Developing ebooks- software?

Question

I've written a few documents for friends or blogs on software testing, job hunting and android development. I've been toying with the idea of producing some programming-related ebooks. However, developing these in Word or OpenOffice seems too amateurish compared to some of the fantastically produced books out there. I'm proficient in LaTeX but have never seen it used to produce ... 'marketable' works - just technical papers, maths, etc - which is great for code but not for distribution.

Has anyone seen any good (preferably free / open source) tool or software for developing/compiling professional-looking marketable ebooks (probably to .pdf or .exe format - but I can take care of that part if need be)? And more importantly, ones that are easy to use to format any code samples or snippets that I may choose to include.

Much appreciated.

Answer 1

You want to look at EPUB (for the standard) and Sigil for a free, GNUv3 editor.

Wikipedia EPUB entry has more listings for free editors and readers.

Answer 2

"Ebooks" can come in a variety of different flavors: you could have PDF, for which I think latex would be an excellent choice, but if you're going to target several different formats, such as epub, mobi, plain text, azw (proprietary amazon kindle format).

If i were going to write ebooks, and wanted to target all these different formats, i would probably use something like restructured text or markdown. reST or markdown you can easily get into latex for PDFs, but also to html for epub, plain text, and mobi.

you may also want to look into Lulu (who i've used an produce pretty good results), booksurge, or blurb, which all do POD (print on demand) for very little up front cost. Lulu will give you a "store front" and let you set up with all your books ready to sell on there.

Good luck.

Answer 3

chm editor could also be use

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