Since I am not writing today, I thought I would give my free calibre download a spin to find out just how difficult it is to work with. Something to know about me: I never consult help files unless and until I am completely lost. Software should be intuitive. Icons need to be clearly labeled with the actions they perform. A developer shouldn't get all snooty and decide to call "add book" "introduce meta file" or something. Calibre calls it "add book". Good, so far. Most of the other icons are for retrieving and converting books one has purchased, although I'm not sure why anyone would want to convert them. Some people apparently do, I guess. And yes, there is a "help" icon.
I decided to try to convert one of my completed books to epub, using the docx file. The first time I opened calibre, I clicked "add book" and it immediately took me to a cover upload screen. So, I figured it was a two-step process ~ upload the cover, then upload the book.
Wrong. I actually did upload the cover, then the book and I ended up with two files and no way to combine them. Oops. So, I closed the app, thinking the next time I opened it, I could just start over. This time it didn't take me directly to a cover upload screen. I wasn't going to be fooled again, so I uploaded the docx file. THEN it took me to the cover upload screen. More sensical! I then proceeded to convert the file to an epub. I clicked the "convert books" icon (well named!) and it asked me what format I wanted to choose. After I selected epub, calibre completed the task almost instantaneously.
Smartly, it then offered me a preview. I hadn't bothered with inspecting my docx, like the Quora expert said I needed to do ~ by some weird Microsoft Word manipulation. This expert had a lot of extra steps that I wasn't going to do with this test unless the finished product came out all wonky.
Well, what do you know? My preview was perfect. The cover appeared first, followed by the book contents. I scanned the entire epub file and there wasn't anything calibre didn't "recognize", as the instruction guy had warned. Now, granted, mine is a novella and thus does not contain any chapter titles. Those may be a little trickier to work with. Not my problem, though.
In my experience open-source software is almost always better designed than something somebody wants to sell me. Calibre is well designed.
I was stressing out over my apparent inability to create my own ARCs, and then I found this handy-dandy app. Sometimes things do go right.
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