How to make your own eBook

Many of my favorite people are writers, quite a few of whom are still among the living. Others have passed along to grace the universe with their spirits, leaving behind books, essays, poems, articles and nonsense for the edification and enjoyment of those of us who are still waiting for our turn to buzz on out of here.

I suppose that may be why I really appreciate that huge repository of out-of-copyright books on the Internet, Gutenberg.org. There I can find and download books from the past, even books remembered from my first childhood.

My all-time favorites included Clarence E. Mulford’s "Hopalong Cassidy" books. There were probably 20 or so of those. Hopalong was a fun-loving, redheaded, gimpy-legged cowboy who worked for the Bar-20 ranch. There, he and his fellow cowboys carried on with the antics and bravado about which a Redneck kid like me enjoyed reading. Always in search of heroes, I also liked the Zane Grey books and others such as "The Last of the Mohicans." Books about real history were also right near the top of my list. Science, fairy tales, fables, and more filled in any gaps. Back then, the librarians would flinch when little Gus The Redneck showed up to borrow book after book. I worked them mercilessly.

And now, having piled up a large number of additional childhoods, I can find many of my old friends, those many books, on the Gutenberg Web site. With a tap or two on my computer keyboard I can download whole books and either read them while connected to the site or store them on my disk or CD.

The Gutenberg folks make electronic copies of my old friends, books from earlier days, through the work of volunteers. The books are scanned, then edited to correct any scanning errors, and then placed on Gutenberg for downloading in a number of useful formats. For book readers like me, the whole thing is free. (Gutenberg operates on donations and volunteer workers.)

As you will suspect, I am a convert to the whole idea of electronic books; that is, "eBooks." Because I like to write almost as much as I like to read, I decided to make some eBooks on my own – right here at this little computer.

The software needed to accomplish eBook-making is widely available, and much of it is available free of cost to anyone who wants it. So, I bought some programs and downloaded a bunch of the freebies as well. Together, the software makes a pretty good team.

I bought "Page Plus" from Serif.com. It is productive of making publishable pages as can the wide variety of word processing software that has been around now for many years. However, Page Plus can convert ordinary pages into fully capable "HTML" formatted pages, complete with imaging and sound, for Web site presentation. Page Plus has easy-to-use facilities for conversion of completed pages into "PDF," portable document format, that can be handled by a large number of computer-driven display and printing devices.

I downloaded, free of charge, other software to assist my Page Plus program in its work. "Gimp2" is my main image-handling software. With it I can manipulate and translate all sorts of digital images, changing sizes, contrasts, brightness, and ridding images of unwanted items and defects. Another imaging program I use to change ordinary digital photos into extraordinary "artwork." The program is "FotoSketcher." With it I can make a photo appear to be a charcoal drawing, a poster, a pencil sketch, an oil painting, and so forth.

For inclusion of ordinary sound, such as music, Page Plus does the work for me. If I want special recordings, verbalization of texts for example, I use a free program, "Audacity 1.3." Audacity produces "MP3" recordings that can be saved on my computer and added to Web-ready HTML pages and to PDF publications as well.

Actionable "hyperlinks" (or links for short) can be placed onto word processing pages for paper publication, onto HTML pages for Web presentations, and onto PDF pages for both viewing and printing. With links, the reader can scoot on over to Internet Web site locations and do there whatever it is that needs doing – read, respond, fill out forms, join the army, or complain about the weather. Then, the reader can click the back arrow and go back to reading or printing that which they left to follow the link.

So, what you wind up with in an eBook is something to read and print, a base from which to visit elsewhere, a written work that can be "bookmarked" for future reference in addition to the bookmarking provided by the eBook creator, and a digital publication that can be duplicated with adequate permission and transmitted here and there as allowed. If the eBook is obtained by downloading it over the Internet, "shipment cost" should be zero. If it is forwarded to the user as a CD or DVD, shipping might cost a few dollars. That can’t be matched with a two pound bound paper book, and many books weigh much more than two pounds, and the books themselves cost far more to manufacture than do the really low-cost CDs and DVDs.

Here is the 1-2-3 of how I am producing my own eBooks. The first of them contains the one hundred nonsense poems already sitting here on HubPages. They have largely passed the scrutiny and commentary of my pals who make this Web site the fun and useful place it is. All were ready to go as publishable items, complete with images and edited to my satisfaction.

The pages were popped into the Serif Page Plus software and prepped for final output as bookmarked pages (in lieu of a table of contents), digital imaging in place, and finally, with a voice recording of each text included on every page. Added was a publisher’s page with information about the producer, and specifics printed out to assist the reader in the use of the eBook. An appropriate dedication page was then added – the dedication being to "Chicken Little" and to several others that deserved exposure.

Using the facilities provided in Page Plus, the pages were automatically bookmarked such that a single click of the computer’s mouse device on the title of a poem brings that page up onto the screen immediately.

At this moment there is but one hyperlink used. It links to Hubpages.com and to my profile page there. (It is fair of me to allow readers to see my many other mistakes.)

Most of the digital images, those given to me by my late friend, Al Kaeppel, were readied for inclusion via my low-cost digital scanner. All of Al’s drawings were black and white ink drawings, and so I kept them that way. Using Gimp2 software I could have colorized them, but the artist would not have enjoyed that as much as he would have liked to keep his work as he had produced it.

Unfortunately for readers of this Dumb Poems eBook, the voice recordings suffer from their having been made in my very non-studio cluttered office using my five-dollar microphone. Even so, Audacity 1.3 software did a decent job of making my Redneck voice more tolerably melodious than it really is. The recordings, all as MP3-format style, were simply added to the pile of files to be wrestled onto PDF pages in the Page Plus non-professional wrestling ring.

The eBook is scheduled to go onto a page on one of my Web sites for downloading by readers. For readers who require them, I will provide physical CD and DVD copies to be sent through the mail.

Let me close this out by alerting you to the feature of the free "Open Office" software that permits you to output your writings as PDF publications, much as I do with my Page Plus.

In addition to the other free software described above, Open Office can be downloaded from the Web site, SourceForge.net.

Publishing date for my new "Dumb Poems" eBook is January 2, 2011. Hubpages members can obtain a donation copy by agreeing to not sell copies or to give copies away to others. Email to me through HubPages via my profile page for the necessary download password.