Liber.io is a free web app which allows you to easily create professional ebooks directly from any of your Google Drive documents in a standard ePub format that can be distributed on all pro marketplaces.
The app can import all formatting, images and fonts, and allows you to either upload your own cover or to choose and edit one of the ready-made ones.
To use it, you simply select a file from your connected Google Drive account, and then you set a number of options that will control, the title, meta-data, layout and pagination of your ebook.
Once you click OK your document is converted into a standard .epub file which can preview with free ebook reader like Adobe Digital Editions. You can't edit or modify the final result, but you can certainly go back to your Google document and change it according to your needs.
Your ready-made ebook can be sent in one click to your Google Play Books account, to your Kindle or to any major social media account.
Liber.io offers truly extraordinary simplicity and ease of use for anyone wanting to publish a standard format ebook without having to learn too many technicalities.
Bloxp is a free web app which can autmatically convert any blog feed, from start to end, into a downloadable eBook. But there's more.
Before you actually download the final eBook in your preferred file format, you can actually select which stories from the selected blog feed you want to be included in the final publication and in which order you want them to be.
You could therefore "curate" your own selection of best posts on a specific topic you have covered in the past and rapidly create a downloadable ebook to share with your readers or to use as a lead generation offer.
Bloxp can capture up to 250 posts and clean them up properly for use inside most ebook readers, Kindle included.
Bloxp offers also the option to convert all found links into footnotes and to create a full Table of Contents.
You can download your blog feed converted into an eBook as an ePub or Mobi file, ready to be distributed anywhere you like. (You can also easily create a PDF by using the "Preview" function and then saving to PDF from your own browser).
N.B.: Unlike other similar services, where only the most recent posts are included, Bloxp will crawl the given blog feed searching for every post written since it was created.
P.S.: Not all sites may work with this, but Sergio, the great guy behind Bloxp, will be happy to be notified of such instances and to try to correct them.
Blogs that works perfectly with Bloxp are those that contain a "next" and "previous" post structure, but other sites and blogs, may work fine as well.
Robin Good: Hamster Free Converter is a free Windows-only downloadable software that makes it extremely easy to convert to just about any eBook format.
Hamster utilizes the same conversion engine utilized by Calibre but without the many options and advanced features.
It supports more than 200+ devices including Amazon Kindle, iPad, iPhone 3, iPhone 4, iPod, FR Book, iRiver, Sony, Digma, Nook, BenQ, Kobo, Explay,CrossElec, boeye, PAGEone, WexLer.
Hamster Free Converter converts any eBooks to run on Amazon, Sony, Asus, iPod, iPad, iPhone, PSP, Blackberry, Zune, iRiver, etc.
From the article: "The app, which made its official debut Monday, offers a simple and straightforward ebook reading experience for all of your ePub files unencumbered by Digital Rights Management (DRM).
This includes most free ePub files available around the web, including those from Project Gutenberg, Tidbits’s Take Control Books, and Macworld’s own line of Superguides.
You may be able to open books downloaded from the iBookstore as well, depending on whether or not the publisher has decided to add DRM during the publishing process.
...
You can add multiple books to your Bookle library and browse each book's TOC through clicks or keyboard commands; actual books are laid out in scrollable form, like a website, with breaks for chapters and pages."
From the article intro: "If evolution is the cornerstone of life, that's certainly no less true in the electronic world. If you can't adapt — or fail to adapt in time — you're destined to join the ranks of the Netscape Navigators, OS/2 operating systems, and WordPerfect office suites of the world, as a warning to future technology developers that nothing lasts forever, and never in its original form.
In this light, EPUB 3 is more than just bug fixes and tweaks from the last version; it represents a major change in what an ebook can be. It's a whole new beast, you might say.
The ebook market has been going through its own kind of hyper-evolution in the mere four years since EPUB2 was released, and a flurry of new devices and document formats have come and gone in that time.
E Ink technology was all the rage in 2007 when Adobe, Amazon, Sony, and others were entering the market, however, and EPUB2 arrived to meet the new needs of these portable reading devices, with improved presentation capabilities, better navigation, support for DAISY accessibility features, and some advances in global language support.
But EPUB2, like its predecessor and contemporaries, remained a static format, in that its core only allowed for the reading of basic text and image documents."
Ebook Glue is a free web app which allows you to easily convert any web page URL, RSS feed, blog, or document file (.doc, .docx, .html, or .odt) into a standard formatted .epub or .mobi ebook compatible with standard Kindle, Nook, iPad, and Android reading devices.
You just provide the URL of your content or you upload a supported document file and Ebook Glue does the rest without ay intervention.
For those needing to convert large number of files and web pages to ebooks an API is provided that allows for precise customization of the conversion process.
