and feel of the resulting book isn't always the way I'd like it. There are a two other tools for creating EPUB books that I find useful. One is, which consists of a lightweight markup language and tools for converting that language into formats like HTML, PDF, and EPUB. The other is, which is a pretty much a Swiss Army Knife for converting between markup formats - for example, Markdown to EPUB.

Good article. It pretty well reflects my own experience, as I used LibreOffice and Writer2ePub to produce my own free eBook: Green Comet. If you want to see what it looks like, you can download it. It's under a Creative Commons license, so you're encouraged to take it enjoy. Writer2ePub certainly made the job much easier than it could have been, and I didn't mind having to work through the little gotchas and work-arounds. I learned a lot and I'm grateful to its author. I always make sure to include a credit to it in the final product.

I'd like to suggest the free software Alkinea to convert your book from OpenOffice or LibreOffice to Kindle and/or ePub. It exports many things that are specified in the OO styles, like margins (all sides), indents, pictures with captions and wrapping, dropcaps etc. It also offers the option to convert the headings to pictures, allowing to use a nice font for the chapter titles. This helps to make the ebook reading experience as enjoyable as a real book.

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