26 Days Until Cosplay, Costuming, and Careers,
So I'm facing converting a book of 180+ pages if it was my usual 6"x9" print book to three e-formats: Kindle, ePub, and PDF.
Pretty much this means Open Office.
If you haven't used Open Office it's a pretty decent Office Suite that is obviously meant to be Not Microsoft Office. It's a bit rough around the edges, has some weird choices, but frankly it works – and it's free. Free is pretty useful for many people.
It has two other factors.
It works with the conversion software I use, Jutoh – http://www.jutoh.com/. Jutoh is a pretty good conversion system for books – it's the one I've been using for all me eBooks. It's efficient, pretty straightforward, and works everywhere. It costs $39 US, and frankly the authors are undercharging people – especially when you look at the other stuff on the market.
The second is its PDF conversion works on Mac.
I discovered, to my horror, some of the Mac PDF conversion that runs on Mac and out of Microsoft Office isn't QUITE compliant with some printing systems. Now even though "Cosplay, Costuming, and Careers" may not go to print (I'm going to see what the reaction is), it's nice to have the option. I've seen books with glitchy PDFs printed and trust me, it wasn't just a few things here and there – it was the wrong characters and so forth.
Open Office's PDF formats work – and in fact Lulu.com recommends Open Office. needless to say, so do I.