If you have Mac OS X 10.6 or later and you’re looking for a tool to create ePub and Kindle books, you might want to check out Legend by ZappTek. It’s $99.99 USD, but you can download a demo and try it out before buying.
Hiring someone to format your eBooks will quickly add up. If you’re planning to create more than a couple of books and you don’t know how to do it manually, Legend could save you money in the long run.
I don’t have a Mac, so I haven’t tried it.
About Sarah Ettritch
You don’t have a Mac and you haven’t tried it, but you are suggesting people pay $99 instead of creating it in Open Office for free??
No, I’m merely letting people know that the tool exists.
I have OpenOffice, but I don’t know how to create ePub and Kindle books from it. How do you do it? Are you using a plugin?
(Since I posted, the Legend Maker price has been reduced to $49.99 USD).
Long story short, you need a tool to create a Kindle book on a Mac. I’ve bumped into this frustration. One of the steps required, after formatting, is to convert the book to a plain html document. Word for PC is able to do this, but Word for Mac is not. This leaves with an interesting problem of not being able to add bookmarks, TOC, etc to your Kindle book without a separate tool…or friends with a PC.
That’s all to say, OpenOffice doesn’t work (in my experience so far) to make the Kindle version of your book. I’ll check out Legend Maker. Thanks
Yeah, I’ve used OpenOffice and was pretty certain that it couldn’t convert files to Kindle and ePub. If it could, it would be super easy and everyone would be doing it.
Does Calibre run on the Mac? If so, you might want to check out the book I posted about here:
http://selfpublishingadventure.com/convert-word-to-mobi-epub-smashwords/
(Actually, I just checked the Calibre site, and it says: calibre works on OS X Leopard and higher.)
Alternatively, check out Jutoh. I use eCub (a stripped down version of Jutoh for tech-savvy folks). I highly recommend both tools.
http://www.jutoh.com