B&N has come up with a newish tool for their site. It’s called Pubit. For the past few days, I’ve had the opportunity to experience it first hand. And I absolutely hate it.
For you nonpublishers out there, I’ll keep it simple: Pubit doesn’t recognize simple formatting (“page breaks” for chapters are ignored. You have to use “section breaks”), so the book comes out looking like one big chunk of text. There’s no chapters (even though there are). Pubit’s solution? Insert random breaks through the document.
And you can’t delete the breaks.
My left eye is starting to twitch.
So you can either go through your document and manually change all the formatting just for them, or you can do it from their very own program. The program looks like it might be easier, so you try that.
Three crashes and starting over twice and the whole left side of my face is twitching.
So you try to get a hold of customer support. They’re too busy to talk to you. So sorry.
N’kay, Pubit, let me take your hand and tell you how it is. Publishers are a busy lot. I don’t have time to play with your crappy program. Just accept my document with the industry standard formatting so I can move on with my day.
If you don’t, you’re simply giving me more reason to hang out with Amazon . I don’t like to play favorites, but Amazon doesn’t make me jump through hoops. They answer all my questions promptly and take care of crap on their end. Also, I make 10X more money with them.
You can see how our relationship is feeling the strain?
Get it together, Barnes and Noble. You’re already playing catch up.
Amber Argyle
Author
Author
I am so disappointed in B&N. They have enough to worry about without pulling this crap. Sorry about the stress.
Lordy the whole purpose of the program was to make it easier on publishers.
Nook customer support has many complaints too.
Amber, are you uploading a Word document or an epub? I know sometimes the epub works better.
After hearing a lot of stories like yours, I did my e-book formatting "the hard way" (create an HTML version) with the plus that I only had to do it once to create files for Kindle, Nook and Kobo. There's a great tutorial on Guido Henkel's blog about it: http://guidohenkel.com/2010/12/take-pride-in-your-ebook-formatting/
Sheena: My thoughts exactly.
Anthony: I love my Kindle.
Cherie: I use Word for the efiles. It kinda bugs me that there isn't just an industry standard that everyone adheres to. Smashwords only takes .doc–NOT .docx B&N wants epub. Amazon has mobi. Can't we all just pick one?
Laurel: I honestly pay someone to do all the formatting, it's the uploading that always causes problems.
There's nothing that annoys me more than a bad user experience in software. That's too bad that their new tool is so hard to use.
I love my Kindle more than you love your Kindle!
Well, maybe not. But I loves it. I loves it a lots.