After reading several eBook articles and FAQs, one of the topics that seems to trip people up are the technical details of self-publishing. So I made my first goal to figure out how to self-publish an Office document into an eBook, and host the eBooks online.

I wanted to self-publish this eBook by starting in Office Word format, then convert it to formats for the Kindle (.mobi) and other readers like the Nook and Sony Reader (.epub), which my wife has.

After several failed attempts with Mobipocket Creator (which could create a .mobi eBook, but I couldn't get it to reliably and consistently create a table of contents), I attempted to use Calibre for the purpose. I'm pleased to announce that Calibre is working great!

The wonderful thing is, Calibre can be used to create both of the eBook formats I want - starting with an HTML file that Word can easily create.

After getting my stub files successfully converted to two different eBook formats and testing on the Kindle (passed!) I used Weebly to get a simple web page up and running that can download each of the files.

I also wanted to make it easy for people to view the book right online, using Docs.com - then I discovered that Docs now provides embed code for viewing Word docs right on your site!  Weebly supports a custom HTML part, paste the Docs embed text - and it works great.  I played around with the dimensions to get something that seems to look good in my browser - and done.