Parker S. Huntington

I would love this!

Rachel, please be a little bit more patient and a little less judgmental.  Anybody who has used both Pagemaker and InDesign for "word processing" and book publishing as I have (30 years) has probably been as frustrated and hobbled as I have with Pages.  That is just about the most frustrating "word processing" software known to man.  For starters, who needs to be presented with Helvetica, 12 point Regular, every time he/she opens the darned thing, no matter whether the document was formatted in, say, Cochin 11 pt?  Or whatever.
This is a BETA.  Affinity Photo is superb!  I tried for days to draw out an eye from a faded, orange, and grainy 1870 photo of an ancestor with Photoshop.  No luck.  Still Popeye.  Affinity Photo got to work and bingo!! Two beautiful eyes.  And not shaded sepia, either.
I predict that Affinity Publisher will be equally wonderful when the finished product is ready.  We are just being given the opportunity to try it out to help catch the bugs. And the very polite opportunity to suggest things we might wish to have in a perfect world.  Not to write "War and Peace."
And by the way, have you ever tried to reach anybody about a problem with InDesign or Pages?  You-Know-Where would freeze over first.  The Affinity people are grand!!

@ Fixx No, not just that. It is the ability to export to EPUB or other book formats.
At present, I can export a book from Pages (or similar) as a PDF, import it easily into Publisher, do whatever I want with it, then I can only export it as a PDF, not as an ebook of any type. The simple question is why? It is an obvious requirement.

Affinity Publisher is meant to be DTP software, or so I thought.
In terms of page design, for brochures etc, Affinity Designer does a much better job.
In terms of book publishing, Apple Pages does a very much better job. Even Libre Writer would.
I decided to test it by recreating from scratch a newsletter which I designed in 1994 (using MS Publisher which came on three floppy discs). I was able to do that and allowing for a little messing around while getting used to Publisher's way of doing things, it was not difficult. I haven't used MS Publisher since the mid nineties and I never once missed it until performing this test.
Affinity Publisher beta seems to be a hacked down version of Designer with Add Page / Master Page features but with no viable word processing function. In simple terms, it has no unique purpose.
It has taken years for Publisher beta to arrive and now that it has, I for one am left wondering what they have been working on because this cannot possibly be it.
I do appreciate this is only the beta version but no one would pay money for software which does not seem to know what it is for.
To end on a plus note, Affinity Designer and Photo are the best software packages of their type I have ever used and I am including Adobe and everything else in that comparison. A huge well done to Serif for producing those two. All I need now is for them to come up with a similar package for DTP.

Talk of alternative ePub creation software like Jutoh and Sigil is missing the point, yes you can use other programs to create ebooks but why would you want to start from scratch with clunky software when, using InDesign you create one beautiful  layout and export for print or ePub. This is where Affinity are getting it wrong by not providing ePub export as a basic feature. I’ve said it before, this is a deal breaker.

Jutoh doesn't support fixed epub and only a tiny subset of epub 3. Instead of Jutoh, Sigil is comparable and completely free for flowing epub ebooks.
https://sigil-ebook.com/
Although I understand the technical reasons why the Publisher developers decided to forego html and epub export, the fact remains that without this option Publisher will be unable to compete with the current crop of DTP layout software.
Which is why I hope scripting and a decent plugin API/GUI will be at the top of the list: this will empower users to build their own solutions. Because export to a fixed html page (which fixed epub 3 basically is) isn't that hard to develop, to be honest. Pretty much direct conversion from frame containers to absolutely positioned div elements, with content converted to bitmap and svg files.

Ok guys, lets step down a bit here. As I wrote before, I am also looking for ebup export. However, I feel we are loosing it with complaints in this subforum. The beta is out for 2 days. Different people have totally different requests and feel that their favourite features are missing. Lets not forget that building indesign or any of the other tools out there also happened in a long process and not all features were there right from the start. In other words: if it was that easy to s?*t out a fully fledged InDesign competitor, we would have many of such tools already.
However, it would be great to get some kind of idea (roadmap or so) on what you Affinity guys are going to focus in the near future. Integration with the other 2 apps? Import/export of Adobe formats for compatibility? Export function such as html or epub? That could help users a lot to make an informed decision when switching to Publisher is a realistic option in their particular situation.

Agreed ePub is not a minor market. If anything the printed matter industry is what is crashing compared to the enterprise video industry growth, especially in marketing. Video is expected to grow from a US$16B market to US$40B by 2022. Electronic publishing is taking over and that includes book publishing and without an ePub export option we can not see any reason to use  this product or recommend it to any of our clients.

No - ePub is not ‘minor market’ - every book publisher now produces an ebook at the same tine as the hardback snd audio book of their new publications.

Yes, we'll add more export formats in future to support e-publications. (I'm not going to commit to exactly which ones.) For this initial 1.7 release we chose to coast with our existing PDF because we had so much else to do. We have left a lot of work to do over the coming years.