

What software do you use to create ebooks? - rcavezza

Curious to see what software (if any) the HN community uses to create ebooks.<p>I'm considering entering the space - also, any painpoints in the process?
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jaz
ePubPack[1] to create the ePub, FlightCrew[2] to validate the ePub, Calibre
and iBooks on the iPad to preview. For Kindle books, I use Mobipocket
creator[3]. Kindlegen[4], the tool Amazon provides to convert ePub to Mobi
didn't output consistent results so I stopped using it.

I'm by no means an expert, so there may be a better set of tools out there but
these have worked well for me.

[1] <http://sourceforge.net/projects/epubpack/>

[2] <http://code.google.com/p/flightcrew/>

[3]
[http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/productdetailscrea...](http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/productdetailscreator.asp)

[4]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621)

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yannis
TeX and LaTeX. Still the best software available to translate structured
markup to a pdf.

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kalid
If you are doing anything with equations, LaTeX is definitely the way to go.
Unfortunately, it's a steep learning curve for regular ebooks.

The downside is it's not super HTML-friendly (there are converters, but you
can't display equations easily in HTML) so converting to Mobi, ePub, etc. is
not straightforward.

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yannis
Certainly it has a steep learning curve but it has a very large community that
supports its packages and now also has a friendly and helpful community
<http://tex.stackexchange.com/>

~~~
davidw
They can be as friendly and helpful as you want, but that doesn't change the
fact that the input format for mobi and epub is basically HTML; meaning that
by utilizing TeX, you are basically adding another layer that doesn't provide
much value. The beautiful fonts, formatting, spacing, etc.. etc... that TeX
provides will all be lost on your ereader.

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Tcepsa
I unfortunately do not have much to add by way of recommendations for software
to use. However, one extreme painpoint for me as a consumer of eBooks is PDF.
PDF documents are bad enough when trying to read them on a full computer
monitor; on a Kindle or a Nook they are nearly unreadable, and on smartphones
they are a complete non-starter (for me, at least). I would strongly encourage
you to focus on formats that can be dynamically be resized based on the
viewing area (e.g. ePub or Mobipocket) rather than PDF.

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brudgers
I have material I self publish using Drumlin Reader due to the extremely low
cost and inclusion of DRM. Due to the nature of the particular market, Windows
only is not a significant drawback.

<http://www.drumlinsecurity.com/>

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davidw
LiberWriter, of course: <http://www.liberwriter.com>

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tobylane
Lazy option: Print to PDF. I've only ever done it from web pages so far, it's
good if don't want html (there was a good reason at the time, forgotten).

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EdgarF
The easiest way is to create a document in Google Docs and export it as a PDF

