This weekend I attended the first IndieReConLive in Sandy, Utah and had a great time. If you live in the West and are an Indie writer, do attend this one. One of the sessions I attended was on epub creation and the presenter, Cheri Lasota, showed off a program that I had never heard of – Jutoh. Jutoh is an epub creation tool that hides the code and lets you build pretty elaborate and clean ebooks from your book manuscript. Jutoh is closed source and will run you about $40 US but it’s available on Linux, Mac and Windows.
I’m just beginning to explore using Jutoh, so I don’t have any helpful hints just yet, but I can recommend several ebooks on using it. First is Creating Great Ebooks Using Jutoh by the program’s creator, Dr. Julian Smart. The second is Cheri’s book, Design and Upload your Epub.
Up until now I’ve been using Sigil to do my epubs, but that program hides files from the user and I think gets you into trouble by letting you change the code. Best to use a regular code editor for that. It appears that Jutoh keeps you out of trouble by never letting you change the code directly. It also has a ton of import and code cleaning wizards to ensure your epub passes validation.
Aside from the above epubs, there are some good Jutoh videos out there on YouTube. I’ll have a better review post in a few weeks after I learn this new tool.