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December 11, 2013 11:16 pm GMT
Vellum is an app for the Mac from a team led by two Pixar software veterans that are trying to make the process of creating ebooks less painful. The app allows authors to publish ebooks on Apple’s iBookstore, Amazon Kindle and Nook devices, but the advances here are in how the app enables live previews and fine-tuning. Ebook creation is an awful experience. The Kindle process is especially poor, with dozens of interlocking parts that must be juggled in order to convert, format, tweak and publish a book. And even then, authors are largely taking a stab in the dark as to how their books will look when they’re live on the store. Apple took some steps to make this process easier with iBooks Author, but I’ve spoken to some folks who have published there and even its tools have their quirks. And it’s not even close to being cross-platform friendly. Once you’ve gotten a project to look how you’d like it to there, you have to do it all over again if you want to publish on Kindle or Nook or any other platform. And, after all of the massaging through the laborious multiple-tool process, authors are often left with a product that looks fairly boring and generic. Well crafted books with gorgeous fonts, nicely presented chapter and header formatting and a highly customized feel are too often the sole purview of publishers with teams of formatting experts. Those are the issues that spurred Vellum’s Brad West and Brad Andalman to look into creating a tool to help authors get the same kind of access to great book design as major publishers. “Authors care about how a book looks,” says West, but he notes, “when a book is self published, you can tell. If they had the tools, [authors] would want to make better looking books…the barrier is the tools, Vellum tries to address that.” West and Andalman spent over a decade each at Pixar (West started there in ’96) working on building software and animation systems used on films like The Incredibles, Finding Nemo and Toy Story 2. West helped develop Pixar’s next gen animation systemthat was first used on Brave(underToyTalk’s Oren Jacob).Doubtless their expertise in building software tools for creators informed their decision to move on to…building software tools for creators. Vellum is a free Mac app that allows you to import your projects from your writing
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/nnZ2EQUTq4Y/
Pixar Veterans Launch Vellum, An App To Help Authors Craft Pixel Perfect Ebooks
Vellum is an app for the Mac from a team led by two Pixar software veterans that are trying to make the process of creating ebooks less painful. The app allows authors to publish ebooks on Apple’s iBookstore, Amazon Kindle and Nook devices, but the advances here are in how the app enables live previews and fine-tuning. Ebook creation is an awful experience. The Kindle process is especially poor, with dozens of interlocking parts that must be juggled in order to convert, format, tweak and publish a book. And even then, authors are largely taking a stab in the dark as to how their books will look when they’re live on the store. Apple took some steps to make this process easier with iBooks Author, but I’ve spoken to some folks who have published there and even its tools have their quirks. And it’s not even close to being cross-platform friendly. Once you’ve gotten a project to look how you’d like it to there, you have to do it all over again if you want to publish on Kindle or Nook or any other platform. And, after all of the massaging through the laborious multiple-tool process, authors are often left with a product that looks fairly boring and generic. Well crafted books with gorgeous fonts, nicely presented chapter and header formatting and a highly customized feel are too often the sole purview of publishers with teams of formatting experts. Those are the issues that spurred Vellum’s Brad West and Brad Andalman to look into creating a tool to help authors get the same kind of access to great book design as major publishers. “Authors care about how a book looks,” says West, but he notes, “when a book is self published, you can tell. If they had the tools, [authors] would want to make better looking books…the barrier is the tools, Vellum tries to address that.” West and Andalman spent over a decade each at Pixar (West started there in ’96) working on building software and animation systems used on films like The Incredibles, Finding Nemo and Toy Story 2. West helped develop Pixar’s next gen animation systemthat was first used on Brave(underToyTalk’s Oren Jacob).Doubtless their expertise in building software tools for creators informed their decision to move on to…building software tools for creators. Vellum is a free Mac app that allows you to import your projects from your writingOriginal Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/nnZ2EQUTq4Y/
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