eBookBinder

Category

Description of App

From the Mac App Store:

What is eBookBinder, what can it do for you?
eBookBinder is the super-easy tool to create your own eBooks using your existing text-documents. There are just three major steps to your very own eBook:

1. Enter book details:
Name of the book and its author, add an image for the book-cover, webpage of the publisher and other details can be entered. There is no need to fill all fields, at least you have to enter a name for your book.

2. Add text-files as chapters to your book-project:
Every single text-file you add to eBookBinder is treated as a single chapter. Give your chapters a name and order them per drag'n drop to your desired sequence of chapters.

3. Create your ebook:
Just hit the "Bind Book"-Button and eBookBinder will compile the ebook for you. That's all!

What can be added to eBookBinder?
eBookBinder supports several different types of text-files. Next to plain-text files also doc-, odt-, rtf-, rtfd-, html- and webarchive-files are supported by eBookBinder. But that's not all!

Support of markup-languages
eBookBinder also accepts plain-text files as input with markup-formatting of following languages: Markdown, MultiMarkdown, Textile, Wikitext, BBCode, Smark

These will be converted on the fly when adding these as chapters to your book-process. Visit the preferences of eBookBinder to determine the file-extensions which should be treated for conversion. All files with appropriate file-extensions will be converted when imported.

Additionally there's the cool splice-feature for markup-formatted documents. If activated (option within preferences), eBookBinder can automatically split (by using headlines as new chapter-beginnings) large documents into small chapters.

Qutput-formats (ebook-formats)
Your compiled eBook-project will be saved as an ePub-File. EPub-files can be read by a variety of ebook-readers and by the iBook-application for iOS-Devices like iPhone or iPad.

Additionally, eBookBinder can create mobipocket-files. Therefore the free tool kindlegen (available at amazon.com) has to be installed and set within the preferences. eBookBinder takes care of the rest.
Mobi-files are especially used for Amazon Kindle-devices and -applications.

Project-Manager and automatic saving
On the left of the eBookBinder main-window all your book-projects are being listed. You can add and remove as many book-projects as you like to.
All your project-details are being saved automatically, you don't need to care about that (exception, in-built chapter-editor, you'll be asked, if you want to save changes).

In-built editor for your chapters
eBookBinder also features an in-build editor which offers some basic editing features like setting text bold, inverse or underlined and alignment of text.
However, the best feature of the editor is the "Reduce-Feature": Select the text you want to keep and hit the reduce button, anything not selected will be removed. This is ideal for editing web-articles to remove all the advertising- and navigation-stuff quickly.

Advanced features
Advanced features are the adding of custom HTML-heads to the chapters and custom CSS-stylesheets. Also take a look at the preferences and add some basic values, so you don't need to write them down every time you create a new book-project.

Furthermore eBookBinder offers convenience-features to rename and adding enumeration to your chapters quickly.

Importing ePub-files
eBookBinder can read in ePub-files, which are not DRM-protected, and creates of its contents a new book-project which can be edited just like the normal projects.

eBookBinder is suitable for use with VoiceOver

International character-set-support
eBookBinder supports a wide set of character-sets. Texts written for example in Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese or Russian can be used with eBookBinder.

Version

1.0.0

Free or Paid

Paid

Version Of macOS App Was Tested On

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

Accessibility Comments

This ap is really accessible and the author, Alexander Sasse have made many efforts to make it VO-friendly. He's really nice and responsive and has also implemented really quickly some features I've requested. Really good job.

Usability

The app is fully accessible with VoiceOver and is easy to navigate and use.

Other Comments

For your information, I've made a comprehensive tutorial about EbookBinder here. Since this guide has originally been written in French, here is a google-translated version http://translate.google.fr/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.edencast.fr%2Fmac-ebook-binder-creation-epub%2F

Recommendations

1 people have recommended this app

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Comments

By Maria on Thursday, June 21, 2012 - 17:15

Hi. can you explain to me how to mark a text file so that e book binder will split it in to chapters? I read the tutorial but wasn't clear on how to do this. Thanks.