Having just returned from
Comic-Con with fresh ideas for your
Captain Kirk/
Dr. Who fanfiction, we're sure your eager to begin writing your latest, bestselling tome. Of course, let's be frank — no one is going to publish that in print. It's just
too awesome for a physical format. That leaves you with the vast world of self-publishing — a world that e-books and digital download have made much easier to enter.
Even if you're not looking to publish your own written masterpieces, knowing how to create a custom e-book is incredibly handy. From instruction manuals to RSS feeds, anything text can be easily converted into your format of choice, giving you no shortage of reading material on the go. The magic dust that makes this whole process work is a great, multi-platform app called
Calibre, and it's just the thing we need to fuel your compulsive, e-reading addiction.
Calibre's interface can be a little confusing at first, but it's simple to import a book or file for later conversion. For this example, we'll be using a copy of
Chris Anderson's book "Free" — which, ironically, is only available free in the US. Once imported, the file should show up alongside other titles in your library, and you can start the conversion process from the toolbar above.
At first, the array of dialog boxes and settings can be daunting. There's lots of things you can use to adjust the look, feel and structure of your final e-book, but you only need to know a few to achieve a basic, readable result. The
metadata sections self explanatory, and simply sets the info required to find and sort your book within your reader's library.
Look and feel is also particularly important, as it determines the font-size and spacing of the textual elements in a document. The default settings are probably fine, but a bit of fine tuning might helpful in making text more legible on-screen.
But perhaps the most important section is Calibre's
page setup section. From Android to iPad, you have the option of adjusting your layout to suit any number of differently sized screens. What's more, you can even throw in some custom CSS to style and modify your book for a more unique presentation.
The output of our first conversion attempt. Pictures have been retained, but the text is a bit too big for our liking. Time to fine-tune!
Upon completion, your resulting e-book is saved alongside other versions in your library. While you might have two or three ePub versions of the same book, Calibre is smart enough to only transfer the correctly formatted copy to your reader or device, making it easy to handle books across multiple devices.
However, what's cool is that you can convert more than just books into an e-book format. Calibre has a great built-in tool that relies on "
recipes" or RSS feeds to news sites and blogs that it scrapes and turns into files for your device. Be forewarned, however, that while this works great on feeds with full-length articles, those who truncate or limit the included content
will take a bit more work to display properly.
If you have your own methods for e-book conversion and making books of your own, be sure to let us know — Tested's Guide To Secret World Knowledge isn't going to convert itself.
Lead image via Flickr user maury.mccown.
