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Self-Pub Tools – Anthologize isn’t Worth Using

Ebook creation tools are a hot topic right now, and online tools doubly so.

My brief experience with Pressbooks earlier this week has had me thinking about online tools, and I’ve been planning to dig up some of the lesser known and older tools. Then, in a delightful coincidence, I came across the mention of Anthologize in a post about textbook creation tools.

Anthologize was developed back in 2010, and it is based on a rather novel idea (for 2010, that it). This a WordPress plugin that you can use to collect posts from one or more blogs and bundle into an ebook. It outputs PDF, RTF, and Epub. It offers just basic formatting, but it looked nice. The generic cover also looked good.

You might notice that Anthologize resembles Pressbooks. It does, only Anthologize won’t work for me. I’ve tried it for an hour or so this afternoon, and I’m going to give it a pass. It’s rather slow and the output didn’t have all the posts I included in the project.

Whenever I added a post to a project, I had to count to 10 and wait for the plugin to catch up. Given that all it’s doing at that point is making a list of titles, it shouldn’t take so long to respond.

But more importantly, I couldn’t get it to make any usable content. I built a project out of a half dozen reviews, and I can confirm that they are actually listed on the project.  But when I generated an Epub, none of the posts were included.

I’ve looked over the settings and I don’t see that there’s anything I can do about the output. I also exported the project a second time, and the result didn’t change.

Given that this plugin hasn’t been updated for 6 months along with the other problems, I don’t see  reason for me to use it.

But I would like to hear from someone who has used this plugin.  It’s been downloaded 16 thousand times; at least some of those downloads are from people who like it.

Did it work for you?

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Comments


Keith February 18, 2012 um 7:06 pm

I have also downloaded it and also had difficulty trying to get anything meaningful from it, recently I got writer to ePub for open office, I have to say its fantastic and with a little tweaking of the macros can create excellent well structured ePubs. I have also spent a few years trying different tools, including oxGarage an open source project by the Oxford university.. Alas it uses an massive amount of div tags instead of paragraph tags. I m not a fan of calibre, due to the poor quality code it produces i.e. CSS classes instead of HTML tags (li, h1,h2,h3 etc..) . From a publishing environment, well structured indesign docs, are an easy route to ePub with a little production manipulation!!


Steven February 19, 2012 um 11:39 pm

I recently came across a new mobile app creation service that instantly turns existing documents into an ipad app— basically, it takes a pdf and converts into a mobile app on the fly. Very handy. The site is www.tapyrus.com


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