I did some work last night in converting “e-books for the 21-Century Author” over to EPUB format using Atlantis. My reaction to the software is complete satisfaction. Here are some thoughts about it.
1) The software has an ebook template that is excellent. Just write or cut/paste your content over theirs.
2) The table of contents intended for the sidebar in an e-reader is dependent upon formatting the chapter headings in “Heading 1” style. If that convention is followed, you right click on the table of contents area and select the proper command, it will auto-fill, even if you have more chapters than the template has fields.
3) For an in-book table of contents with hyperlinks, you insert a table of contents page when the document is finished and for the most part, it auto-populates.
4) As long as you use an image of the recommended dimensions, a cover image is simple to add.
5) As long as you use images of the recommended dimensions or smaller, embedded images are handled well.
6) The help option entry for EPUB is very practical and avoids theoretical rambling. Straight to the ‘how-to’ point. Makes using the tool for epub files very easy to learn.
7) This tool makes converting a document to EPUB format simple. The hardest part of the process is now creating the cover image, but that is out of the scope of a word processing program anyway. Generating the file is not without some work, but compared to doing it by hand, this is effortless.
I suspect a .DOC manuscript for a 100,000-word novel with 50 chapters and a finished cover image would probably take just a couple of hours to convert into an EPUB document ready to use.
By the way, after this experience, I plan to do a minor revision of eBooks for the 21st-Century Author and release it in PDF, EPUB, and if it works, also MOBI format.
