Having had fun with Ebook Glue, I thought I'd check the App Store for something I could use to make at least basic ebooks that don't have to be blog posts. I thought that if I can cobble together some of my own stuff, eg already-published short stories, I can also use it at school with my classes and maybe my book club, many of whom are writers, so we can share written stuff. Our Year 7 and 8 students this year will have iPads.
So off I went to the App Store and found a number of ebook apps. I ended up downloading two, because the first one I bought wasn't much use for anything but picture books. If I ever want to share family albums with friends and relatives I might go back to that one, but it won't take much text.
The other one, Creative Book Builder, seems to be working much better for my needs. You can't put the book up on-line as you can Ebook Glue books, but you can email them and I think you can park it in Dropbox.
It's fairly basic and I'm still working out how to use it. It doesn't seem to reproduce italics from a Pages document, either, and there isn't a toolbar to let you fix that. Maybe I'll figure that out eventually, because there seem to be some "import" options. BUT - I not only did a couple of short story collections, I pasted my whole current novel manuscript into it, chapter by chapter, so I can now read it as an ebook while I try to get out of my current state of writer's block. I can't edit the ebook, of course, but right now, all I want is to reread it and see what the problem is. I will also be able to email it to any beta readers I trust. ;-) The app only has ePub and PDF, not mobi, though, so any beta readers with a Kindle are out of luck there.
For anyone who's interested, the app is not that expensive and worth checking out.
So off I went to the App Store and found a number of ebook apps. I ended up downloading two, because the first one I bought wasn't much use for anything but picture books. If I ever want to share family albums with friends and relatives I might go back to that one, but it won't take much text.
The other one, Creative Book Builder, seems to be working much better for my needs. You can't put the book up on-line as you can Ebook Glue books, but you can email them and I think you can park it in Dropbox.
It's fairly basic and I'm still working out how to use it. It doesn't seem to reproduce italics from a Pages document, either, and there isn't a toolbar to let you fix that. Maybe I'll figure that out eventually, because there seem to be some "import" options. BUT - I not only did a couple of short story collections, I pasted my whole current novel manuscript into it, chapter by chapter, so I can now read it as an ebook while I try to get out of my current state of writer's block. I can't edit the ebook, of course, but right now, all I want is to reread it and see what the problem is. I will also be able to email it to any beta readers I trust. ;-) The app only has ePub and PDF, not mobi, though, so any beta readers with a Kindle are out of luck there.
For anyone who's interested, the app is not that expensive and worth checking out.
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