Chapter 22
Write Once, Publish Everywhere

Per­haps the eas­i­est way to pub­lish a dig­i­tal book is to do your web­book ver­sion first. Once you per­fect your web­book, you can con­vert it into oth­er dig­i­tal for­mats for wider publication.

HTML

You can use the fol­low­ing pro­gram to con­vert your HTML web­site into an ebook that will run on a PC (not on Android or Apple devices):

HTML Exe­cutable (https://​www​.htm​lexe​.com)

This is an inex­pen­sive way to dis­trib­ute your web­book to users who have PCs. The result­ing ebook has nav­i­ga­tion fea­tures built in. Some PC lap­tops now dou­ble as Win­dows tablets, so this is a rea­son­able means of pub­lish­ing for users with up-to-date PC laptop/tablets.

This process illus­trates that HTML5 has become pop­u­lar as the soft­ware core for much oth­er soft­ware regard­ing dig­i­tal publishing.

Merger  Note that the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which sets the standards for EPUB (ebooks), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which sets the standards for the Web (HTML), are negotiating to merge their standards. This will presumably increase the diverse media and embedded programming capabilities of EPUB and make it more compatible with the web than it already is. Such a merger is several years away, but it shows the direction of digital technology in regard to content creation.

This book focus­es on the web­book as a way to pub­lish a book eas­i­ly, inex­pen­sive­ly, and effec­tive­ly. I’ve tried to make a strong case for doing so. Nonethe­less, I hope I have not led you to believe that I’m mak­ing a case for pub­lish­ing via a web­book exclu­sive­ly. Most dig­i­tal book pub­lish­ing for­mats and oppor­tu­ni­ties are not exclu­sive. There­fore, you should take advan­tage of whichev­er for­mats you think will increase your read­er­ship sub­stan­tial­ly. It is with this in mind that I have writ­ten this chap­ter on the poten­tial for the HTML core now being used by a wide range of soft­ware to enable you to eas­i­ly con­vert your web­book into mul­ti­ple dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing for­mats. In oth­er words, repur­pose your content.

Why Not?

Why not write your book in Dreamweaver (or sim­i­lar HTML author­ing pro­gram). When you fin­ish a chap­ter, you have a web­page (no con­ver­sion). And you can pub­lish the web­page in a web­site (web­book) or eas­i­ly con­vert it into anoth­er dig­i­tal book for­mat. You can even copy and paste the HTML WYSIWYG dis­play into a Word­Press page or post WYSIWYG display.

If you can build a EPUB book from your web­book and sell it as an ebook at iTunes, Android, and Ama­zon, you will cov­er a lot of retail bases. And on top of that you can con­vert it to a print-on-demand for­mat (via a PDF), which will make it avail­able to those lit­er­ary dinosaurs who still read print. Write once pub­lish every­where, is a great strat­e­gy. But it’s only a great strat­e­gy if it’s easy and inex­pen­sive to do so. By using the idea of an HTML core, you can accom­plish what you need to do in regard to more eas­i­ly pub­lish­ing everywhere.

Or Do Your Own Thing

If the HTML core idea does not appeal to you for what­ev­er rea­son, think of what else you can use as a core for­mat which will enable you to eas­i­ly con­vert to oth­er pub­lish­ing for­mats. For instance, cut­ting and past­ing a Word doc­u­ment into an HTML author­ing pro­gram (via WYSIWYG) might work very effec­tive­ly to con­vert your word pro­cess­ing con­tent into HTML and then into var­i­ous oth­er pub­lish­ing for­mats from there. Indeed, from Word itself you can con­vert direct­ly to EPUB, PDF, HTML, and oth­er such for­mats, albeit not as clean­ly (pro­fes­sion­al­ly) as you might like.

Or maybe you choose Adobe InDe­sign is your core for­mat. It does an amaz­ing job for print­ed books but will also con­vert your book to oth­er for­mats. Hence, as you might imag­ine, my strat­e­gy of using an HTML core to write a book and to con­vert it into oth­er for­mats may be the most effi­cient way that suits me as a pub­lish­er; but that does not mean it’s the only way. If you don’t like my spe­cif­ic HTML write-once-pub­lish-every­where strat­e­gy, devel­op your own system.

So sim­ply by tak­ing the soft­ware that you want to use togeth­er with con­ver­sion pro­grams, you can find a path that exists from the author­ing soft­ware to the var­i­ous fin­ished pub­lish­ing prod­ucts you need.

The Very Least

At the very least, use a word proces­sor (e.g., Word) to write your book, and copy and paste the WYSIWYG text into a web author­ing pro­gram such as Dreamweaver or a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS) such as Word­Press. That is, don’t export the doc­u­ment to HTML. The result could be very messy HTML and CSS that you want to avoid. Sim­ply copy and paste the text into the author­ing pro­gram’s WYSIWYG mode.

If you write direct­ly into Word­Press, you can copy and paste the WYSIWYG ver­sion of each web­page (page or post) into the WYSIWYG dis­play of anoth­er author­ing pro­gram for an easy conversion.

Conclusion

You will prob­a­bly find that HTML core soft­ware pro­vides the most flex­i­ble and effi­cient path toward var­i­ous types of dig­i­tal books. Thus, pub­lish­ing your book in a web­book for­mat first makes a lot of sense. You can take the time to per­fect your book after the ini­tial pub­li­ca­tion. Then you can eas­i­ly con­vert the book into ebook or bookapp for­mats as well as print and web-based training.