Hi everyone,
New to the forum.
The main reason I aquired Atlantis was it's ability to produce EPUB files. The program would be to me twice as great if it could also READ EPUB files.
I do not want to be snide, for the program is great, but it sure seems wrong to PURCHASE a program that creates the files you want, and then have to get a freeware or another shareware program to read it.
I tried a search and did not find anything on adding this feature. It sure would be GREAT!!
Keep up the great work.
Bill Everett
Reading EPUB files
E-books are the biggest growth market for Atlantis!
I strongly agree. The entire reason I started using Atlantis in the first place was the Save as EPUB feature. Being able to go directly from Word to an EPUB that passes validation checks is worth the price of purchase all by itself if you're doing e-book work regularly.
I have repeatedly recommended AWP on the Kindle Developer Forums on the basis that it is easier to make an EPUB and convert it to MOBI via KindleGen then muck with MobiPocket Creator or KindleGen via HTML generated by Word. I'm never going to be that deep of a web code guy and I really want tools that keep me from having to directly edit the code. (The downside is that feeding an EPUB to KindleGen for conversion to MOBI results in a file far larger than it should be. Amazon refuses to explain why this is.)
With this in mind, I think the Atlantis developer would be well rewarded if they pursued the e-book market. I'd be willing to pay a lot more for a product that got me a lot closer to something like Adobe InDesign but without that level of power and expense. Something that combined Atlantis and Sigil in a single turnkey e-book creation app would be well worth $100 to me.
This is my list of what Atlantis needs to grow into this emerging market:
1. Tables. Yes, I know, you've been hearing this for years but it remains the single biggest deficit of the product. Tables are an important formatting feature of EPUB (and Amazon's new K8 format eventually replacing MOBI) and the lack of this function means you cannot play in the big leagues.
2. EPUB editing. Currently, Atlantis is not a complete solution for making a professional-looking e-book. After outputting my Word file to EPUB via AWP, I still have to go into Sigil and do more work on it because I cannot figure out how to make it happen in Atlantis. The functionality may be there but it could be a lot more straightforward. A book creation workflow for assigning cover images, creating metadata ToCs, and applying semantics would go a long way towards increasing the value of AWP.
3. E-book creation workflow. As already mentioned, making this more approachable for people with no experience in web work would be a huge plus. The current most invaluable tool is the freeware Sigil. A partnership with that project to create a combined package is a possible way to go.
4. Kindle support. The Kindle family pretty much owns the e-book market for most of the Western world. Some very successful self-published authors are seeing over 85% of their sales through Amazon, with Barnes & Noble making up nearly all of what remains.
In spite of this the Kindle is much more difficult to develop for than EPUB. Part of this is due to the lesser functionality of the format. But the biggest obstacle is the lack of good tools. There is nothing remotely like Sigil (or better, the AWP and Sigil combination) available for Kindle work. Being able to do a complete e-book workflow and out a Kindle compatible file would be a huge win for the e-book market. Again, such a high-end version of AWP would be worth far more than the price of the current version.
There has been no indication from Microsoft that they have any interest in doing any of this in the next rev of Office. Adobe doesn't want to bother with anything affordable. The sole entry I'm aware of, Jutoh, is just not up to snuff in too many areas AWP already has mastered. Jutoh is strong on the workflow but lacking in some of the nuts & bolts. (They rely on KindleGen for creating MOBI files, which means having all of KindleGen's issues.)
This is a growing market and it's wide open.
I have repeatedly recommended AWP on the Kindle Developer Forums on the basis that it is easier to make an EPUB and convert it to MOBI via KindleGen then muck with MobiPocket Creator or KindleGen via HTML generated by Word. I'm never going to be that deep of a web code guy and I really want tools that keep me from having to directly edit the code. (The downside is that feeding an EPUB to KindleGen for conversion to MOBI results in a file far larger than it should be. Amazon refuses to explain why this is.)
With this in mind, I think the Atlantis developer would be well rewarded if they pursued the e-book market. I'd be willing to pay a lot more for a product that got me a lot closer to something like Adobe InDesign but without that level of power and expense. Something that combined Atlantis and Sigil in a single turnkey e-book creation app would be well worth $100 to me.
This is my list of what Atlantis needs to grow into this emerging market:
1. Tables. Yes, I know, you've been hearing this for years but it remains the single biggest deficit of the product. Tables are an important formatting feature of EPUB (and Amazon's new K8 format eventually replacing MOBI) and the lack of this function means you cannot play in the big leagues.
