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2012: The Year Of New Ebook Tools

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The release by Apple of iBooks Author last month begins a year that will see the release of several new tools focused on helping people to create, publish and track their ebooks. Now that Apple have clarified that their EULA does not attempt to claim ownership of users’ content, I’m sure many more people will be willing to give it a shot, but it’s still a one trick pony: your .iBooks file can still only be uploaded to Apple’s store. iBooks Author's other file formats - PDF and plain text - aren't very useful when it comes to uploading to other stores. That’s fine insofar as it goes, but if you’re an author or publisher wanting to reach as many people as possible, with limited time and resources to repurpose the same content for different marketplaces, iBooks Author isn’t a great help.

Centralised ebook conversion and upload

For non-enhanced ebooks, which I would guess makes up the majority of ebooks produced, a new service aims to make serving all the different ebook shops easier. BookBaby, sister site to the successful CDBaby, will reformat and distribute your ebook to all the major stores, including Amazon’s Kindle store, Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, the Sony Reader Store, Kobo and others.

BookBaby works on an upfront fee basis, a minimum of $99, leaving its users to receive all of the royalties from all sales. That makes it easy for users to understand how much they are shelling out and for what. Because BookBaby manages the uploads to all stores, it can also manage all your stats, providing you with an accounting dashboard so you can keep track of how your books are selling in each shop.

The disadvantages are that it will cost to get corrections into your ebooks, $50 for up to 10 changes, $75 for 11 to 25 changes, and $100 for 26 to 50 changes. That means even more motivation to make sure that your book is absolutely perfect before you submit it. It will also cost $59 more to convert a PDF, Quark or InDesign page.

The convenience of being able to manage uploads to all stores at once, however, should make using BookBaby well worth it. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but certainly will be with my next publication.

Tracking stats

If you’re managing your own uploads, though, IndieTracking is a Windows-only tool that helps make sense of your downloaded sales reports from your various ebook outlets. Simply feed in your spreadsheets, as downloaded from Amazon or wherever, and IndieTracking will chew through the data and give you reports and graphs by month, book, and sales outlet.

Indietracker makes it easy to understand your book sales figures

IndieTracking is a relatively simple bit of software. It can’t magically provide the kind of detailed stats that I wish Amazon and its competitors would give their sellers, but it will make make sense of those messy spreadsheets that ebook stores spit out. Definitely worth a shot if you find yourself drowning in stats for various books in bunch of different stores and currencies.

Write and publish

Next week, open source software house Sourcefabric is launching a new tool “to help people and organisations write and publish great multi-platform books”. The software will prep books for iPad, Nook or print and will output to PDF, ePub, odt or HTML. Says their blog post:

The free, open source platform will cover the entire book production workflow from collaborative writing and editing, to fully customisable output and design. You can manage a community of authors, proofreaders, translators and editors effortlessly while the software takes care of book structure, formatting, licensing, and versions.

The new tool is almost certainly an extension of the existing FLOSS Manuals site, which allows people to collaborate on writing guides to free and open source software. Sourcefabric announced its partnership with the FLOSS Manuals Foundation at the beginning of December last year.

A good online collaborative tool could be a godsend for businesses who want to cut down on the overhead of creating ebooks from existing content. And it could help authors manage the tricky proofreading process which can trip up even the most vigilant.

An ebook tools boom

There is undoubtedly a boom in ebooks at the moment. The opportunity for businesses and individuals alike cannot be ignored and many are hoping to benefit from the democratisation of publishing. Whilst we have some fantastic tools for writing, such the wonderful Scrivener, other parts of the production workflow are woefully underserved. Here’s hoping that this is the year some of these problems are solved!