One way, according to Lulu.com, was to use their services to create an ePub version of your book for you, now for a limited time at 50% off!

I was excited to see this, until I saw the price. It was about $350. Even at half off, my time isn't worth that much.

But the blog post on Lulu said that there were many free options for creating ePub books, so I looked into them. I found a program called Calibre that was available for Mac OSX, Windows, and Linux.

At first I thought I could just import the PDF that I had created from Lulu, but that didn't work too well--the result had the page numbers smushed directly into the main text, didn't have chapter dividers, and generally looked ugly.

There was talk of some macros for Microsoft Word that would create an ePub-friendly document for importing, but here I ran into the horrible truth that Word 2008 for Macintosh does not support Visual Basic macros! I thought about trying it on my PC, but they suggested a different solution.

Word has a Save As HTML feature. It creates horrible code and everybody hates it, but here I thought it just might work. The Calibre documentation suggested using the "Save as Web page (filtered)" which creates much cleaner code, but it seemed like the Macintosh version of Word didn't have this feature! I turns out that it is just labeled a little differently in the Mac version. You select "Save as Web Page (.htm)" and then select "Save only display information into HTML".

The result is an .HTM file that can be imported into Calibre and produces a perfect ePub book, suitable for uploading to Lulu.

Who would have thought that Word's Save As HTML would be actually useful? Well, me, as it turns out. I once used that feature to create a single-sourced HTML Help document from a 100-page Word manual, but that involved some custom programming and is a completely different story. I'll tell that one another time.

Here is the link for the ePub version again: http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/edge-of-infinity/8519263