eScape - Free Open Office Writer to ePub Creator !
 

Just popped in to say hello and share a good news to all the ePub enthusiasts!

We have just announced the release of eScape - a free Open Office Writer to ePub creator/converter. Designed to turn your Open Office Writer documents (ODT) into perfect ePubs, effortlessly and instantly.

Download eScape from our site.

Don't you think ePub creation is made easy ?

You can have your say Here.

Have a great Week! :)

Cheers !

I was elated at first. Then I saw this:

I don't need commercial creation support, but your #2 requirement is--to me--unacceptable. I'm don't want advertisements in books I create for myself.

Other than that, the more epub converters we have, the better.

Valloric,

Thanks for the comment. We don't really regard it as an advertisement, rather an acknowledgment. However I guess that is a Point of View thing.

It's really small, tucked right at the back, doesn't appear in the TOC or anywhere. Bit like a "Printed by .... " statement from the bad old paper days I suppose.

Anyway, if anyone else agrees with this, we don't have a significant problem removing it from the tool and the license, and telling you how to remove it from your current installation - it's not DRM.

In the interest of full disclosure, the actual text, inserted into a last lonely page is:

This book was created using eScape. An Open Office Writer document to ePub Converter

Created by
Infogrid Pacific
For more information visit
http://www.infogridpacific.com

I second Valloric.

Best regards,

If you toned it down to, say, "Created with eScape by Infogrid Pacific" and put that in the metadata and not in the text, that would be acceptable (to me at least). I'm suggesting this because there is a need to be able to programmatically recognize which epub file has been created by which tool.

I wouldn't say it's the same as the "printed by..." info in paperback books. First, that information doesn't have an exclusive full page in a book (it's usually in the same page with all the publication info). Second, I don't view eScape as a "printer". For me, it would be the same as Microsoft forcing the author to include in their books an info saying "Book created using Microsoft Word".

Anyway, that #2 requirement wouldn't bother me, if it weren't automatically imposed by the software. It would be the author's responsability to write it in his ebook, where he sees it fit.

In the books I create, I add a page after the cover and the title page, where I write something about where the source of the text and/or illustrations comes from and the main changes (if any) I did. That would be the place for such information in my books.

Great news :) The more creation tools around the more ePub will take off.

Best of luck with the future of the software.

What bothers me is the "not for sale" part. If you plan on offering work for sale is there another version to use, or is this device only for amateurs?

It doesn't seem too bad too me - doesn't Book Designer do exactly the same thing when creating LRFs?

Yes it does, and it's immensely irritating. But BD is a free program, and I can (just barely) live with an ad for a free program...

Good effort and the "acknowledgements page" doesn't bother me. But without support for images other than the cover it's limited to text-only-books at the moment.

Good effort for creating text-only books. I played around with it a bit and was quite underwhelmed, honestly. Way too simplistic and not enough options (and quite bossy).

eScape Update

The license text on the website has been changed. We have removed the Acknowledgment page (AKA advertisement) condition as requested. The page is no longer displayed.

You can download it from here

There have also been a few minor changes/cleanups in the default stylesheets.

We have uploaded some titles made with eScape to our eBook resource page here and will add more over the next few weeks. We are focusing on the latest releases from Gutenberg.

Both the ODT and ePub are available so you can re-edit/re-style to your own taste in Open Office (Eg, remove our shameless plug page), and create your own versions of these books. These are designed to be tutorial in nature rather than books for general distribution.

eScape is a free product and there is no plan to make it commercial. It's designed for people interested in making free books for themselves and their friends, or even the greater public. If we get enough requests for a commercial version we may consider it. We don't really see this as a viable commercial product with out a lot more options. We did it purely because we could, and to address a challenge made on the Teleread blog. The development had the skills and components to bolt it together pretty quickly in their own time, mostly from our existing code components. The hardest part was learning the quirks of OO XHTML generation.

We have a professional Product IGP:FLIP (Front List Interactive Publishing), that obviously costs money to use and supports commercial models. It does a lot more such as creates print PDF, ePub, Online books, plus packages for Mobipocket, MS Reader and Palm Reader. It supports images, maths (with difficulty), SVG, Indexing, auto hyperlinking, notes/footnotes, etc. We are not trying to push that here as the spirit of Mobileread is sharing and support. That was just to answer your query on is there a commercial version.

eScape uses the Structure-Styling approach and is designed to demonstrate how the XHTML needs to be consistent for maximum value. From that perspective it is bossy. Then all changes can be made on the CSS. This is a radically different approach to most of the talk we see on the forum where there is a constant struggle with the smallest HTML issues for various reasons, and ePub packaging is onerous. eScape eliminates that struggle in return for a little discipline applying styles, then you can get as creative as you like with styles. For more information on this approach there is an informative white paper on XHTML for publishing here.