A new way to make and sell eBooks

While we were all sitting around trying to figure out how to do a better job with Amazon's eBook creation options, Barnes & Noble launched their own new tool.

Here's the quote from Digital Publishing World, via the Passive Voice blog:

Barnes & Noble has just announced the relaunch of PubIt as Nook Press, and for once they’ve stolen a march on Amazon. Nook Press adds a new function to the Nook Store that the Kindle Store still lacks. Rather than offer an automated conversion, Nook Press lets you upload a Doc or RTF file and then edit the work to produce a better looking ebook which you can then sell in the Nook Store.

This is huge.

I agree with them that Barnes & Noble has taken a step ahead of the eBook creation tool that Amazon offers. At Amazon, you can upload a Doc or RTF file that will be automatically formatted for the Kindle. But you are not able to make any changes to that formatting. To make changes, you need to go to a formatting company and pay them to ensure that it will look how you want it to look on the Kindle. The service isn't expensive (usually around $100), but it can take weeks to turn it around, and even more time if you find that you want to make some formatting edits, as is often the case.

And really the big issue is that it's not something everyone can do on their own. But this tool makes it so that the author him/herself can make those edits within the Nook Press tool, which, if it is relatively intuitive to use, will be a huge plus in the eBook creation process.

Cheers, Barnes & Noble.

Has anyone tried this new Nook Press tool yet? Will you?

Image courtesy of John Federico via flickr