Uploading LibreOffice ePub to Google Play Books

We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. If you don't care to read the background information and just want to skip straight to the solution, scroll down to the stuff with the yellow highlighting.

Background: I convert a  lot of public domain books to text, edit them, add commentary, then convert them back to e-Book formats for reading on my computer, smartphone and other devices. I have a Google Pixel phone and am heavily invested in Google Play Books, so it is to my advantage to upload my converted and newly-created .epub and .pdf books to Google Play Books, for reading on my phone.

The Problem: I completely ditched all things Microsoft several years ago. LibreOffice Writer is the only product I use for word processing, as it is far superior not only to other Linux offerings, it is way better than MS Word in virtually all aspects. So, after I convert and edit public domain books, I export them to the epub format. The trouble is (was) that exporting the Writer file ( .odt ) to epub using LibreOffice resulted in an epub book that I could read on my computer (using Foliate or Calibre), but it always caused a user error when I tried to upload to Google Play Books.

The Solution: First, I must give credit where credit is due. 95 percent of the fix was found in this YouTube video by @Geaoffmobile. He does not go on to say how he came across this solution, but as weird as it sounds, it works. The short, text version of the fix follows the video.



Steps:
  1. In LibreOffice Writer, with the file that you want to convert opened in LibreOffice Writer, click on File, Export, 





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