I was faced with a challenge:

As you may have noticed from other posts on this site, I have written a few books.  When writing, I generally use Microsoft Word.  I’ve been using it since Word V.6 when I changed from WordPerfect.  I have taught how to use Word at the colleges and high schools.  In other words (sorry), I know how to use Word.

So when writing my books, it was a natural choice to go with Word.  I have it on both my PC and Mac laptop.  By using DropBox, I could continue working on the book no matter where I was at (beyond a few minor differences between the Mac and Windows versions of Word).

Saving the book to PDF for distribution was easy in Word.  I did find that making the PDF on the Windows version of Word (2010) resulted in a smaller PDF file size than the performing the exact same function on the Mac version of Word (2011).

An important thing that I was reminded of in the process of writing the book is that if you use headings properly, the Table of Contents tool does a great job and is essential for converting to ePub & mobi.

But then I want/need to be able to publish the finished document as ePub and mobi. Microsoft really dropped the ball.  There isn’t any capability to do either!  (BAD Microsoft! Very Bad!  Almost as bad as the time you told me a piece of software didn’t exist that I was holding in my hand that had your name on it).

Just so you know what I’m trying to do, here are the specs of my book:

Over 400 pages
Internal Links from index to the chapter and chapter subheadings using the table of contents tool.
Complex formatting with multiple fonts and margins
Tables
Lots of images including Jpegs, PNG and images made with the line tools.

My expectations are that the conversion process should be easy. It shouldn’t take me more than 1 hour to learn, setup, import and have a finished ePub and mobi document.  Am I asking for too much?

In PDF it looks great.  All the links work, images are in the right location, handles the pages and formatting without any problem.  Looks great, but my audience wants it in ePub and mobi for their eReaders, and I want to keep my audience happy!

Here are my experiences (in no particular order) of trying to get my book converted to ePub and mobi:

OpenOffice
Nope no ability, just like Word.. moving on!

Aspose Word Express Word to ePub Converter: Free
This was a pain to download, requiring registration and hopes to jump through, but I have been really impressed with what a great job it does converting the word file into ePub.  Sadly, it doesn’t do mobi.

Calibre – Donation
While Calibre does not convert from word to epub, it does convert epub into a host of other formats.  Fairly easy to use.

WonderShare MePup – watermarked free trial
Easy to use conversion from Word to ePub.  However, it did not handle the table of contents correctly.  Everything was listed as being in chapter 1.

Aiseesoft PDF to ePub Converter: Free trial version
The trial version will only convert the first 10 pages.  But in that 10 pages I was able to see that it creates a table of contents for each page of the document, not based upon my internal table of contents (which would be surprising considering that it is converting it from PDF). 

Apple iBooks Author – Free (Mac only)
I thought I would give it a shot since it was free from Apple.  It did an adequate job of importing from Word.  The Table of Contents were not handled correctly, and it would take at least a day or two to get the book looking nice.  The real problem that I have with it is that the output file it is proprietary to the iTunes iBookStore.  The final file size was nearly twice the size as the original word document, without using any of the special Apple-only ePub tags.

Apple Pages ($19.99 Mac only)
Pages did a nice job of pulling in the Word document.  I did have to go in and fiddle with some settings and internal links, but in the end, the ePub document was 1/3 smaller than the version created with Aspose and performed MUCH better on my iPad. 

Adobe inDesign CS 5.5 – $$$
First, inDesign is NOT intuitive!  I know it is the publishing industry standard and has all the bells and whistles.  I have spent hours trying to get my document to properly import into inDesign.  I have no doubt that should I actually get it imported, it would output it the way I want.. but I don’t have hours and hours to become an expert in this piece of software.  The Word import doesn’t work the way one would expect.  I must say, Adobe, WTF?  What happened to creating software that people can use, instead of software that doesn’t work?  Complete waste of money (yes, I bought it).

Amazon Kindle Conversion – Free (kind of)
This surprised me.  When I was posting my eBook to Amazon to sell it on the Kindle (mobi) , they asked for a Word DOC file (not DOCX).  I uploaded it, and after going back and making a few tweaks to the file, it was finished. I was able to download the converted file, view it in a Kindle previewer (supplied by Amazon) to make sure everything looked correctly.  In less than 30 minutes I had two books converted and ready to be sold on Amazon.  Of course, Amazon does take a healthy cut of the sale  (30% to 65%), but that is the percentage which they would take even if I did all the conversion work.  Nicely done Amazon!

 

Summary/Conclusion
After spending weeks working though each of these programs in my spare time, I have decided that I will be using a combination of products:

• Originally, I was using Aspose Word to ePub Express. But I was having very slow response from the final document on the iPad and it was HUGE.  So I switched to Apple Pages.  The final document was 30% smaller and performed much better on the iPad.  I have now switched to Pages.
• For my Amazon Kindle/mobi version I will use Amazon’s built-in conversion system for Word DOC files.  It was easy and fast.
• For the mobi version that I will provide on my site, I will use Calibre E-book Maker.  Again, fairly easy to use and straight forward in its design. I use the ePub created with Pages to convert the book into any of the other formats that I might need.
• Finally, I will probably spend some time using iBook Author by Apple to get the book into the iTunes store.  This will be the LAST step in the publishing process, as it will take some significant time to get it formatted and looking the way I want.

I have updated the ePub version of “Mobile App Development with Corona” to address performance issues.  The new version is now available!