Tom Gorham
I don’t know if a single-point upgrade to any Apple application has yet revolutionised an entire industry, but the recent upgrade from Pages 9.0.3 to Pages 9.0.4 is in the running to be the first.
The reason? The addition of an ePub export option to sit alongside the existing Word, RTF and plain text choices. For those who don’t know, ePub is the open eBook standard used by Apple in iBooks for the iPad, iPhone and iPod, but it’s readable in many other devices, from Android smartphones to the Sony Reader. So the ability to create documents in this format could be a huge opportunity. Suddenly, Pages has the potential to be a powerful book publishing engine.
Yes, it isn’t the first ePub creation software on the Mac, but until its arrival you had to choose between an expensive ePub creator such as Adobe’s InDesign – which is what most UK book publishing houses currently use – or rely on the Byzantine interface of free tools such as Calibre (calibre-ebook.com).
Pages, as the first major word processor to offer ePub export, brings it to the mass market. Unlike some attempts by Apple to popularise content creation – yes, iWeb, I’m casting a baleful look in your direction – Pages, in the short while I’ve been using it, turns out to be an excellent ePub producer.
It can’t quite match the flexibility of InDesign, which offers fine control over image format conversion and flexibility over the CSS style sheets that govern the document’s look, but most small book publishers won’t worry about these niceties. Where Pages really shines is in its simplicity. Unlike with InDesign, you’re not expected to create separate files for covers, front matter and chapters, and then combine them into a book. Pages takes a more prosaic approach – optionally using the first page of any document as the cover, for example – and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how good the results can be with minimal tweaking.
Creating an ePub eBook from an existing Pages document essentially involves applying styles to the text. Pages turns these into chapters, headings and body text during the export process. Apple helpfully supplies a sample document (bit.ly/aPumqd) containing some sample styles alongside ePub guidance. Apple suggests you either use this document as the basis for your own ePub file, or import its styles to a fresh document (Format > Import Styles).
However, if you just want to create a quick ePub document, you can get decent results using the built-in styles in a blank Pages word processing template. The important thing is to make sure all your text has a relevant style applied to it. For example, apply the default ‘Title’ style to the name of the book, give your proposed chapter headings the ‘Heading 1′ style, and assign the body copy the default ‘body’ style.
During export, Pages will generate a table of contents for your eBook based on these styles, and you can determine what appears there in the Table of Contents (TOC) view of the Document Inspector. The results of this bare-bones approach were impressive when viewed in the iPhone’s iBooks app.
However, I discovered a few caveats to remember when generating ePubs in Pages.
First, you have to work with Pages’ Word Processing templates, rather than Page Layout documents. That’s really not surprising when you remember that, unlike PDF files, exporting to XML-based ePub sacrifices a lot of control over how your document appears, as ePub doesn’t respect page structure: text is reflowable and resizable. That’s good news in some ways: there’s no need to insert page breaks or section breaks before new chapters: they’re automatically inserted, and any manually created breaks and section breaks in your document are simply ignored.
Equally, for images to stay with the text to which they relate, they have to be created as inline graphics – embedded along with the text flow – rather than floating images, which remain in place after the text flows around them. In most cases, if you have floating images in a Pages word processing document, you can quickly convert them to an inline image through the menu bar or the Wrap Inspector. Images in Page Layout formats, on the other hand, are frequently floating and can’t be converted to inline ones, as they don’t relate to any text. You’ll have the same problem with other fixed layout elements, such as sidebars. Hence, no Page Layout export to ePub.
All is not lost if you’re stuck in Page Layout mode, though. You can save the file as a PDF from the Print menu, so you’ll still be able to import it to iTunes and read it in iBooks’ library – just not in the ePub section.
You’ll also have to bear in mind that Pages follows the iWeb approach of being a media creator rather than an editor, so it can’t open the ePub files it exports. That isn’t the end of the world, as there are alternatives. You can preview ePub files on your Mac using an eBook reader such as Calibre or Adobe’s free Digital Editions reader (bit.ly/bpiRG9).
There are also a few tiny glitches when preparing ePubs. Pages always seems to throw up a palette warning me that certain styles won’t transfer properly to ePub format even when I haven’t used any of these styles in a document. I’m not sure why it bothers with that sort of low-key approach when it offers a far more obvious dialog box when a document does contain elements, such as floating images, that won’t transfer.
All in all, though, it’s a hugely impressive first attempt by Apple that will popularise the ePub format, which is presumably Apple’s aim as it will promote iBooks along with way.
However, Pages’ ePub export could herald a revolution for authors, too. There are a few obstacles in the way before you can get your self-penned book in front of an audience of millions. First of all, how do you sell your Pages-created ePub eBook? There’s nothing to stop you selling it yourself on your website or via any of the popular web-based eBook outlets: iBooks will happily import any ePub file. However, iBooks offers a huge market and some authors at least will appreciate the DRM protection that it offers, so getting on the iBookstore will be an aim of many.
Even here there are hurdles, the biggest of which is that at the moment, unlike in the US, there’s no way for UK-based authors to upload their own work to the iBookstore. Instead, you’ll have to turn to an authorised aggregator such as Smashwords (smashwords.com) or Lulu (lulu.com). For Pages users, the latter is the better bet as Smashwords requires its content in Word .doc format, while Lulu will happily accept Pages-generated ePub files.
There are also some mundane chores to perform before your content is ready. The ePub file must be validated; an application such as ePubChecker (bit.ly/bRY3NT) can do this for you. As required by the iBookstore, you’ll also need to sort out an ISBN for your book; you can manage this yourself, although given that Lulu will do this for free, it may be best to leave it to them.
Lulu will take a cut of the final selling price of your book: 20% of the retail profit after deducting Apple’s traditional 30% share. In practical terms, that means that a book you sell for £10 on the iBookstore will provide you with £5.60 income before tax. If that doesn’t sound a lot, console yourself with a quick comparison to the deals offered to most printed book authors. They’re lucky to get around 10% on the retail price.
