Before a book can appear in printed or electronic form at a book supplier, it must go through several steps. To begin, the process requires a manuscript; the author creates the book using a text editor that later becomes the basis for publication. Next, submitting the manuscript as a file to a publishing house involves the time-consuming work of an editor to create a well-formatted and publishable document from the writer's jumble of text.

If you prefer to self-publish with Amazon's CreateSpace [1] and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) [2], however, the editing work is up to you. In practice, the free office packages LibreOffice [3] and OpenOffice [4] are available as extremely powerful tools for this purpose.

The publishable files – not to be confused with the raw manuscript – make up the published book, now completely formatted in an acceptable way. In the case of CreateSpace, these are PDF files, whereas KDP works primarily in the HTML format. Again, LibreOffice and OpenOffice are especially well-suited here, because they can export manuscripts to PDF or HTML. (See the "Error Correction" box for more information.)

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