Inkling Habitat may have gotten all the hype last week, but it wasn’t the only online ebook creation tool launched at TOC. Booktype also launched last week. I couldn’t get to it until today, but I’m pleased with what I’ve seen so far.
Booktype is the latest project of SourceFabric, a Czech non-for-profit. This developer is new to me, but that’s mainly because I’ve never needed to use any large scale collaboration tools, which is SourceFabric’s specialty. [Read more →]
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Ebook creation tools are a hot topic right now, and online tools doubly so.
My brief experience with Pressbooks earlier this week has had me thinking about online tools, and I’ve been planning to dig up some of the lesser known and older tools. Then, in a delightful coincidence, I came across the mention of Anthologize in a post about textbook creation tools.
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Last week I wrote a post explaining why you shouldn’t make KF8 files (they’re a waste of space and not many people can use them), and today I’m going to show you tool to fix the size problem.
My recommendation last week was to wait for a tool that would let you split the enormous file generated by KindleGen into smaller files that would be easier for the end user. It turns out that tool already existed, I just didn’t know about it, [Read more →]
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Last week I posted about the launch of Red Staple’s new ebook creation service, and in that post I also briefly mentioned several of Red Staple’s competitors (more details here). I forgot to mention one of the online services in that post, and I just caught a TOC session on it today.
Pressbooks hasn’t gotten much attention since it launched, but after my experiences today it became my immediate favorite.
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Can’t afford a Mac in order to use iBooks Author? You might want to check out Red Staple. This developer recently expanded beyond creating iTunes Extras, and later this week they will be launching their ebook creation tool.
It’s not live yet, so I haven’t tried it. But I did manage to connect with Red Staple, and they answered a few questions.
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Every time you make a note, highlight a section of text or add a bookmark in a Kindle book, a copy of the annotation is made in the MyClippings.txt file on the Kindle. The text file is a simple record of all annotations made in all books in the Kindle. It serves as a backup of notes and highlights but has limited utility if you’re reading more than one book concurrently, as the notes are organized chronologically. There is no way to re-sort the annotations by book.
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There’s an interesting bit of news that was swallowed up by the Amazon Kindle event last week. Intel held their annual Appup developer’s conference and one of the neat new tricks they unveiled was an an ebook app maker.
This is the app maker that I first uncovered about a month ago. I didn’t know much about it then, but now I do. And I’m not sure it’s worth the bother.
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Vook have just announced that they’re not going to be publishing their own enhanced ebooks anymore. They’re now going to make a push to become a conversion service which anyone can use to make an ebook with embedded audio and video. They’re not giving up on the market niche, but they did pivot and go in a different direction.
I have to say that I’m not terribly surprised. I was never convinced that there was a market for enhanced ebooks. In the 20 months that I have been watching Vook and other makers of enhanced ebooks, I have never seen a good piece of evidence that suggests I was wrong.
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Liz Castro has tipped me to this great new way to download and convert webpages. It’s called GrabMyBooks.
It’s a Firefox plug-in that functions kinda like dotEpub, only it’s better. GrabMyBooks will not only get the content from a webpage, it will also let you combine several pages into one. And it gets better. You can also pause the conversion midstream and edit the content to fix the more annoying formatting errors and generally clean up the files. it will also accept RSS feeds as a source.
Now, dotEpub does have one advantage in that it is not tied to Firefox; GrabMyBooks is currently only available as a Firefox plug-in, which is fine by me.
Go get it now. I’ve already deleted the dotEpub bookmarklet and replaced it with this.
P.S. Mike Cane ranted and raved about it, which should tell you how good it is.
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A friend sent me an email this morning with an update on Amazon’s new KPR format. He thought I’d want to know that the usual suspects had hacked the file and released a script that could remove the DRM.
He’s right. I did want to know.
You see, I own an ebook in the new KPR format. I’d like to be able to make sure I can still use my property even after the original copy is gone from the Kindle store, and even after I’ve switched to a new computer. The only way I can do that is by removing the DRM.
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