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Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Genealogy e-Book publishing

You have your genealogy book already to publish and then start finding out the cost of self-publishing a bound book. It is sort-of like the sticker shock of trying to buy a new car. Now all that is in the past. With the advent of the new e-readers like the Amazon Kindle, Apple iPad and others, e-publishing is becoming reality for every author.

A Google search on the term "e-publishing" will get you started. One alternative is Lulu.com, another is Smashwords.com . Smashwords advertises 463,456,793 words published. Quoting from a recent article about creating e-Books by Larry Richman on LDS Media Talk,
I used Smashwords, which seems to be ideal for authors to create an e-book for free and make it available online. You take a Microsoft Word file with the text of a book you’ve written and strip out all formatting except headings and normal tags, then upload it to Smashwords where it’s converted it into multiple ebook formats such as .EPUB, PDF. .RTF, .PDB, .MOBI, LRF and TXT, as well as online HTML and Javascript formats. That makes it readable on any e-reader device, including personal computers, the iPhone (via the Stanza e-reader app), Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Android smart phones, etc.
If there are any of you out there who have successfully e-published your genealogy, let us know about it.

1 comment:

  1. I've used Blurb to create books for the family. You can download text from Word, charts from PDF files, and lots of photos. Actually, the photos look great and lately I've made a lot of gift books with themes like "mom" for Mother's Day and highlighted the umbilical line, or surnames and given them as birthday gifts. The cost depends on size of the book and whether or not it's hard or softcover with Blurb.com I would say that Blurb would be too expensive for a 200 page compiled genealogy, but for smaller projects and gifts it's OK

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