Chapter 17
Repurpose!

If you cre­ate a web­book, what about the print, ebook, and bookapp for­mats? Remem­ber repur­pos­ing is a way to get max­i­mum rev­enue out of your book. Since many author­ing pro­grams today have an HTML core, con­ver­sion may be eas­i­er that you might think. This enables you to con­vert to oth­er pub­lish­ing for­mats with lit­tle extra work.

Print

Pro­grams that are capa­ble of cre­at­ing pre­cise print­ing, such as Adobe InDe­sign, will typ­i­cal­ly import an HTML page. Con­se­quent­ly, not much is lost in regard to print­ing your book if you start with an HTML core.

PDF

The stan­dard for print pub­lish­ing is an Adobe Acro­bat PDF. You send the PDF to the print­er. In addi­tion, you can use the PDF by itself as a book for­mat, and dis­trib­ute PDFs rather than ebooks or bookapps. PDFs have their own inter­nal nav­i­ga­tion and also inte­grate diverse media. (Note: InDe­sign exports a PDF as the final step for print publishing.)

Ebook

There are plen­ty of con­vert­ers that take an HTML doc­u­ment or web­book and con­vert it into the EPUB for­mat required for ebook pub­li­ca­tion. EPUB has an HTML core. The ebook plat­form has its own inter­nal nav­i­ga­tion capa­bil­i­ty, and you may want to remove any nav­i­ga­tion code from your HTML pages pri­or to conversion.

Note also that HTML and EPUB are sched­uled to merge and become one for­mat some­time in the future.

Bookapp

HTML has become the core for devel­op­ing not only dig­i­tal doc­u­ments but also soft­ware (appli­ca­tions, apps) for com­put­er devices. What this means to you is that you can sim­ply con­vert your web­book into an app that can be used by peo­ple on their smart­phones or tablets. You make the con­ver­sion and sub­mit the app to iTunes, Google Play, or oth­er app stores (depos­i­to­ries, direc­to­ries, cat­a­logs), and you have made your­self an inex­pen­sive bookapp for dis­tri­b­u­tion into the app market.

There are many con­ver­sion pro­grams avail­able. Some are very expen­sive, and some are rea­son­ably priced. The one I favor is an inex­pen­sive app-build­ing pro­gram named Monaca (https://​monaca​.io). You sim­ply upload your web­site fold­ers and files (in a ZIP file) to the online Monaca engine, and it cre­ates either an Apple app or an Android app for you.

Monaca also has a close rela­tion­ship with Osen, a app user inter­face that’s open soft­ware. Poten­tial­ly a tem­plate made in the Osen soft­ware can pro­vide con­ve­nient nav­i­ga­tion capa­bil­i­ty com­pa­ra­ble to a Word­Press web­book or an ebook.

Osen  Osen is much more complicated than just using HTML5 and CSS by themselves. You need to be a programmer to create a Osen template, but you don’t have to be a programmer to use such a template.

Although I find Monaca to be one of the eas­i­est and least expen­sive con­vert­ers, you should check out oth­er soft­ware to see if there’s some­thing that you like better.

If you sim­ply con­vert your web­book to a bookapp with Monaca with­out using an Osen inter­face, the nav­i­ga­tion that you place in your web­pages is still nec­es­sary for nav­i­ga­tion in the result­ing app. Thus, it’s appro­pri­ate for any HTML nav­i­ga­tion code to stay in your bookapp.

Using your core HTML web­book, you can eas­i­ly con­vert it to anoth­er app author­ing pro­grams that use HTML for its core. There are a lot of them now, and there will be more in the future.

Read my book Pub­lish­ing by Bookapp for pre­cise details on how to cre­ate bookapps.

WordPress

Although Word­Press has an HTML core, it uses data­base pro­gram­ming and PHP pro­gram­ming to cre­ate a CMS (con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem). Con­se­quent­ly, it is dif­fi­cult to con­vert Word­Press web­sites into oth­er dig­i­tal for­mats (e.g., a blog into an ebook). Nonethe­less, there are ser­vices that do so. But they do a piece­meal job. They extract one web­page at a time from a Word­Press web­site and incor­po­rate it into an ebook or bookapp, a task you may be able to do eas­i­ly and effi­cient­ly by your­self using copy & paste.

Other Software

Of course there are oth­er sys­tems using a dif­fer­ent core that can export (con­vert) your book into HTML or EPUB. For instance, Adobe InDe­sign, not only pro­duces a superb book for print, but will also export the pages into HTML or EPUB. Thus, if your pri­ma­ry objec­tive is to print the book, you may find it con­ve­nient to write your book in InDe­sign rather than in a word processor.

But InDe­sign will also import an HTML doc­u­ment. Thus, if you start with HTML, you can still con­vert your writ­ing into a print book.

I argue that writ­ing a book in any­thing except HTML will require an sub­stan­tial extra step some­where along the line. The prob­lem is that such an extra step can often be messy. That is, the web­pages may require major adjust­ment after the con­ver­sion. Thus, an extra con­ver­sion step, no mat­ter how auto­mat­ic, is like­ly to be extra work and is there­fore to be avoid­ed if possible.

For exam­ple, writ­ing in Word and then export­ing the Word file as HTML will require some adjust­ments. Word is noto­ri­ous for export­ing messy HTML doc­u­ments. It might be sim­pler and more effi­cient for you to write direct­ly in an HTML author­ing pro­gram such as Dreamweaver.

There is even some talk of HTML replac­ing PDF doc­u­ments. This seems bound to hap­pen, and is anoth­er rea­son why you might con­sid­er pub­lish­ing a book in HTML as a start­ing point for pub­lish­ing it in oth­er for­mats. And Adobe Acro­bat DC (the PDF author­ing pro­gram, not the PDF read­er) will con­vert an HTML web­page into a PDF.

Conversion tip  An efficient way to convert is to copy & paste the WYSIWYG version of a chapter in one platform (software) into the WYSIWYG version of another platform. This is not trouble-free, but it often requires a minimum of tweaking.

Marketing

Pub­lish­ing dif­fer­ent ver­sions of your book in dif­fer­ent dig­i­tal for­mats (dif­fer­ent plat­forms) can be a mar­ket­ing advan­tage. The pro­mo­tion of each ver­sion of the book can be designed to pro­mote the oth­er ver­sions of the book. For instance, in the back of your web­book ver­sion you can include a cat­a­log for your oth­er books. The ebook ver­sion of your web­book will be in the cat­a­logs of the online book­stores (e.g., Ama­zon), thus giv­ing vis­i­bil­i­ty to your book (in all its ver­sions) that you oth­er­wise would not have with a web­book alone.

Final Word

As a prac­ti­cal mat­ter, with HTML emerg­ing as the core for most pub­lish­ing soft­ware, it makes sense to choose HTML is your pri­ma­ry author­ing tool. And as this book has indi­cat­ed, HTML5 is a diverse media author­ing sys­tem, which pro­vides you with plen­ty of capa­bil­i­ty and flexibility.