New ePub Maker for OS X

[Daddy Warpig]

Anybody used it? Any reviews?

http://www.zapptek.com/legendmaker/

"The easy way to create ePub and Kindle books!"

"Are you looking to support the growing number of eBook readers that use ePub? Are you spending too much time trying to properly format your books instead of focusing on writing?"

[Or reading, for me.]

"Legend Maker for Mac OS X takes all the hassle, confusion, and mystery out of creating perfectly formed ePub and Kindle books so you can do what you do best, write great stories!"

[$99, not cheap. Aimed at content sellers, not hobbyists. Still, a "sold" for me, if it means I don't have to jerk around with zipping and unzipping an ePub just to fix some tiny flaw in the .opf.]

"ZappTek has taken the tools used to produce Legends books for the iPhone and made them available to you."

[I assume those are "books-as-apps", not iBooks volumes. Anyone bought one? Do they look decent?]

"With some simple additions to any Word or RTF manuscript (no HTML required!) you can create books that look great on the Kindle, iPad, Sony Reader, ibis reader, bookworm, and any other reader that supports the ePub standard."

[Heavenly, if true. Direct conversion from RTF without errors would be ideal. Would be even better if they import .rtfd documents.]

"How about a Table of Contents? Legend Maker makes that easy as well. Simply add bookmarks to your manuscript and Legend Maker will automatically generate a Table of Contents — fully accessible via an eBook reader’s contents listing (including the Kindle’s Menu button!). It’s what your readers expect and, with Legend Maker, it’s what your readers get."

[Awesome.]

[Fabe]

As a Mac user I am always interested in new things and as an ebook creator, doubly so here. But my Mac is a Power PC which means I top out at 10.4.11 in the OS arena. So I cannot use this product.

Which comes first, book sales allowing me to purchase newer resources or new resources in the hopes of generating more book sales?

[scottjl]

Ouch. $100 for it. Well for a serious writer it might be a worthwhile investment, or your publisher would probably be doing this for you anyway. A few of the features are available in tools like Calibre (editing metadata). I imagine there are probably some open-source utilities out there that would help you format your book as well, it is only XHTML after all. If you knew what you were doing you could write the whole document in a plain old text editor and hand-edit your own tags. Like how we wrote HTML when Mosaic was our browser. LOL.

[cmdahler]

If you're a serious writer, you'd likely just shell out two or three hundred for InDesign and be done with it. Hell, I've seen InDesign on sale in various web stores for as little as $99.

[Fabe]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

If you're a serious writer, you'd likely just shell out two or three hundred for InDesign and be done with it. Hell, I've seen InDesign on sale in various web stores for as little as $99.

As a serious writer I would pay someone to do it all for me. (If I were a well paid writer that is.)

[cmdahler]

Touché!

[tesseract420]

I have seen no other program that converts a book or text into an iPad or iPhone app, if this program did so it might be worth it. It's a little strange that there are so many books for these devices in the iTunes store yet there is no easy way to convert to that format.

[pwalker8]

Calibre converts over formats into epub with no problem. I think the program above is an authoring tool for creating new content in epub format rather than converting. You can use Calibre to convert a RTF document into epub for reading with iBook. You might need an authoring tool if you want to take raw text and create an ebook with all the bells and whistles that readers expect.

[Daddy Warpig]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Calibre converts over formats into epub with no problem. I think the program above is an authoring tool for creating new content in epub format rather than converting.

I agree. I think it's more of an alternative to Sigil or InDesign rather than calibre.

That said, I usually end up running my calibre-generated pubs through sigil, and this would be an alternative.

[Kolenka]

Originally Posted by Fabe

As a Mac user I am always interested in new things and as an ebook creator, doubly so here. But my Mac is a Power PC which means I top out at 10.4.11 in the OS arena. So I cannot use this product.

Which comes first, book sales allowing me to purchase newer resources or new resources in the hopes of generating more book sales?

10.5 supports PPC, 10.6 is what dropped PPC support. That said, it will be difficult finding a copy of 10.5 at this point.

[Mitchll]

I tried the demo of legend maker ... not very impressive results. Calibre does a better job at a much better price!