Last year, it was really the release of Vellum that prompted us to do a two-month series on e-publishing, and naturally we did a Hands On review of it then. Almost everything we said then was praising, but we did have criticisms, and since then we've been continuing to test it, continuing to find new ways to explore it, and the makers have continued to develop it. The very latest release,
Vellum 1.3.5 is a minor update, but it's the sixth since we
covered the app back in July last year.
You can't necessarily tell that from an initial look, as the app has the same rather classy design as it did, and you can't necessarily tell from creating an e-book in it either, as it has the same straightforward process as before. It's in the details that Vellum has changed, and the criticisms in
our previous review were about tiny, fine touches. Most specifically, we had hit a process-halting problem with certain links to Amazon that we had in our test e-book.
The problem was entirely our fault, but we wanted Vellum to handle it better. Somehow, the way that we copied and pasted in weblink meant that we would often -- but not always -- accidentally include an extra space at the start of the address. That address is displayed sufficiently small within Vellum's dialog box that we didn't see it, but the iBooks Store did. You have to submit e-books to Apple via the iTunes Producer app, and that app simply refused to allow the book to be uploaded, because it had incomprehensible errors.
We could do with iTunes Producer being better about this too, then, or at least substantially clearer about what was going wrong, but in the end we had to use an
online ePub checker before we could even fathom out the problem. Once we had, it was a slog going through each link in the book to see which had spaces and taking them out, but it was doable, and we did it. Sometime between that version and this one -- Vellum 1.3.5 -- the issue has been fixed, and in a perfectly elegant way. Now Vellum just ignores spaces: paste one in, and it's stripped out, even as the address is entered correctly. Tap on your spacebar, and Vellum just sits there with its arms folded. There's no chance of getting this error again.
One of the minor changes in this latest update is that you can now add your own web addresses as links: in theory, you would previously either link to a regular website when you were referring people to information, or you'd use a Vellum Store Link. That lets you enter one link that sends people to different stores, depending on whether they're reading the iBooks Store version or the Amazon Kindle one.
The new version adds the ability to send people to the Nook, Google Play, or Kobo Stores instead, and we should use that. Not because we know anyone with a Kobo, but because previously we've just used a straight link and sent people directly to Amazon or iBooks Store, depending on the context. That wasn't clever of us, and it's caused problems: right now, we're having to schlep through the iBooks Store version of one book, because Apple's requiring us to remove any Amazon links from it. We've no idea why that has come up now, months after the book was released, but it's a thing, we have to deal with it, and we'll now redo everything using this Vellum Store link.
Other small but notable updates include the addition of bullet and number lists: don't ask us why we haven't ever used those in a book, but we haven't, and possibly still won't. We have been using Vellum in OS X El Capitan's Split Screen but didn't appreciate that we couldn't before: it's a new feature since version 1.3.1.
We're quite the fans of Vellum, and each of these changes and improvements is a good thing that adds to the app without taking away the fairly minimalist and sleek look that we so like. We did say before that we've found it confusing where you're supposed to enter the details of your book such as publisher, ISBN, authors and so on. That's still the case, and we still have to blink first. In the main screen, you get a list of chapters -- and the there's the book's title above them all: you have to click on that to go into editing the details. It's a clearly separated area with a different shaded background, very different fonts, yet we keep thinking it's a big title instead of a big button.
So that remains even as our biggest issue over the error-catching in the web addresses has been fixed. We've got a new one now, though: we would deeply like Vellum to include more keyboard keystrokes. Once we used
Keyboard Maestro to add a shortcut to the command for changing text into a heading, we flew through one stage of producing our latest title on the iBooks Store,
Pointers: iWork Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
It's also available on Kindle, but don't tell Apple.
Vellum 1.3.5 requires OS X 10.9 or later, and we can't review Vellum without explaining the prices. Some people find it expensive -- but we didn't before, and we still don't. What Vellum gives you is worth the cost of admission, which is that the app itself is free either
directly from the makers or via the
Mac App Store, and there is an in-app purchase. If you want to produce one e-book, it will cost you $30 to produce the actual files to submit to the various e-book stores. To produce 10 different books, it's $100, or for an unlimited number, it's $200 -- and the company does offer discounts on bulk purchases of that unlimited version.
See the official purchasing FAQ for details.
Who is Vellum 1.3.5 for:
Maybe if you're working with a professional publisher and so only focused on writing your text, you won't need Vellum -- but then you won't need any ePub application. If you do need to produce your own e-books, this is the app to get. Get this, and see our most recent week-long
Pointers guide to the writing and production of e-books.
Who is Vellum 1.3.5 not for:
If you're solely producing work for the iBooks Store, then stick with Apple's iBooks Author. Perhaps if you're also technically-minded, and want extra fine control over the details you could schlep around other ways of producing ePub files, but we think the features to time to effort balance is heavily in Vellum's favor.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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