Open source tools you must know if you are looking forward to self-publish.

For any writer, publishing his book is a dream come true. With readers preferring ePubs over printed versions, self-publishing has become easier. The availability of certain open source tools help you to do the job swiftly and with ease without having to rely on any professional service provider.

When you opt to self-publish, there are more things you should do than merely writing your book. When you are planning to publish the digital version in Epub format, careful checking must be done so as to assure that it is properly created. Also, if you have plans to sell the created book via Amazon’s Kindle library, it must be converted to a format that is supported by Kindle. Two popular and most effective tools for both are enumerated below.

ePubcheck

Proper structuring is there for ePub files. Epub formatting service providers always try to maintain structured chapters, supporting files and directories. Regardless of the effort you take, few mistakes may always creep in. This make validating you book important which see to it that the book has all those elements that your reader expects in it. Few among those are complete metadata, valid XHTML, table of contents and working links etc.

Validation can be done easily using ePubcheck (a command line tool) and this is preferred by most of the professional eBook conversion companies.

Ebook-convert

You have to accept the fact that Amazon is the most popular and largest marketplace when it comes to the digital publishing, selling or purchasing of eBooks. However, it uses a format with .mobi as extension. For creating eBooks in this format, the publishing tool used is Book Type. However, eBook conversion to .mobi can be done using eBook convert which is another command line tool. 

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