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How to convert a WordPress blog into an ebook

26th February 2011, 02:20 pm


Question:

I have a WordPress blog. What I’d like my ebook to look like, is to have the “reference guide” pages serve as a table of contents, and allow access to each of the individual pages through it in addition to just paging through.

And is there a way to just convert the WordPress blog pages straight from the web site into an ebook, or would it work better to copy all the html files to my computer first?

Answer:

Converting your blog to an ebook can be done, but it does take some manual work.

If you have full control over your WordPress blog, you may have luck with the Anthologize plugin. If you don’t (or if your blog is hosted at WordPress.org, keep reading:

You’re going to have to build the book in MS Word / Writer / HTML and import to Calibre, ebook creator software. There will be a lot of copy/paste and manual page design. I fully intend to have to do the same thing when I publish Dev Manny. If you want quick and dirty, you could just save each page on your site as an HTML file, but honestly I don’t think it would look good. Or rather, it would look like someone just saved a bunch of HTML pages. It wouldn’t be a very pretty or functional book.

I don’t know what you have access to, but MS Word 2010 has excellent book-publishing features – you can auto-format “chapters” into really nice-looking headings at the touch of a button, and then have it auto-generate a table of contents with auto-generated page numbers, etc. I don’t know if the free OpenOffice Writer has such a feature, but Word 2010’s is really nice (Word 2007 and earlier are just okay).

I would suggest building a chapter or two, complete with table of contents and links and pictures and headings, save as HTML, and just try to convert it with Calibre. Make sure you’re doing it right before you commit to doing the whole book, so you’re building the MS Word doc correctly from the start.

We can’t make a WordPress site auto-build a book for you. To my knowledge (and I’d love to be proved wrong), that functionality is available for individual pages (like “click here to download this page as a PDF”), but not for the site as a whole book.

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Category: Amazon, Ebooks, WWW