TCC 4-5 Making Your Own E-Books

TikaTok makes ebooks simple for a price. TikaTok is software from Pearson who supplies our gradebook/attendance software or portal. TikaTok has templates for students to use to write a book and then publish it as an e-book or hard copy. The basic subscription is only $19/year and there is a free trial. Publishing is a fee also: $3 or $4 to publish an ebook and $15 for a softcover paper book which they ship.

But you can do something similar with either power point or word. You will need to design pages for books and then have students add pictures, drawings and text. When finished save as a pdf file. Any pdf can become an eBook.

There are online converters which will change pdf files to ebooks for specific ereaders. One I have used is Online ePub Converter which offers conversion to specific readers: iPad, Kindles, Nooks, and others.

Since we don’t get these books from online stores it requires some special handling to put them on the reader. Two were mentioned when I learned how to do this:

calibre (cost) and Digital Editions (free). These both allow you to make a library and share the ebooks to ereaders. This video from Goodereaders gives details on how the move the epub books to a nook. The video also used Windows Explorer which is the window on your PC where you look at files.
To bring your project to TikaTok levels you will need to create some templates for your students to use for the genre of book you wish them to produce. I would suggest looking at TikaTok to see what can be done. The kids will love it! Of course you can also print and bind the PPT slides, too.

Enjoy!