E-book generators

[MAllie]

I'm not sure if this is the correct place for this, but couldn't see anywhere else to put it. If it's the wrong place, maybe some admin person could kindly move it for me.

I'm trying to find out about ebook generators. Adobe is the obvious one, but is there a lot of learning with it? Some people say you can just do it with one click, others that there is a learning curve. And does anyone know if the resulting pdfs can be easily copied or shared?

I've read about other generators, but there's so much information out there and not much of it hard. Does anyone have experience with any of these? Which are the most reliable and the safest in terms of protecting one's ebook?

Thanks in advance for any responses.

[draggar]

Adobe Acrobat is great. Type it up in MS Word (or whatever your choice is), load up Acrobat, then load it up and save it as a PDF.

Or, even easier, Acrobat adds a "PDF printer" to your PC which will let you save any document as a PDF (WYSIWYG).

I've made many PDFs these ways and have no issues.

(If you're going to get into development, I'd highly recommend Adobe's Creative Suite - it's a lot of money but well worth it).

[MAllie]

Thanks, Ed. So you're saying the people who say it's basically one-click to make your Word document a pdf are right?

And when you say you've no issues, do you mean there are no security issues, either, and someone you sell to can't copy to sell on? Or do you know anything about that?

Yes, I've heard the full Creative Suite is great, but I'm trying to avoid taking on anything I'll have to study hard for the moment.

[draggar]

Originally Posted by MAllie

Thanks, Ed. So you're saying the people who say it's basically one-click to make your Word document a pdf are right?

And when you say you've no issues, do you mean there are no security issues, either, and someone you sell to can't copy to sell on? Or do you know anything about that?

Yes, I've heard the full Creative Suite is great, but I'm trying to avoid taking on anything I'll have to study hard for the moment.

It's not one click (unless your default printer is the PDF printer) but it is as simple as printing (you'll just need to type in a filename).

As for security - once you're done with an eBook and you send it to one person, there is nothing stopping them from distributing it themselves (I'd say include a good TOS / terms of usage) with the copy saying people can't copy them).

I have CS3 (Acrobat, DreamWeaver, Flash Professional, Illustrator, Fireworks, Photoshop). Dreamweaver is pretty easy especially if you know web programming and/or your average WYSIWYG editor (Publisher, Frontpage / Web Expressions etc..). There are great books out there that are cheap (PeachPit press - Teach Yourself (program) visually). These are great sit-down do at your own pace (especially the Visual Quickproject Guides).

I see that CS4 came out recently but I can't vouch for that one.

[MAllie]

Thanks again, Ed. It does sound good. But there are other generators offering built-in prevention of copying and distributing, and I was also wondering about those. They obviously haven't got the reputation of Adobe, so there's no way of knowing if they can follow through on what they're offering.

I'd love to get into CS3 or 4, but my time is somewhat curtailed now by my having set up as a real (as opposed to virtual) publisher and being at the moment in the process of marketing my first book. But I suppose if I take things slowly I will get there (somewhere, anyway!) in the end.