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Roll your own iBooks with ePub

iBooks bookshelf in iPad. If you don't have cover art, iBooks will create it for you.

In A novel concept: Roll your own iBooks with ePub, Macworld’s Dan Moren tells how to create your own e-books as easily as you export a PDF or GIF from an authoring program like Office or Photoshop:

Earlier this week, Storyist Software released an update to its eponymous writing software that supports export directly to the ePub format, including the ability to add cover art, tweak formatting, and more. Likewise, the forthcoming 2.0 version of popular writing tool Scrivener is also adding ePub support.

In both cases, converting your file to ePub is as easy as saving it as a PDF or Microsoft Word document—you just pick ePub from the choice of export formats and hit the button. Voilà, the ePub file appears wherever you saved it. Drag that file into iTunes, sync your iPad, and you’re finished: your book will now show up in iBooks next to any other e-books you’ve purchased. Both tools also allow you to add your own cover art, and tweak the book’s metadata (author, description, genre, and so on).

By L. Jeffrey Zeldman

“King of Web Standards”—Bloomberg Businessweek. Author, Designer, Founder. Talent Content Director at Automattic. Publisher, alistapart.com & abookapart.com. Ava’s dad.

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