Words on a page

A few days ago, O’Reilly Media released a new book by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein: The Twitter Book. You can get it as an ebook, with a dead trees version coming soon. What’s interesting about the book isn’t its subject matter, but rather the way in which it was written. Believe it or not, the book was done in PowerPoint. Yes, PowerPoint. A piece of software that’s generally used to create presentation slides.

Tim O’Reilly recently blogged about the book, the writing process, and how their approach to the The Twitter Book was an attempt to reinvent the concept of the book in the age of the Web. Read O’Reilly’s post for the details.  Read more... (487 words, estimated 1:57 mins reading time)

Once again, I’ve dusted off the idea of turning a set of blog posts into an ebook. The inspirations for this resurrection were Wil Wheaton’s recently-released book Sunken Treasure and a Web-to-book experiment done at the recent Tools of Change for Publishing conference.

I realized that the way in which I’ve been writing my blog posts for the last year or two — detailed here and here — makes converting those posts (which exist as files on my computer) to a format that I can compile into an ebook fairly easy.  Read more... (273 words, estimated 1:06 mins reading time)

A few years ago, I blogged about an interesting printing/publishing technology called the Espresso Book Machine. Since then, I’ve learned that the Espresso is being updated and upgraded. You can learn more about it here and here.

I’m actually a bit surprised at the number of Espresso Book Machine locations, especially in Canada. I’m hoping one will show up in Toronto soon.

What this means for personal publishing is anyone’s guess. But I get the feeling that it will make self publishing easier and cheaper, if the penny per page production cost is accurate. This is definitely something to keep watching.  Read more... (114 words, estimated 27 secs reading time)

I’ve been living with an eBook reader for the last couple of months. In that time, I’ve rarely picked up a dead-trees tome.

While reading, I’ve been thinking about formatting an eBook for the small screen. And I’ve learned a few things. Like what? Keep reading …

 Read more... (505 words, estimated 2:01 mins reading time)

Ebooks can be great marketing tools. They showcase your knowledge and expertise, and (I hope) demonstrate that you can explain and express an idea clearly. Heck, a well-written ebook can also make you a few dollars if you pick the right subject and are able to draw in buyers.

But the problem is finding the time to write the ebook. If you’ve got an idea, and an outline, then the next step might be to read this post. It explains how you can write an ebook in a week. The author of the post makes a great point:  Read more... (130 words, estimated 31 secs reading time)