Two weeks ago, I wrote an article about E-reader Devices for Reading Books after attending the Publishing Business Conference about e-readers and the future of publishing.
So, last night I experimented in creating an e-book version of my booklet Learning Through Life’s Trials, which is an expanded version of the article that appears in this month’s Ensign magazine.
I used Smashwords, which seems to be ideal for authors to create an e-book for free and make it available online. You take a Microsoft Word file with the text of a book you’ve written and strip out all formatting except headings and normal tags, then upload it to Smashwords where it’s converted it into multiple ebook formats such as .EPUB, PDF. .RTF, .PDB, .MOBI, LRF and TXT, as well as online HTML and Javascript formats. That makes it readable on any e-reader device, including personal computers, the iPhone (via the Stanza e-reader app), Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Android smart phones, etc.
They do all this at no cost so they have the chance to sell your book on their site. My e-book is now available at Amazon Kindle, Smashwords, and Century Publishing.
That wasn’t too hard to do. If you’ve written a book or booklet, this is a great way to get it out in more formats for people to read.
Thanks for sharing this insight on ebooks! Content creation and syndication has to be digital these days and it seems that Smashwords makes that very easy.
Brother Richman,
How many of the church manual, publications, and magazines will be ready for download onto the iPad on April 3rd? Has your team finished converting everything and posting it to the sight so we can use it from day one? The seminary and institute manuals would be awesome on the iPad.
I meant site, not sight. Sorry.
Hello? Brother Richman? Are you there?
Michael,
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you on this. As you can imagine, the Church can’t create all our content in every format for every device. However, we are creating an iPhone app that should run on the iPad. However the experience of an iPhone/iPod Touch app running on an iPad will not be the most optimal experience, but it should work fine. We are considering a more robust ePub format, but don’t have any definite decisions or timeline on it.
So, long answer short…we will have a lot of content available for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad but we can do much more to make the iPad experience better. We don’t have an exact release date for the iPhone app, since it’s pending approval from Apple. It will have the majority of church publications. However, the seminary and institute manuals you mention won’t be ready until 3rd or 4th quarter 2010.
Thanks Brother Richman. I look forward to the new app and to all the future developments your team is working on!
I Know this is an older post I was just surfing your blog (great information) I did want to say thank you. I am starting to sell eBooks on my blog and this will help a huge deal. I know sometimes with the PDFs yes they can be read on the smartphones and tablets but they can get all funky and hard to read this will make it so much easier. and probably means more books sold 🙂 I appreciate you sharing this.