Online book publishing

Someone asked me if there is a web site which allows you to print and sell books which you have written yourself. There are actually several online book publishers, or online self publishers, which you can upload your manuscript to who will handle the printing and the online bookstore sales for you.

The online publishing house that I prefer is called LuLu (http://www.lulu.com), however, all of the varios online publishers tend to provide very similar features. Lulu will accept your manuscript in various formats including Microsoft Word and PDF. I would recommend using PDF since you will be able to be sure that the typesetting of the document will be identical on both your home PC and on lulu's printing computer. Lulu also provides an option to have your book become available to traditional "brick and mortar" book retailers.

You may be interested in using TeX, or LaTeX, to typeset your manuscript. TeX is a very powerful document layout language/specification which is very popular in academia and will produce PDF formatted files using a tool called pdflatex. The advantage of using TeX is that it performs the typesetting on your behalf so that you are able to focus your energy on writing content.

I have some additional information about LaTeX in Ben's Information Station here:

LaTeX Embedded in HTML

and here:

Presentations With LaTeX Beamer

Have you ever written a book and had it published?

Good luck publishing your book, if you have any comments please let me know and if you have any other questions which you'd like me to answer for free please send them to Ben Dash at ben.dash@gmail.com