8 ms·

Ask HN: How do you guys write your ebooks?

• eponeponepon 12y ago
  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.
• netcraft 12y ago
  You might find these links useful: https://github.com/WebBooks/wbb https://github.com/WebBooks/wbb http://easybook-project.org/ http://easybook-project.org/ http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/epub.html http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/epub.html https://draftin.com/ https://draftin.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7822057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7822057 That last link for pollen is very interesting IMO.
  • nanexcool 12y ago
    Thanks, those are very useful!
    • netcraft 12y ago
      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.
• helen842000 12y ago
  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.
  • nanexcool 12y ago
    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!
• dai_pole 12y ago
  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.
  • thejteam 12y ago
    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.
• krrishd 12y ago
  For technical books, http://gitbook.io http://gitbook.io is a new choice that I've been using.
• guynamedloren 12y ago
  I'm working on some software in this area (https://www.penflip.com/ 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).
• rachelandrew 12y ago
  I wrote about how I built mine here: http://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2014/01/07/html-epub-mobi-pdf-wtf-creating-an-ebook/ 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.
• moron4hire 12y ago
  I was going to suggest my project, but you can't add images to your books yet. Le sigh, back to work.