I’m a big fan of ebooks because I can carry my whole library in my pocket. In this episode, I will show you how to use LibreOffice to create ebooks in one of the most popular ebook formats: ePub documents. If you have ever thought of publishing a book or story that you have written using LibreOffice, this may be a good alternative.
There are many tools available to create ePub documents, and though LibreOffice may not be the best choice for everyone, it is very simple to use, and produces great results!
Show Notes:
LibreOffice Extensions
Writer2LaTeX
Writer2LaTeX is an extension for LibreOffice which lets you create epub documents directly from LibreOffice by providing additional file format export options in the export dialog box.
Download Writer2xhtml version 1.2 beta. The stable version does not support publishing to epub.
This extension may have been abandoned and has not seen any updates in over a year.
Writer2ePub
The Writer2ePub extension is available from the developer’s website, and provide a toolbar with buttons that will allow you to export the document as an epub.
This extension inserts a “created with” add at the end of your document.
eLAIX
The eLAIX extension adds a toolbar and menu option to LibreOffice which provides a number of formatting options designed to create learning modules for the ILIAS system. This is by far the most polished extension, and seems to be updated frequently. One small annoyance is that the icons on the toolbar seem to be of very low resolutions, and therefore look pixelated. If this is an issue for you, the toolbar can be removed, and you can use the menu instead.
Information about the Epub format
Devices
Devices that support the ePub format
Other Links
Books in the public domain: Project Gutenberg
This is where i got the sample for the book “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville that was used in the tutorial.