First Look – eBook Creator Software Kotobee

I’ve been trying out a new application which is for creating electronic books. The application eBook Creator Software Kotobee and it would be a competitor to Ulysses, Scrivener and iBooks author. It has the advantage of, like Scrivener, you are able to export out to the Kindle format. The application also gives you a proprietary format which can be accessed from a native application on Android, iOS and even on Windows phones. Kotobee will also export out to a web format. You upload the folder containing your book to a Web server and hey presto you have a book which can be viewed online. It looks quite interesting and I’m still in the process of playing with it and testing to see what can be done.

eBook Creator Software Kotobee

The interface for eBook Creator Software Kotobee is fairly basic in terms of being a word processor. You get a WYSIWYG view of the work you are doing. It’s easy to make the headers and add pictures to the text. It supports flow around the text even in the format style which is re-flowable. I exported out to the Kindle format and the images I put into the text didn’t show up on the Kindle app on my iPad. I looked at the same file in my Kindle app on the Mac and I have pictures exactly where they were supposed to be. I also exported out to the EPUB format and the pictures came across okay into the iBooks reader application. It’s still early days for testing this application and I have yet to work out how the pricing of it works. There is a free option which is what I’ve been using. The exports I’ve made so far have worked okay without any restrictions. I see that to export to an encrypted version of EPUB it’s necessary to upgrade to a paid version. This is fair enough as software developers do have to eat as well. The Good and Geeky brand books I’ve created for sale on Amazon previously have all been compiled and exported out of Scrivener. This has given me a good well formatted book and all for a reasonable price for the Scrivener software.

One of the formats I tried to export out to from eBook Creator Software Kotobee, PDF didn’t work because it required having Java installed. I will not install Java on my computer and there are other ways of getting PDFs. If you want to export out as a web app it will export out as a HTML 5 application. It’s possible to send books out as an application for Windows, Macintosh or as a Chrome app. Each time you want to export to a different format it seems to want to download a plug-in to do it. This is probably a good idea saving you from downloading parts of the application you’re never going to need. I did a test of exporting out to a Mac application. It put an icon onto my desktop and when the application was opened it gave me the same sort of view as I experienced when opening up the book in a web browser. You get one or two options for the way the book works within the application. It’s possible to select text and add notes or highlight text. There is a view of all of these notes in one place which would be handy if you were creating textbooks.

Creating the book as an iOS application

This is something I’m going to have to try and hopefully I won’t need to have a paid Apple developer’s account to be able to use it. There is a tutorial to help you set up because you need to have a certificate file and a provisioning profile. You do need to upgrade eBook Creator Software Kotobee or buy credits in order to create applications. And this starts off with a $100 one user – lifetime access to the application. This might only allow you to export one application because there is another premium version which requires the payment of $300 which states you can export five mobile apps. There is a mobile app pricing allowing the export of one mobile app and that costs $30. There is a free trial so I might give that a go.

Interactive components and facilities for education

The books are compatible with iBooks widgets. This means you can add video, audio, galleries and 3D widgets. As with iBooks Author you can add customised HTML 5 widgets, limited to your html5 coding prowess. With all of that you’ll be able to create a better academic experience for learning from these electronic books. You can add responsive quizzes and exams in the form of multichoice questions. The answers to these questions can be self-reported to the student or emailed to the instructor.

First impressions of eBook Creator Software Kotobee

In the edit mode for Kotobee you have your word processor. On the left side you have a panel where you can put in the book title and arrange your chapters. This is where you will also insert the cover for the book. In the main TextEdit area you have a set of icons at the top of the screen for formatting your text. Over to the right there’s the panel where you can choose images, links, audio, 3D, widgets and so on. When you insert or edit links it’s possible to link to external websites, to a location within the book or for a pop-up message. A good way of getting the information into the application will be to bring in as HTML text. I would likely be writing in Ulysses or another markdown editor allowing me to export out to HTML. Change to the source code view to paste in HTML formatted text. This would save having to go through each of the sections of text to set up the headers and things like lists. There are also views for JavaScript and CSS so there’s no reason why you can’t create some incredibly good looking and intelligent e-books using eBook Creator Software Kotobee.

eBook Creator Software Kotobee

2 thoughts on “First Look – eBook Creator Software Kotobee

  1. Ayman A R says:

    Ayman from Kotobee here. Great article David. If you would like us to help you resolve any of the issues you mentioned (such as PDF import) feel free to contact us at info@kotobee.com.

    1. DavidAllenWizardgold says:

      I’ll be looking more at what Kotobee can do. I have family visiting right now and it will have to wait until I have time to get in to it.

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