Monday, August 22, 2011

Jutoh e-book software

I downloaded the demo version Jutoh to try for creating ePub/Kindle e-book publishing. This also required me to download Amazon's KindleGen software for creating Kindle e-books (although I have found Amazon's on-line tools work okay).

After installing the Linux version of Jutoh, I pointed it at a folder containing the file from an IMS Content Package generated by Moodle, containing the chapters of my book in XHTML format. Jutoh extracted the HTML and created an e-book in a few seconds. The chapters were not in the correct order (the ISM table of contents is an XML file which Jutoh seems to have simply ignored). There were 22 errors with the HTML reported. This was disappointing as I assumed the application would fix the HTML.

Also I tried using my LibreOffice file as a source document. But Jutoh did not recognize the ODM master document format. So then I tried the HTML print file generated by Moodle. This had the problem that Moodle does not using a HTML heading tag to identify chapters, but a class. I could not see any way to get Jutoh to recognise this and one of my attempts too more than ten minutes to process.

It seems that the software is designed to create an e-book in only one format. So while you can use the same source documents, you need to compile the book separately for each format (ePUB, Kindle and the like). After generating the EPUB, I tried switching to Mobi, but this seemed to confuse the software.

So over a few minutes trying Jutoh, I concluded it does not work significantly better than the other tools I have tried. Given Jutoh costs money and the other tools don't, I did not think it worth persisting with.

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