Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book, Part 3

In Part 2, I talked about templates – what they are and why you might care. This week, I’ll talk a little about word processors, then we’ll get into the nitty-gritty about templates and how to customize them.

First, since most of the work required to publish a book involves typing the text, let’s start with a word about word processors. In the pc based world, three of the main choices are Microsoft Word, Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. I’m quite sure everyone reading this is familiar with MS Word. OpenOffice began when Sun Microsystems acquired the StarOffice office suite and “Open-Sourced” it as OpenOffice in 2000. Because OpenOffice was free to the user and because much of the development was done by volunteers, it quickly became a popular and full featured word processor and office suite. When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems in 2011, they halted the development of OpenOffice, which caused a number of developers to split off and start LibreOffice. Later, Oracle gave the rights to OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation, and development was begun again. Today, LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice are very nearly identical, although I’d give a slight edge to LibreOffice.

Microsoft continued the development of MS Word as well, of course, and now, all three do all the basic stuff extremely well. All three have strengths and shortcomings when compared to the others, and there are websites that have devoted pages to detailing the differences. For the most part, however, any of them will get your book from basic text to a form that can be published. I favor LibreOffice over MS Word for two reasons: MS Word is expensive while LibreOffice is free, and, the last time I checked, LibreOffice could export files directly to EPUB format – the format used by the majority of eBooks - while MS Word lacks this feature (although there are two caveats: this is easily accomplished using one of the free conversion programs like Calibre, and the latest version of LibreOffice doesn’t execute this step all that well when there are images involved).

My choice is LibreOffice - it does most everything I need... and it’s free.

Now on to templates.