We made it available in ebook, PDF, and printed book formats. Shift Happens is an overview of many of the technologies of the past century that have shifted our lives, environment, and perceptions. These are the tools I used to produce Shift Happens: Essays on Technology, co-authored with my wife, Marion Turner Wilburn, in 2020, during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. These products and systems are not as widely used as Microsoft Word, and they have a reputation for being “techie,” but I think they’re accessible to anyone who is willing to take on a modest amount of learning. It’s your choice which typesetting program or system to use, but they all have a non-trivial learning curve.Īs a self-published independent author myself, as well as being a retiree on a tight budget for software, I’m going to outline a way to produce great looking books and ebooks using a combination of free tools that work in Windows, MacOS, or Linux. The open source world offers Scribus, as well as traditional text-based typesetting systems such as troff and LaTeX, two systems frequently lauded for their ability to produce beautiful typesetting. Adobe InDesign, Adobe Framemaker, QuarkXPress, and Affinity Publisher are commercial products that offer this kind of quality. The next level up from word processors is the tier of publishing systems that do a more nuanced, attractive, and professional-looking job of kerning and leading, especially for print books and PDFs with fully justified lines. If your aim is a little higher, you need to move up a level. Word processors, however, are not true typesetting systems, though they do a decent job if “good enough” is your aim.
Microsoft Word, of course, is commonly used for this purpose, and LibreOffice Writer, a free, open-source alternative to Word, is rock solid. There are many tools that can be used to write a book and prepare it for self publication.
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