From Pages to epub format

Question

On June 2, in a post entitled Pages to ePub, I evoked the challenge of transforming a novel, written in Pages, into epub format for the iPad device. Over the last week, I've succeeded in carrying out this task completely, in an essentially manual way.
Harrison Ainsworth's excellent tutorial on building epubs, which is perfectly sufficient for the basic stuff, can be found at
http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/epub-guidehxa72412007.html
The first operation consisted of exporting all my Pages files as pure text. Then I used BBEdit (on my iMac) to insert countless pairs of XHTML tags: basically "p" tags. The steepest learning curve for me (as an enthusiastic Flash developer who hasn't touched HTML for years) was getting the knack of how to write a perfect XHTML-oriented Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) file.
Curiously, I was hung up by a trivial obstacle for several days: the necessity of zipping together all my files, to create the final .epub document. Here again, Harrison Ainsworth kindly solved this problem by pointing me to a magic tool (in fact a tiny AppleScript device) that can be found on a MobileRead forum at
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=55681
While waiting to buy an iPad, I'm using the Adobe Digital Editions tool on my iMac to display my novel. Finally, the most convenient way of validating the end result consists of using the website at
http://www.threepress.org/document/epub-validate
So, my 318-page novel is now ready (well, almost ready) to be published. I'm awaiting an ISBN number from the French authorities. And maybe I should get a professional graphics artist to produce a first-class cover illustration. For the moment, I haven't looked into the question of whether Apple will be prepared to accept my novel for their iBooks distribution (since I live in France).
I'm now faced by the following tough question: Should I carry on using Pages as a creative-writing tool, or would I be better off using an ebook-oriented environment right from the start? For the moment, there are two or three significant advantages in using Pages for creative writing: (1) There's no technical barrier between the author and his/her output. (2) I can distribute my stuff conveniently to friends and colleagues in the form of PDF files. (3) I can print out pages on A4 paper, for checking.
As much as I'm really fond of Pages, I'm not sure that these advantages justify the messy operations involved in moving to epub format. Consequently, I fear that I might soon be putting Pages in mothballs… alongside Textures, PageMaker and InDesign.

Answer 1

Honestly, at the moment if you are writing fiction, the easiest answer is to use Word or one of the Open Office variants and then use an aggregator and let them hassle with the coding parts (although I must point out that there are some difficulties for the future in terms of the publisher code and the ISBN ownership). Or else get really good at writing CSS/XHTML for yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. There are places where you can get a manuscript formatted for all the major outlets.
For any kind of heavily formatted book, I think the solution is to hunker down and wait a bit. People in the industry are still figuring out how to enforce a lot of formatting (there are some magnificent cookbooks in ibooks right now, for instance, but section headers and captions may not appear in the right place if you tinker with the settings), and it remains to be seen exactly what Steve Jobs meant by including PDFs in ibooks. He didn't say "sell PDFs through the ibookstore", and for material where there's any kind of fixed formatting, PDF is still the best way.
There are some serious bugs in InDesign CS5 for epub creation, although the chapter splitting feature is very tempting. But I think a lot of production shops are waiting to see if Adobe will release a point update before moving to CS5, for all the hassles in CS4.
The other big consideration is the platform wars. If you want maximum readership, you will need separate formatting for Nook, Kindle, ibooks, and now there is a new ereader that is going to be sold in all kinds of general purpose stores like CVS, for example. Formatting for that isn't known yet.
Eventually this will all shake out. They are working on a new standard for epub that should help with a lot of the current problems, but that's probably 18 months away or more.
Another option is to publish your book as an app. I did see a press release last week from someone who is selling a kit to turn a book into an app, but I haven't heard any feedback about whether it's any good or not. Or you can do what the Take Control series has been doing: sell a PDF and recommend GoodReader.
I was pretty excited about that blog post last fall where someone claimed to have found ebook creation embedded in the Pages package, but in reality right now it's a highly complex process, no matter where you start, so it's not surprising this hasn't come to pass. My own ideal would be to be able to lay out a book in Pages and use that as the basis for a PDF or just send a perfect epub straight to the ibookstore, but I'm not sanguine that this will ever be possible.