Creating Electronic Books
In this video we look at a simple ways to create e-books and I start off by looking at an application which is specifically for turning HTML files into EPUB publications. This application is very much a one trick pony and from it you will get a very simple electronic book. You can add a single HTML file or multiples, or you can even add a whole folder containing files. There are not many options within the application for customisation of your e-book and when I looked at it, it wasn’t even possible to add a front cover. I can still see a use for an application like this, for instance you might want to just have something done very very quickly. This could be when a teacher in the classroom has webpages already created that she wants to quickly get out to students as an EPUB. Perhaps you feel like you don’t want to get out iBooks Author, or other EPUB editor, perhaps because if you did you would up spending too much time messing and fiddling with it.
Other apps for making e-books
EPUB Mac – It is possible to use the application from Adobe called Indesign to make a ebook. Personally, I think it is over the top in terms of price and complexity and if you don’t want to use iBooks author, then you could instead use the Pages application . When you use Pages all you have to do is to download the e-books template that you can get and bring into your Pages application. You can do this by importing the template or you can just open the document and do a Save as Template.
I have tried Pages for making an e-book and to be honest I was not really impressed. You have to be very careful in the way that you add images to your e-book and I think that using iBooks Author is a much better proposition. The problem is that with iBooks Author you don’t get the option for making a standard ePub, it has to be one of the new specialised iBooks formatted style of book. This does mean that to be able to read any book out of that software, you do need to have an iPad. So maybe you will have to struggle with Pages after all. One other application that is worth looking at is Scrivener. Very good export capabilities to loads of formats including ePub.
Creating iBooks directly from the iPad
There are some reasonable applications available for making your iBook directly on the iPad, from the very simple such as Daedalus to the app called Book Creator. Why would this not be the case, the iPad is a creation device after all. Having an EPUB creator on the iPad only makes sense.
Publishing and being everywhere
When you’re making an e-book you really want to be able to have it available in as many formats and in as many stores as possible. To this end it is good if you can have some way of exporting your book out as a PDF, because some people will want to get it that way. It is also quite reasonable to look for a way to convert the publication to the Kindle format. Obviously Amazon is going to be a good way to get your book sold too. Nevertheless, there is the possibility with certain types of content that you may just want to stick with the Apple bookstore. That is not a bad thing either with there being 100 million and growing, iPads out there. So start creating your electronic book masterpiece with some of the EPUB software available and keep coming back to Digital Book Maestro for more tips and hints on how to use the software to publish your own books.
