There are reports on various technology websites that Microsoft is rumoured to purchasing the owners of the Nook e-book readers and tablets. There are also rumours that the next release of Microsoft Office (codename “Gemini”) will have a “publish to Nook” option.
These potential actions would help Microsoft compete with Amazon and Apple in the digital publishing market; Microsoft would be able to offer writers a feature-rich authoring tool, a publishing platform and a publishing environment, all from the same vendor. The promise is, you could write your book in Word, and be able to start selling it, in just a few clicks.
What is unclear at this moment is whether “publish to Nook” means “publish EPUB documents that will display their content nicely on other ebook readers”. Will the underlying code in the EPUB files be “clean” and not “bloated”? Let’s hope that’s the case.
Let us know what you think.
I’m waiting for Microsoft to sort out MS-Publisher – I write a newsletter for the IT group where I work and to publish it in an email takes a total of FOUR programs/actions. I write it and lay it out in Publisher, I create a PDF cos Publisher can’t publish images to Word (or display in Outlook). I take screenshot images of each page of the PDF (where unfortunately I lose links) – and then insert the images into an Outlook email page.
(Btw – it anyone has a simpler way to display newsletters in an email, I’m always open to suggestions.)