In a recent post I talked about how all of you would-be eBook authors should know your file formats, or at least be somewhat familiar with the most commonly used ones. As an author, you want to make your work as accessible as possible, which means making your content able to be read on as many devices as you can. Since it is Read an eBook Week, and Lulu is giving away three Apple iPads, I thought it might be useful to provide a how-to tutorial for the most universal eBook format: ePub.
Many new authors might make the mistake of thinking that if they have a portable document format (PDF) of their book it means that it can be read on an e-reader or other mobile device. While in many cases the PDF can be opened, the text is far too small because it is a static or unchangeable image. ePub makes it so your text is resized to fit the screen of any given device. Since the text in ePub format can be changed in terms of size, font and color, reading an ePub book becomes a much more personal experience for the reader. Sounds great right? But how do you make an ePub book?
You really have three options: let Lulu do the work for you with our conversion services, use a conversion program like (Adobe InDesign, eCub, Calibre, Google ePub Toolkit, etc.), or you can do-it-yourself. If you decide to do-it-yourself, I’ve added some great directions I found over at jedisaber.com.
What You’ll Need:
* A text editor (like Text Edit or Notepad) that can edit text files, HTML, and XML.
* A program that can create .zip files (which should be built into OS X or Windows).
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