From Pages to epub format

Gamone wrote:

I'm now faced by the following tough question: Should I carry on using Pages as a creative-writing tool, or would I be better off using an ebook-oriented environment right from the start? For the moment, there are two or three significant advantages in using Pages for creative writing:
(1) There's no technical barrier between the author and his/her output.

Not sure I understand what you are saying here, as Pages throws plenty of technical barriers at writers and there are many simpler word processors or text editors which provide output closer to what is required for ePubs.

(2) I can distribute my stuff conveniently to friends and colleagues in the form of PDF files.

You can print to pdf from any OSX app.

(3) I can print out pages on A4 paper, for checking.

ditto

As much as I'm really fond of Pages, I'm not sure that these advantages justify the messy operations involved in moving to epub format. Consequently, I fear that I might soon be putting Pages in mothballs… alongside Textures, PageMaker and InDesign.

I am sure that there will be a large number of apps leaping into the vacuum left by Apple.

btw Indesign CS4 and CS5 both output to ePub without any of the Pages' hassles.

Peter

One caveat for you: while Mr. Ainsworth's tutorial is very good for general epub creation, it is dated 2007. I would suggest reading through the links collected at Liz Castro's blog, Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis for information about the peculiarities of epub creation for ibooks, if you haven't already done so. (A valid epub that passes the Apple validator does not necessarily truly meet the requirements. and there are a number of quirks in ibooks, like the need to include Palatino someplace in your document, or lose all font formatting.)

EDIT Peter, InDesign has its own set of quirks for epub creation, although I agree it's probably one of the best choices right now. (See Gabriel Powell's videos for more about those.)

(1) Yes

(2) Yes

(3) Yes

(4) Things may change, but then I have been waiting a heck of a long time for the things that are broke in Pages and OSX to get fixed and all I hear are the flies buzzing. 😟

Peter

Yeah, what Peter said, alas.

For this:

I would imagine that forums (as distinct from self-interested blogs) will soon come into existence.

for now, one of your best bets would probably be to follow the #eprdctn group on twitter. Lots happening there.

Hello

To translate from Pages to epub, you mayuse this path :

Pages --> PDF --> Calibre to convert into eBook

http://calibre-ebook.com/

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 12 juin 2010 22:52:56

You will find that you can't create a valid epub for sale that way (not without spending many hours fixing formatting issues and putting in the various required code elements), and pdf is the very worst format to try to convert, although you can use calibre to convert a pdf in a way that may be okay for home use.

It's an okay solution for wresting the text from a pdf if that's all you have, but it's not a workflow to choose voluntarily. PDF should always be an end format, not a middle one, if at all possible, in making ebooks.

You didn't mention genealogy before. Are we talking genealogical tables here? If you plan to have graphics in an ebook, everything is more difficult by a order of magnitude, unless you have the skills such that you would be comfortable writing the book in CSS/XHTML.

Believe me, if making a salable ebook only involved: 1. make pdf, 2. open calibre, the publishing world wouldn't be in nearly such a swivet as it is right now.

Just as an example of what I mean, I recently heard the folks from a very popular ebook series say it currently takes them about a week's work to convert one of their pdf files for ibooks, and these are people who are not only coders from way back, but who also have access to the resources at O'Reilly, too.

Wow a new word, I have never heard before:

swivet n. Informal Extreme distress or discomposure.

An Americanism I believe as it occurs in Websters.

Barbara,

As you seem to have a better handle on this and I believe you are also an author, can you suggest a workable workflow for the users?

Peter

Honestly, at the moment if you are writing fiction, the easiest answer is to use Word or one of the Open Office variants and then use an aggregator and let them hassle with the coding parts (although I must point out that there are some difficulties for the future in terms of the publisher code and the ISBN ownership). Or else get really good at writing CSS/XHTML for yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. There are places where you can get a manuscript formatted for all the major outlets.

For any kind of heavily formatted book, I think the solution is to hunker down and wait a bit. People in the industry are still figuring out how to enforce a lot of formatting (there are some magnificent cookbooks in ibooks right now, for instance, but section headers and captions may not appear in the right place if you tinker with the settings), and it remains to be seen exactly what Steve Jobs meant by including PDFs in ibooks. He didn't say "sell PDFs through the ibookstore", and for material where there's any kind of fixed formatting, PDF is still the best way.

There are some serious bugs in InDesign CS5 for epub creation, although the chapter splitting feature is very tempting. But I think a lot of production shops are waiting to see if Adobe will release a point update before moving to CS5, for all the hassles in CS4.

The other big consideration is the platform wars. If you want maximum readership, you will need separate formatting for Nook, Kindle, ibooks, and now there is a new ereader that is going to be sold in all kinds of general purpose stores like CVS, for example. Formatting for that isn't known yet.

Eventually this will all shake out. They are working on a new standard for epub that should help with a lot of the current problems, but that's probably 18 months away or more.

Another option is to publish your book as an app. I did see a press release last week from someone who is selling a kit to turn a book into an app, but I haven't heard any feedback about whether it's any good or not. Or you can do what the Take Control series has been doing: sell a PDF and recommend GoodReader.

I was pretty excited about that blog post last fall where someone claimed to have found ebook creation embedded in the Pages package, but in reality right now it's a highly complex process, no matter where you start, so it's not surprising this hasn't come to pass. My own ideal would be to be able to lay out a book in Pages and use that as the basis for a PDF or just send a perfect epub straight to the ibookstore, but I'm not sanguine that this will ever be possible.

Thanks Barbara for that insight. 🙂

P.

You're welcome. For anyone who's really interested in pursuing this, I would again recommend reading the link roundups on Liz Castro's blog (linked above) and also following #eprdctn on twitter (I'm not a twitter fan at all, but this is the most active wide-ranging group I've found dealing with the nitty-gritty of epub creation.)