by Joseph T. Sin­clair

In a pri­or post I sug­gest­ed that a rea­son­able way to pub­lish a book is to estab­lish it as a web­site (a web­book). How do you make a book web­site eas­i­ly and effi­cient­ly? It’s sim­ple. Use Word­Press. It has a lot of built-in attrib­ut­es that will save you a lot of time and effort.

1. You can use either Page menus or Blog Post menus for nav­i­ga­tion. Either will sup­port your chap­ters (and oth­er book com­po­nents) list­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly with links. The Blog Posts have auto­mat­ic dates. The Pages don’t. How­ev­er, dates are appro­pri­ate for chap­ters that are updat­ed occa­sion­al­ly. 
2. You can choose to include, or not, Com­ments after each Page or Post, and Word­Press han­dles the Com­ments.
3. Most recent Word­Press tem­plates are now respon­sive. That means they auto­mat­i­cal­ly adapt their for­mat when accessed by a smart phone or tablet to accom­mo­date the small­er screens. They are PWAs (pro­gres­sive web apps).
4. Word­Press takes third-par­ty plu­g­ins. Plu­g­ins are sim­ply pro­gram­ming to enhance Word­Press func­tion­al­i­ty. If you need some spe­cial pro­gram­ming, some­one may have already cre­at­ed it and is mak­ing it avail­able to oth­ers as a plu­g­in either free or for a price.
5. Word­Press has a build-in search func­tion, which makes a usable index for your book.
6. You can embed images, audio, video, and JavaScript in Word­Press doc­u­ments to cre­ate a diverse media book.
7. SEO func­tion­al­i­ty is built in and easy to use.
8. There are hun­dreds of themes to choose from. Themes are dif­fer­ent visu­al web­site designs.
9. Any­one can use Word­Press. You don’t have to be a pro­gram­mer. Train­ing on how to use Word­Press is wide­ly avail­able, much of it free.
10. There are Inter­net ser­vice providers (ISPs) that pro­vide mul­ti­ple web­sites and mul­ti­ple auto­mat­ic Word­Press instal­la­tions for one very low month­ly cost. Word­Press itself is free.
11. And more.

To devel­op a book web­site oth­er­wise would take many hours of work and some sub­stan­tial web devel­op­ment exper­tise. To have some­one do it for you would cost thou­sands. How­ev­er, if Word­Press isn’t for you (for what­ev­er rea­son), you would only have to devel­op a book web­site once, and you could reuse it as a tem­plate for dozens of web­books.

One dis­ad­van­tage of using Word­Press is that you can’t take a Word­Press web­site and eas­i­ly con­vert it into a bookapp (for iTunes or Google Play), as you can with a pure­ly HTML5 web­site. Nor can you zip the Word­Press files togeth­er (into a ZIP file) and deliv­er your web­book to be down­loaded and used offline on a user’s com­put­er.

But you can achieve flex­i­bil­i­ty in devel­op­ing for dif­fer­ent pub­lish­ing plat­forms? You can take HTML web­pages devel­oped with a gener­ic for­mat and use them as your core con­tent. Then you can copy and paste the web­pages into Word­Press, or you can adjust the web­pages to be con­vert­ed into a bookapp. Thus, Word­Press is a viable plat­form for web­books even when you pub­lish your books into oth­er elec­tron­ic for­mats.