2. EPUB editing. Currently, Atlantis is not a complete solution for making a professional-looking e-book. After outputting my Word file to EPUB via AWP, I still have to go into Sigil and do more work on it because I cannot figure out how to make it happen in Atlantis. The functionality may be there but it could be a lot more straightforward. A book creation workflow for assigning cover images, creating metadata ToCs, and applying semantics would go a long way towards increasing the value of AWP.
3. E-book creation workflow. As already mentioned, making this more approachable for people with no experience in web work would be a huge plus. The current most invaluable tool is the freeware Sigil. A partnership with that project to create a combined package is a possible way to go.
4. Kindle support. The Kindle family pretty much owns the e-book market for most of the Western world. Some very successful self-published authors are seeing over 85% of their sales through Amazon, with Barnes & Noble making up nearly all of what remains.
In spite of this the Kindle is much more difficult to develop for than EPUB. Part of this is due to the lesser functionality of the format. But the biggest obstacle is the lack of good tools. There is nothing remotely like Sigil (or better, the AWP and Sigil combination) available for Kindle work. Being able to do a complete e-book workflow and out a Kindle compatible file would be a huge win for the e-book market. Again, such a high-end version of AWP would be worth far more than the price of the current version.
There has been no indication from Microsoft that they have any interest in doing any of this in the next rev of Office. Adobe doesn't want to bother with anything affordable. The sole entry I'm aware of, Jutoh, is just not up to snuff in too many areas AWP already has mastered. Jutoh is strong on the workflow but lacking in some of the nuts & bolts. (They rely on KindleGen for creating MOBI files, which means having all of KindleGen's issues.)
This is a growing market and it's wide open.
Trt loading an EPUB into Sigil. Then right click on a section in the left column where the components of your book are listed. The bottom item in the context menu will be 'Add Semantics.' This is a way of labeling things like covers, ToC, copyright pages, etc. for systems that know how to make use of the metadata. It can be essential for some venue to make sure your book is displayed correctly.Robert wrote:What exactly do you mean by "applying semantics"?
http://sigildev.blogspot.com/2010/04/ne ... -menu.html
I believe that the combination of HTML and CSS are now sufficiently public that they together with EPUB can be considered portable document formats, which can now compete with Microsoft Word. I would like a version of Atlantis where EPUB was the actual file format and the file format for the styles was CSS. If CSS were the basis of the style format, the menus could be based on the CSS nomenclature. Microsoft Expression Web and other tools have this type of technology. A model for this exists in Adobe FrameMaker. This would permit an EPUB document to be opened and subsequently edited in Atlantis. It would be elegant and very powerful if XHTML5 were the basis of EPUB.
Re: E-books are the biggest growth market for Atlantis!
Hi,epobirs wrote:I have repeatedly recommended AWP on the Kindle Developer Forums on the basis that it is easier to make an EPUB and convert it to MOBI via KindleGen then muck with MobiPocket Creator or KindleGen via HTML generated by Word. I'm never going to be that deep of a web code guy and I really want tools that keep me from having to directly edit the code. (The downside is that feeding an EPUB to KindleGen for conversion to MOBI results in a file far larger than it should be. Amazon refuses to explain why this is.)
Recently, I have had to save Atlantis documents to the EPUB and MOBI formats. I have come to these conclusions:
As far as the EPUB format is concerned, nothing beats Atlantis Word Processor for ease of conversion, but above all for preserving the original formatting of the source file into the EPUB file. This is of course if you do not use fanciful font and paragraph formatting or layout in your source RTF or DOC document. The EPUB format is not overly tolerant with complex formatting or layout.
Producing satisfactory MOBI files was trickier.
I tried using a RTF or DOC document as source file and doing the conversion to MOBI in any of the available tools. I was unhappy with this solution. A lot, or some of the original formatting was lost or mangled by the conversion process, whichever converter I used.
I then tried to save the RTF or DOC source file to HTML from Atlantis, and convert the HTML file to MOBI. No luck there. Forget about it unless you’re prepared to rewrite most of the HTML code manually to accommodate the MOBI specifications before actual conversion…
Finally I tried to import the EPUB file generated from Atlantis into several of the available converters. I got the best results by far with Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/download_windows). The MOBI file produced by Calibre from the Atlantis EPUB file looks just fine in the viewers I have got.
So my (simple) DOC source documents now look almost identically in the DOC, EPUB, or MOBI format.
MOBI files are best previewed in the “Kindle Previewer” (http://www.amazon.com/kindleformat/kindlepreviewer) or the “Mobipocket Reader” (http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSo ... anguage=EN).
HTH.
Cheers,
Robert