Review by Michael Gallagher

Compiling a book into the Kindle or epub format is pretty easy with the Scrivener software. I would highly recommend you go through the tutorial that comes with the software (it takes about an hour), as it gives you a high level introduction of how to use it.

There is a slight learning curve of what you have to do when you’re adding chapters, text within the chapter, etc. and if you’re like me you have to go to the online forum where your question has probably been answered. However, its all pretty straight forward and you can edit / switch stuff around to your hearts content. One of the many useful features is the ability to store your research material / notes / trash files electronically for reference (but they won’t translate over to your final eBook): thats very handy as you’re going back to your document either to finish it, refine it, or as in my case updating for a new edition of a reference guide.

After going through the tutorial, compiling an existing book that was originally in Microsoft Word didn’t take that long at all. What I particularly liked was the automatic generation of a linkable table of contents for Kindle-compiled books, but what I wish it had was a way to hyperlink to other pages / sections of your eBook.

If you’re considering using this for compiling a Kindle-related book, you will need to install the free Kindle Gen software from Amazon. It takes all of 15 seconds or so to convert a text into the Kindle format, ready for uploading to Amazons platform online.

At just $40 for the download here on Amazon (as well as from the Literature and Latte website), this will save you a heck of a lot of time. If you are a self-published author and want to compile your books into the Kindle format on your own vs. hiring someone, Id highly recommend trying the free 30 day trial period before purchasing a license to see if this is for you. With the compilation into the Kindle format of just one book, I more than offset the cost of hiring a third-party to compile it for me.