gordon019

Q: iBook PDF export to EPUB conversion

Converting PDF to EPUB seems to be common problems for many us, trying to get our iBooks Author content to the Kindle format. IBooks Author only exporting Text only and PDF formats, leaves many of us with few conversion options. Has anyone out there had any success with this conversion process? I understand that PDF exports from IBooks Author will lose many of the interactive features of an iBooks project, but I am really only hoping for the text and images to be reasonably recreated in a format acceptable on Kindles. I don't want to recreate my iBook project and future updates in another app (Pages), that's too much revision and conversion work. I have investigated the Calibre App but the developer admits PDFs are hard to successfully convert to EPUB or other Kindle supported formats. It seems like a future version of iBook Author could generate a basic EPUB export (only scrolling text and images perserved). As an eBook content provider, not being able to participate with Kindle sales, means extinction for many of us, and therefore, probably failure for Apple's iBook Store.

iBook, Mac OS X (10.7.5), iBook Author 2.0

Posted on Mar 20, 2014 10:33 AM

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Q: iBook PDF export to EPUB conversion

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  • by Christiano Valois,

    Christiano Valois Christiano Valois Apr 26, 2014 10:55 AM in response to gordon019
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    Apr 26, 2014 10:55 AM in response to gordon019

    I think there might be no solution. It is not in Apple's interest permitting you to conert ibooks files into free epubs or mobis, since they would not get their share if you resell those converted items. Remember that when you agreed on using ibooks, you have commited yourself to sharing the copiright revenues with Apple.

    /you can convert pdfs into epubs using Calibre, a free software. /but conversion will always be imperfect and you will have to rework all your formatting using Calibre, which is also an epub mobi or azw editor, or restarting from scratch with Jutoh, which is free but certainly not as manageable and beautiful as Pages or Ibooks-Author. Remember that Word does not have an epub exporting tool as Pages offer. However I really never managed to use Pages' converting tool, it always reports an unsolvable error (never specifying which), so all my working with formatting has been a losing job. Hence, you either restart again converting your text into .txt extension and manually reformatting each page in Jutoh or you do the same with Adobe's InDesing, which is the best software for so doing, but also extremely expensive.