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Save Some Green: Create an E-Book for Free!

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Got a great story to share? Don't wait for a publishing company to print your book; E-books or electronic books are a great way to share your ideas, while also sparing a few million trees. Aside from being the eco-friendly way to go, E-books are gaining popularity among college students and young readers, says Phys.org. According to a recent report, commissioned by Scholastic Inc., 46 percent of the participants between the ages of 9 and 17 had read an E-book in 2012, whereas only 25 percent of the participants had read an E-book in 2010 and about 25 to 30 percent of book sales, this past year, were E-book purchases. You can even create an E-book on your own, for free and you don't have to be a computer programmer to make it happen. If you have a computer with an Internet connection and backup software, so you you won't lose your work in the event of a computer crash, and one of the many free E-book creators, listed below, you're good to go!

EPUB Your E-Book

The EPUB E-book formatting program is XHTML based, making it ideal for creating something with mostly text, like an e-book novel or text book. However, if you're thinking about creating a picture book or a cook book with lots of colorful images, you will need to understand more code and the images will likely not line up well with the text on each page. If most of your EPUB is text based, using an inexpensive program like Lulu or Smashwords should make transferring a Word document to an EPUB a simple enough task.

The Kind of Kindle for You

If you would like to make your E-book available on Amazon only, their Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) converter will allow you to transfer a word document to their Kindle format for free. Creating a Kindle creator account is free and if you need more help to create a mobile/pocket friendly version of this Kindle E-book, you can easily convert your files through the free KindleGen. One might wonder why Kindle is offering all of these features for free and the simple answer is that if they have cornered the market on e-book publishing, and they don't have to pay authors a dime in royalties. According to SmashingMagazine.com, there are three types of E-books available, and EPUB is one that operates on most devices (all Apple iOS systems, Barnes and Noble's Nook and Sony's e-reader). However, it does not operate on the Kindle or Kindle Fire and Amazon does not intend on allowing users to to download EPUB formatted e-books onto Kindle devices anytime soon.

The good news is, with both of these formats, you won't have to learn a lot of code and you don't have to be a computer genius to create an E-book that you can sell or give away to your friends, fans and family. With EPUB and Kindle, you can create an E-book that is perfect for children of all ages.

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