Publishing ePubs & Kindle Format?

[Khell]

Hi there,

will there be a way to export for iBook Store, Kindle and other e-publishing platforms?

Thank you!

 

[RickyO]

Yes, that would be useful.

[Bad_Wolf]

If I remember correctly someone of Affinity mentioned that e-publishing is not a target of Affinity Publisher.

If you want to create ebooks for all the platforms you mentioned, go for Jutoh. Jutoh is relatively easy to learn and very powerful and precise. I tried many ebook creation softwares including Scrivener and none of them get close to Jutoh. I am using mainly Jutoh and sometimes Kotobee Author (for true interactive ebooks because it is easier in that category).

With traditional desktop publishing, layout is very important. With ebooks it is just the opposite, mostly the reader controls the layout and the ebook reflows accordingly. For example, a font in an ebook can be choosen by the reader as also the fontsize. So your beautiful crafted ebook with fancy looking fonts, can easily gets lost because a reader choose another font. Or are you going to put a message at the start section of the ebook, please don't change the font, mine is better?

Something else I do not understand, is that and correct me when I am wrong, you want to use the same layout for DTP in an ebook. I assume here you want to publish a paper and electronic version of your publication. For the reasons above, that is simply not possible and practical.

Chris

[Fixx]

My educated guess is that Publisher will support exporting to epub but not in its first version. For now Jutoh is the way to go. Epub can be beautifully crafted even when lot of design follows user selections in reading device.

[NewInBoston]

Does anyone have any experience using Pages that comes with macOS? Apparently it can handle EPUB, and I was reading if I need it in Mobi format for Kindle, there is a free software called  Calibre that can convert EPUB to any format. http://calibre-ebook.com/

I only ask because I try to avoid application bloat where possible, and Jutoh is yet another license to track among the hundred or so I already have!

Thanks for any info, as I'd like to start formatting as soon as possible. 

[kfriis]

On 9/13/2019 at 5:47 PM, NewInBoston said:

Does anyone have any experience using Pages that comes with macOS? Apparently it can handle EPUB, and I was reading if I need it in Mobi format for Kindle, there is a free software called  Calibre that can convert EPUB to any format. http://calibre-ebook.com/

I only ask because I try to avoid application bloat where possible, and Jutoh is yet another license to track among the hundred or so I already have!

Thanks for any info, as I'd like to start formatting as soon as possible. 

I have used Pages as an ePub3 editor a few times. Mostly I need to create fixed format ibooks (I’ve done a few using the free iBooks Author), but it’s not bad for the occasional free-flowing epub3 publication. Not at all bad.

The Mac/iPhone/iPad Books reader handles everything I’ve tried - even including simple animations, although the latter poses problems outside the Apple sphere (there really is no “grown up” reader of epub3 files on Android, Windows or Linux). As long as you use text, images and videos only, problems are few, and far between. Nothing, that can’t be cured by Sigil, but… Sigil is seldom required for ordinary - even advanced - creations.

You can - of course -  work on Pages documents on-line from any decent Windows or Linux browser, and there is the added bonus, that you do not have to leak content and ideas in readable form from unfinished products, while working on your latest candidate for a Nobel prize in Litterature. You can password protect/encrypt the documents (and you can place them on iCloud and any WebDAV server available), and on iPhone, iPad and modern MacBook Pro/Air machines, you can unlock via a convenient touch-ID (probably face-ID unlock will work also on most recent iPad/iPhone gear) in day-to-day use. Quick and easy. 

The latter makes Pages a really interesting solution for everyone working in the Apple sphere, since Word (or Excel) do not support this approach at all (not even for documents stored on OneDrive, which does not encrypt stored user files except in the business edition. Whether you use the much safer iCloud or the far less safe OneDrive or Google Drive cloud storage solutions for private use, you can activate a minimum of protection on a per document basis with Pages.  This will of course not render the old-fashioned physical rubber hose decryption method obsolete - ahem.

By using the iOS App FileBrowser Biz I also get access to storing/reading practically “anywhere else”, like ordinary network shares (SMB - including standard network shares from my desktop Mac or local NAS), other cloud providers (Amazon etc.) or even the odd FTP servers “out there on the internet” - from inside Pages (and Numbers). You are not forced to use iCloud or local storage on devices. You don’t even have to have a copy of your document stored on your iPhone/iPad.

The new iOS/ipadOS 13 versions are said to support a similar agnostic storage regime; if you wait a week or two or so, you can check for yourself, if a third party solution is required at all in the future. Then it will also be possible to check the read/write support for external disks, USB-sticks and SD-card readers on the final iOS/ipadOS releases.

Regards