Google Docs now supports exporting in .epub

By Lulu Chang March 8, 2016

google docs epub i — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Writing the next great American novel? Doing it on Google Docs? Then pushing your content out just got a whole lot easier. On Monday, Google quietly announced yet another update to its ever-improving Google Docs service — the ability to export your work directly as an .epub file. In the firm’s rather inconspicuous app update alert, Google notes, “EPUB is the most widely supported file format for publishing accessible documents and digital books, allowing people to consume long-form content in their preferred apps on a diverse range of screen sizes and devices, including smartphones, tablets, and eReaders.” And now, the Internet giant supports it too.

The latest release will “make it easier for authors, publishers, and academic institutions to create works that can be consumed digitally,” Google says, and the process is about as easy as can be. All you need to do is head over to the File Menu within Google Docs, find the Download as tab, then scroll over to EPUB Publication (.epub). And voila, your writings will be made available as the open ebook standard, adoptable by any device maker in the world.

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Well, that’s not entirely true — interestingly enough, Amazon’s Kindle, the most popular e-reader on the market, doesn’t actually directly support the .epub format. That said, it’s very easy to convert, so this doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to access your work on one of the most ubiquitous devices out there. In fact, there are a number of free tools (like Calibre) that allow you to convert your .epub files to Kindle’s preferred MOBI. But Kindle aside, you can rest assured that the vast majority of smartphones, tablets, and computers will be able to work with .epub as well.

So if you’re looking for a way to make your output more accessible than ever, consider exporting it as an .epub. Now, you really don’t have an excuse not to.

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This new Google Docs feature is exactly what I’ve always wanted

Text box in Google Docs on a laptop.

As a writer of a certain age, I've lived a lot of life in Google Docs. It's where my first drafts go, but it's also where my crazy ideas, unhinged brainstorming, and research dumps go.
There’s so many conveniences about Google Docs that make it my go-to for word processing, but let’s be honest: It’s still fairly barebones, especially when it comes to organizing and managing different files within Google Drive. But this new feature makes all of that much easier, keeping it all contained all within Docs itself.
It’s called Document Tabs, which you may have already noticed floating just to the left of your document.

The idea is simple: It lets you create multiple documents within a single Docs file. Create as many “tabs” or separate documents as a single project might need, and switch between them extremely fast. That accessibility to them is really where the gold is. No more switching between different browser tabs.
It’s even more handy on mobile, of course, where switching applications or tabs is even more cumbersome. Here, you’ll find Document Tabs hovering just at the bottom of the screen with some simple arrows to flip between your different tabs. All we need now is a simple gesture to be added to flip between them even more seamlessly.
Document Tabs takes the place of the old outlining system, which would grab headers and automatically create a table of contents around them. I used this frequently, but it was pretty finicky. More than that, it resulted in overly long documents that I still found myself scrolling through.
Document Tabs is a really elegant solution to that problem. Whether it’s segmenting chapters in a book, multiple aspects of a project, or even just different parts of an article, it’s already become an extremely useful outlining and productivity tool for me.
It even had a pretty clean way of converting the tabs when you need to export. All the tabs do is combine down into one document, but they’re sectioned off with titles and some basic formatting. That’s not going to be ideal in every situation, of course, so it’s something to keep in mind if you need to export and share it with someone outside of Docs.
At the very least, though, it’s worth trying out. And if you’re a Google Docs fiend like I am, I have a feeling you’ll get quite a lot out of it.