
Show HN: Papyrus,a simple way to create ebooks - gt5050
http://papyruseditor.com
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gt5050
Hello HN, I have been building Papyrus for the past few months. It is a simple
web app that allows people to create ebooks easily. Would love to hear your
feedback.

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jvandenbroeck
Cool looks very nice! I might use it for my new years' resolution to write
something:p I would only be cautious because I'd be afraid of losing data
(what if I write a whole book with your site & suddenly you go offline) & on
the pdf version there 's also a white border around the book, it might be nice
to be able to remove this or change it. For the rest it looks very awesome!
Nice templates, easy to use etc=)

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zrail
I recently made a service named Docverter[1] that attacks this from the other
end, where you write your book in Markdown or various other markup formats and
produce ebook files via pandoc and calibre. It's way more do-it-yourself, but
it could be a useful backend for this or other services.

[1]: <http://www.docverter.com>

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ramayac
Great tool, thanks for sharing!

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bpatrianakos
It's black and white and red all over. Please tell me you deliberately chose
that color scheme for that reason. You'd be my hero if you did.

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gt5050
To be honest, I am not a designer myself.Experimented with a few colors, this
looked decent and pushed it.

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bpatrianakos
Oh no, I wasn't commenting on the design really. I think the design is just
fine. I was referring to the joke that a comment above me refers to.

"What's black and white and red all over" A newspaper. It's a play on words
where "red" is supposed to be "read". I thought maybe you had that in mind
when you chose the colors. It would be really clever and funny if you did. If
anyone ever asks you that you should totally tell them yes. I bet they'd get a
kick out of that.

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basseq
I've wanted something like this for going on two years. I even went so far as
to start building it (wireframe: <http://basseq.com/fun/epub/>; some epub
publishing code written), too, but lost momentum back in September and it's
been sitting in my project folder.

So I'm excited someone took this further. I'll be playing with this more. Drop
me a line if you're looking for more thoughts, feature ideas, or help.

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gt5050
Thanks ,sending you an email.

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Rayne
This looks like a nice service. I could see myself using it. One thing I
noticed on the front page is that you do strange things with punctuation.
Examples:

"Import the contents from the web . Convert your blog to a book in one click."

Notice the space before the first period.

"Papyrus lets you create books in pdf,epub,kindle formats."

No spaces after commas and no 'and' before 'kindle'. Also, there is no space
between the last period and "(Coming soon)" in the two rightmost feature
sections.

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gt5050
Thanks for the feedback. Will fix it soon.

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gt5050
This has been fixed.

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smountcastle
The terms of service discuss a monthly subscription payment but I cannot find
any fees listed anywhere on the website. I assume it's free for now and
sometime in the future they'll announce pricing. What if I don't like the
pricing model? Can I export my content and sell my book somewhere else? How
easy is it to get my book out of Papyrus?

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gt5050
The books are available as epub,pdf and mobi as of now.All the content that
you would create will be yours forever. You could always sell the books on any
platform you like.(Like iBooks,Kindle,Nook). Example of a book created using
Papyrus and being sold on Amazon <http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009OU5E3K>

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KeithMaguire
Looks great!

One note - I happened to have my screen quite narrow when I opened it and as
the menu-bar wrapped around it obscured the "Import Chapter from Url" button.
The introductory guide pointed to where it thought the button should be but it
was just highlighting a corner of the "Feedback and Support" button.

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shalintj
Tried creating an ebook out of some of my old blog posts. Import from URL
feature is pretty cool. Loved it. The frictionless way to try the app is also
great. Bookmarking the site. Can I import a couple of my Dropbox docs
directly?

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flexie
Looks great. Nice feature that you can import content from any url. It's good
that you can get started and see the product without signing in. Also a good
guide.

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gt5050
Glad that you liked it.The guide was inspired from
<https://github.com/Gild/bootstrap-tour>

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mtgx
It should probably have a word counter. Also a spellchecker? Chrome seems to
identify the spelling errors, but I don't know if all browsers have this.

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gt5050
Thanks. We will try and add these features soon.

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rebelnz
Nicely done - I too was looking for pricing information but after reading
comments here see that its still in development. Bookmarked - good luck!

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prabhats
Neat Design! Great UI Experience!! Really dig the "origin of species theme"
and in app walk over.

Really Usable Product. Would love to publish some books with this.

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mikecane
How does this differ from Pressbooks? <http://pressbooks.com/>

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gt5050
Its different from Pressbooks

1)Has a cover designer built into the app

2)You could import content directly from anywhere on the web. (File import
coming soon)

3)There are a set of themes,you could choose from.(Abilty to customize themes
and a few more themes will be rolled out soon)

4)This might not be a differentiating factor,but we have tried to keep the
editing process simple.

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rman666
I have to admit that I prefer <http://leanpub.com>

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gt5050
Would like to know your thoughts. Your feedback would be very helpful

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ramayac
Why don't make a small comparison table vs other similar products to clearly
show the benefits of using your product?

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tanish2khn
this is neat - all went good, until I incidentally pressed the 'clear canvas'
button on cover page. no undo there?

looking forward for more advance features - full screen, double page editing,
collaborative editing and review comments ?

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gt5050
Thanks for trying out Papyrus. Will try and add these features soon.

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Boldewyn
Firefox user here. What technology do you use to limit the page to WebKit
only?

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gt5050
The editor is basicaly, a div with contenteditable. The implementation varies
across Gecko and Webkit. We are working hard to add Firefox support.

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Boldewyn
Good to hear! I'm curious to see the result.

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devilankur18
Seems like a nice utility for fast ebooks. Going to my bookmarks :)

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saravanavijay
Great app... Liked the import from url feature..

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udayaprakash19
looks great, is it going to be a free service ? i don't see any pricing page!

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gt5050
We are still building the product. We will add pricing plans soon.

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SwitchCase
Finally out! Congrats!

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ntayal
Great !! All the best!

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Toshio
I went straight into book editing mode, since I plan on publishing an ebook in
the following months.

The experience has been slightly frustrating. For instance, Shift+Enter when
editing the contents of the title doesn't work as advertised. And when trying
various things in desperation/frustration, a section of text popped up on me
from nowhere, and I couldn't find a way to remove it.

I'd say the product has a lot of promise, but you have a long way to go until
you reach MVP stage.

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gt5050
Apologies that you had face issues while using Papyrus. I agree the product is
still far from perfect. We are working hard to fix the bugs.

Thanks again for trying it out.