My comment: Excellent free solution for low-volume needs. It may require you to test and verify format of your images and other elements in your layout.
Robin Good: Leanpub is a free web service that allows you to create, edit and publish your own book in PDF, .epub (iPad) and .mobi (Kindle) formats, and to sell it online at your own set price.
With Leanpub you get 90% of the selling price, minus a fixed .50cents per copy sold which goes to Leanpub. Check this table for more details: http://i.imgur.com/ziqV5.jpg
Leanpub it's simple to use, but, in my opinion, it's not for everyone, as its setup is not as simple and straightforward (yet) as that of other web apps. But if you are a bit familiar with Dropbox, if you can easily edit text files, and don't mind tagging your book text with a few asterisks here and there, then you should be more than fine with this tool.
Basically Leanpub hooks up to your Dropbox account where it drops a set of simple text files that control the contents, sequence, formatting and images for your book.
So to work with Leanpub, you actually open a text file in your Dropbox account, and start editing it. The Leanpub account is used only to initially create the files needed in Dropbox, to generate previews and to provide you with the means to provide marketing info for your book landing page (auto-created by Leanpub).
It is possible to start a book by importing content from your blog RSS feed or from a Word document saved in HTML format.
One other cool feature of Leanpub is its ability to allow you, as an author, to publish and start selling your book at any time, giving you the option to actually get paid from the moment you publish your first edition.
People can sign-up to your book updates via the landing page, and Leanpub collects for you their emails so that you can keep in touch with them, and alert them everytime you have a new edition out.
The final cherry on the pie at Leanpub is the "bundling" feature which allows authors to bundle together either multiple books of their own, or their books together with other authors'(and their approval) ones and to offer them at a special discounted price.
This option by itself allows book authors both to use a very powerful marketing approach juxtaposing their titles to other relevant ones, as well as to cultivate their own competence in a specific area to curate relevant book sets for their audience. Check the bundling feature in this video here: http://youtu.be/BGJoDImqSqU
Robin Good: Fastpencil is a design, printing, publishing and distribution service which self-published authors can use to create books/eBooks and publish and distribute them to the major online and physical book distribution outlets available.
FastPencil provides all of the tools needed to write, edit and format your book and allows authors and companies to choose among three levels of imprinting and publishing services: PREMIERE, Wavecrest and FastPencil.com.
Distribution options:
1) Color Books: to Amazon.com, Alibris.com and the FastPencil Marketplace.
2) Black and White Books: to Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Baker and Taylor and the FastPencil Marketplace (excluding 8.5x11 page size, which is only available on the FastPencil Marketplace).
3) eBooks in Epub format: Apple iBookStore, Amazon Kindle Store, Barnes&Noble.com, Borders.com, Kobobooks.com, Powells.com, Ebookmall.com, Diesel-ebooks.com, Booksonboard.com, Lulu.com, Lybrary.com, and the FastPencil Marketplace.
4) eBooks in PDF format: Powells.com, Ebookmall.com, Diesel-ebooks.com, Booksonboard.com, Lulu.com, Lybrary.com, and the FastPencil Marketplace.
Pricing: All of the FastPencil writing tools are free.
When you’ve finished writing and are ready to publish you can choose from the following Distribution options:
1. Private - FREE
2. FastPencil Marketplace Only - FREE
3. Wide Distribution - $149 one format ($199 for both print and eBook)
Robin Good: Epub converter allows you to convert pdf, doc and other types of documents and e-books to EPUB format. 2epub is 100% free online converter.
2EPUB allows you to convert PDF, doc and other types of documents & books to ePub format, the standard format for ebooks, supported by almost every reading device including iPad, iPhone, iPod, Sony Reader, BeBook, Nook, Kobo (for Kindle use .mobi).
Nothing to download. Simply upload your files directly on this page by using the "Browse" button.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Liber.io is a free web app which allows you to easily create professional ebooks directly from any of your Google Drive documents in a standard ePub format that can be distributed on all pro marketplaces.
The app can import all formatting, images and fonts, and allows you to either upload your own cover or to choose and edit one of the ready-made ones.
To use it, you simply select a file from your connected Google Drive account, and then you set a number of options that will control, the title, meta-data, layout and pagination of your ebook.
Once you click OK your document is converted into a standard .epub file which can preview with free ebook reader like Adobe Digital Editions. You can't edit or modify the final result, but you can certainly go back to your Google document and change it according to your needs.
Your ready-made ebook can be sent in one click to your Google Play Books account, to your Kindle or to any major social media account.
Liber.io offers truly extraordinary simplicity and ease of use for anyone wanting to publish a standard format ebook without having to learn too many technicalities.
Free to use.
Request invitation here: https://liber.io/