For Immediate Release:

Monday, April 28, 2014

PressBooks is a great way to create, design, and produce ebooks and print books in the cloud. They have some beautiful interior design templates to choose from. To do it yourself costs $25. Pay $100 for some help. Or for $350, they’ll do it all for you. Send them your Word, Open Office or Pages manuscript and they’ll set up your book and export your files. Then you can edit your book, work on it with your proofreader, put a cover on it, and export advance reader copies or just pieces of the book for publication and promotion elsewhere. You get PDF for print, EPUB for ebooks, MOBI for Kindle ebooks, and HTML for web books.

I also love PressBooks because they’re the easiest way to go from blog-to-book. I created a little book about motorcycling Northern California Wine Country by grabbing the “wine country” category from my MotoSFO blog, uploading it to PressBooks, and adding front and back matter and a cover. I uploaded it to Smashwords and you can get it free (or pay what you want). Check it out. I wrote a tutorial about this on Nina Amir’s How to Blog a Book website. Here it is.
When my editor at PBS MediaShift asked me to compile all my columns into a book, I suggested we use PressBooks for that, too. I loaded them all up and edited them into book chapters. The MediaShift team edited my work right in PressBooks, added front and back matter, and the designer added a cover.
PressBooks is run by Hugh McGuire, who builds tools and communities where book publishing and the web intersect. He is the founder of PressBooks, a simple book publishing tool, and of LibriVox.org, a community of volunteers that has created the world?s largest free library of public domain audiobooks. You can find him on Twitter at @hughmcguire.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/pressbooks
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pressbooks2
Google+: https://plus.google.com/s/pressbooks
YouTube interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbN4aTkjYCM
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