Ask HN: How do you guys write your ebooks? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you guys write your ebooks?

9 pointsnanexcool12 comments

I'm thinking of writing an ebook for a very specific niche. I have no idea where to start software-wise.

Ideally, I would like to write and add images, and then have the software export to HTML and PDF/mobi. I think that's about it. Not looking for anything fancier than that.

Thanks!

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I'm working on some software in this area (https://www.penflip.com/). A book is a basic git repository holding a collection of markdown files and images, which are compiled into PDF/epub/html with a single click in the browser. There's a web UI that essentially wraps git functionality, which has proven useful for collaborating with (and receiving feedback from) non-technical people. It's pretty simplified.

Several open sourced tools are used behind the scenes, including some mentioned here (e.g. pandoc).

You might find these links useful: https://github.com/WebBooks/wbb

http://easybook-project.org/

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/epub.html

https://draftin.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7822057

That last link for pollen is very interesting IMO.

Thanks, those are very useful!

I hope to write a book one day, so ive been collecting resources - I haven't gone very deep with any of the research yet though. Let me know how you get along.

There's a difference between writing a book and formatting one. For writing you can use anything as long as you can export it to txt/rtf - rtf being the standard in the print world - even vi/vim is usable for this purpose.

For formatting the standard in the print world is InDesign, nothing else comes close. I used to work in the "print" trade, and that is what everyone uses.

I will second InDesign. I was having a conversation not that long ago with somebody who used to work in the printing business and that is what she used. And she had horror stories of people trying to do things with Word and HTML.

I wrote about how I built mine here: http://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2014/01/07/html-epub-mobi...

TL:DR going from HTML to PDF is more of a PITA than you think, .mobi and epub is pretty straightforward.

Use DITA or DocBook. There's loads of pretty solid transformations for turning either of them into all three of the outputs you want.

Word processors are always the worst choice.

I use Scrivener & it works well for me. If you have an image-heavy book you may find formatting images a little difficult in some of the e-reader formats. PDF files work well.

My book will be about game development so there's going to be lots of images and lots of code. I'll check out Scrivener, thanks!

For technical books, http://gitbook.io is a new choice that I've been using.

I was going to suggest my project, but you can't add images to your books yet. Le sigh, back to work.

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