A few weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to mine my weblog to identify topics and content that could be used to create science education eBooks.  I have nearly 600 posts written over the past seven years, but I didn’t have an easy way to do transform them into eBooks.

I wondered whether there might be a WordPress plugin to do this, but during my first few searches, nothing popped up that I thought would enable me to convert posts into eBooks.

Home page of the Anthologize Website

Then I came across Anthologize, a program that claimed to make it easy to transform WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing eBooks.  It turned out, that Anthologize is a WordPress plugin, free, and open-source.  I really couldn’t believe it after I uploaded the plugin to my WordPress site.

For WordPress users, all you have to do is make sure you are using WordPress 3.0 and PHP 5, go to your Dashboard  page, click on Plugins, and then from that page click on “Add New.”  Type in “anothologize” in the search box, and then hit the “install now” link when anthologize appears in your search list.

Anthologize will appear in your Dashboard menu, and from there you can create multiple projects.  Last week I published my first Anthologize eBook, entitled Why do we teach science?

I am currently working on several new eBooks, one of which is entitled “Is ist pedagogy or petrology?”  Beneath is a screen shot of this project on the Anthologize page in my WordPress Admin site.  Notice that on the left are my posts, which you can scroll through, select, and drag into the various Parts of the eBook that I set up.  You can edit, append and preview each page, and organize your project quite easily.

Screen shot of Anthologize page I am working on for a new eBook on geology and teaching.

When you are ready to publish your eBook, simply click on the “Export Project” button at the bottom of the Anthologize page.  From here you can enter copyright information, and choose the export format (PDF, RTF, e:Pub, HTML), as choose the published page size, base font size, font type, where to enter page breaks.  Your published work will also include a table of contents, each page not only numbered, but with stylized headers on each page.

I recommend Anthologize to you.  It was developed at the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University in one week by a team of 12 individuals.

If you would like to see a finished product that used Anthologize to transform WordPress posts into an eBook, please go to this science education ebook: Why do we teach science?  From this page you can download the eBook, which is in PDF format.