How to Make eBooks with Google Docs

Adobe PDF may be the most popular document format on the web but there’s a reason why eBook lovers prefer the ePub format over PDF. PDF documents have a static layout with fixed page breaks but the layout of an ePUB document is “responsive” meaning it will automatically adjust for different screen sizes.

You can read an ePub book on your desktop or inside the Google Play Books app on your Android phone and they’ll look good. Also, since ePub files are essentially HTML5 documents under the hood, the text size and font family can be easily adjusted for an improved reading experience.

Download ePUB ebooks

How to Create your ePUB eBooks

Adobe Stanza and Calibre are popular desktop software for  creating ePub ebooks but now can now easily make one in the browser using Google Docs itself. Just write a document in Google Document, or upload an existing Microsoft Word file to your Google Drive, go to File menu and choose download as EPUB publication.

Here’s an ePUB version of this article, generated with Google Docs.

You get an ePub file that you can copy to your mobile phone or, better still, upload the ePub to the Google Books website and access the ebook from anywhere. You can even read it in the browser. To upload an eBook to Google Books, go here and click the Upload Files button. The files are only visible to you.

ePub files are readable on iPad, Nook and Google Play books. Amazon Kindle doesn’t support the ePub format but there’s an easy way to convert ePub into MOBI format that is supported by Kindle.

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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