book publishing

Ever since I bought my first electronic book reader I've wanted to create my own e-book¹. Not because I want to self-publish a book, because I want move the notes and cheat-sheets I have on paper to something I can reference on my e-book reader.

My first experiment was with PDFs. They're easy to create but the results are underwhelming. While there are exceptions, PDFs generally don't display well on e-book readers, especially technical documents. It was clear that I needed to produce an ePub document.

I've noodled around with different options. Last week I decided to give it a concerted effort.

My criteria was:

• Ability to have source chapters or sections in individual files
• Ability to have the files readable on a website as well in ePub format
• Easy to update the ePub document (i.e., as simple a workflow as possible)
• Have the source formatting as straight forward as possible