One of the most effective ways to gain lots of traffic and free link backs for your blog or website is to produce a useful and informative eBook. If you have a WordPress blog and have lots of useful content, you can compile your best posts and create your own eBook and you can easily do it with the help of the Anthologize plugin.
Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including–in this release–PDF, ePUB, TEI.
The Anthologize WordPress plugin was created by the One Week | One Tool project of the Center for History and New Media department of George Mason University.
Screenshots:
Initial page
New project page
Filter blog posts/content
Drag and drop organization/layout
Export Project
Here are the core features for the latest alpha version of the Anthologize WordPress plugin:
- Use your existing WordPress blog content as the basis for your project;
- Import content feeds from non-WordPress blogs and other publishing platforms;
- Create a project containing one or more parts (chapters, acts, etc);
- Add, update, remove, and reorder parts;
- Add, update, remove, reorder, and merge individual items in parts;
- Edit project items through standard WordPress editing interface;
- Export your projects to: TEI, PDF, and ePUB (as well as rudimentary RTF).
Things to take note of before using/installing the Anthologize plugin:
1. Requires WordPress 3.0 and PHP 5
2. Cannot be installed on blogs hosted on WordPress.com.
I don’t have any plans of creating my own eBook yet but I installed the Anthologize plugin here on JaypeeOnline so I can have a hands-on experience and be able to write a more comprehensive/detailed review.
Based on what I’ve experienced using this plugin, it’s easy to install – just download the file, upload to your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it. Once activated, just click on the Anthologize section and start. It’s very straight-forward and user-friendly. You can drag-and-drop to organize and customize the eBook’s layout. Once you’re done compiling your posts, you can produce the eBook in the following formats – ePub, PDF, and TEI. The only thing that’ll probably need to work on is creating a nice eBook cover to make it more appealing and professional looking. If you have the skills then you can do it yourself but if not, then you can probably ask a friend or hire a professional to do it.
You can get a copy of the Anthologize plugin from the official Anthologize site or from the official WordPress Plugin repository.
Anyone using or have tried the Anthologize WordPress plugin to create eBooks? Do you know of other WordPress plugins or third-party software/service (free/open source/commercial) that can convert WordPress posts into eBooks? Please share your thoughts.
yes good plugin but not working, there is a bug about export the projects…
@greg – you’re welcome! glad I could share something useful for the publishing of your ebook. please do share it with us once it’s finished. :)
this is something i have been wanting to look into, thanks for sharing this info , hopefully my first ebook will be underway shortly!
@Mayank – That’s a good question. I’ve tried the plugin but didn’t complete it so I didn’t see the finished product. Will do it later and update you. Thanks for mentioning about this. :)
question — what’s the output like? Watermarks/credits of the plugin?
@Shiva – Yes it is. I knew that many bloggers would like this plugin, that’s why I blogged about it. It sure does make creating an ebook from blog posts quick and easy.
All the best on your plans of publishing an ebook!
Wow, this is an awesome plugin…It will save a lot of time when compiling an ebook out of posts. I have seen many bloggers doing it and I am planning to publish an ebook too. This will certainly help me a lot
@Joie – Let me know how you find this plugin once you’ve tried it. Thanks! Glad you liked it.
Yeah, good to have my blog back online after more than a day of downtime! :(
That is an interesting plugin. I would like to try on this one who knows I might use this in the future. Good find bai. It’s nice to see your site back online.
@Sourish – Yes, you can do that – compile your best blog posts into an ebook and offer it to your readers. That’s one effective way of generating traffic and increasing subscribers/readers.
wow , that cool. I needed just that for creatig an automatic copy of all my iphone jailbreak tutorials. People often ask me for that . Mayb i can offer them a copy for free if they subscribe to my rss feed like that
Sourish