Show HN: Papyrus,a simple way to create ebooks

Hello HN, I have been building Papyrus for the past few months. It is a simple web app that allows people to create ebooks easily. Would love to hear your feedback.

I recently made a service named Docverter[1] that attacks this from the other end, where you write your book in Markdown or various other markup formats and produce ebook files via pandoc and calibre. It's way more do-it-yourself, but it could be a useful backend for this or other services.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.docverter.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.docverter.com</a>

It's black and white and red all over. Please tell me you deliberately chose that color scheme for that reason. You'd be my hero if you did.

I've wanted something like this for going on two years. I even went so far as to start building it (wireframe: <a href="http://basseq.com/fun/epub/" rel="nofollow">http://basseq.com/fun/epub/</a>; some epub publishing code written), too, but lost momentum back in September and it's been sitting in my project folder.<p>So I'm excited someone took this further. I'll be playing with this more. Drop me a line if you're looking for more thoughts, feature ideas, or help.

This looks like a nice service. I could see myself using it. One thing I noticed on the front page is that you do strange things with punctuation. Examples:<p>"Import the contents from the web . Convert your blog to a book in one click."<p>Notice the space before the first period.<p>"Papyrus lets you create books in pdf,epub,kindle formats."<p>No spaces after commas and no 'and' before 'kindle'. Also, there is no space between the last period and "(Coming soon)" in the two rightmost feature sections.

The terms of service discuss a monthly subscription payment but I cannot find any fees listed anywhere on the website. I assume it's free for now and sometime in the future they'll announce pricing. What if I don't like the pricing model? Can I export my content and sell my book somewhere else? How easy is it to get my book out of Papyrus?

Looks great!<p>One note - I happened to have my screen quite narrow when I opened it and as the menu-bar wrapped around it obscured the "Import Chapter from Url" button. The introductory guide pointed to where it thought the button should be but it was just highlighting a corner of the "Feedback and Support" button.

Tried creating an ebook out of some of my old blog posts. Import from URL feature is pretty cool. Loved it. The frictionless way to try the app is also great. Bookmarking the site. Can I import a couple of my Dropbox docs directly?

Looks great. Nice feature that you can import content from any url. It's good that you can get started and see the product without signing in. Also a good guide.

It should probably have a word counter. Also a spellchecker? Chrome seems to identify the spelling errors, but I don't know if all browsers have this.

Nicely done - I too was looking for pricing information but after reading comments here see that its still in development. Bookmarked - good luck!

Neat Design! Great UI Experience!! Really dig the "origin of species theme" and in app walk over.<p>Really Usable Product. Would love to publish some books with this.

How does this differ from Pressbooks? <a href="http://pressbooks.com/" rel="nofollow">http://pressbooks.com/</a>

I have to admit that I prefer <a href="http://leanpub.com" rel="nofollow">http://leanpub.com</a>

this is neat - all went good, until I incidentally pressed the 'clear canvas' button on cover page. no undo there?<p>looking forward for more advance features - full screen, double page editing, collaborative editing and review comments ?

Firefox user here. What technology do you use to limit the page to WebKit only?

Seems like a nice utility for fast ebooks. Going to my bookmarks :)

Great app... Liked the import from url feature..

looks great, is it going to be a free service ? i don't see any pricing page!

Finally out! Congrats!

Great !! All the best!

I went straight into book editing mode, since I plan on publishing an ebook in the following months.<p>The experience has been slightly frustrating. For instance, Shift+Enter when editing the contents of the title doesn't work as advertised. And when trying various things in desperation/frustration, a section of text popped up on me from nowhere, and I couldn't find a way to remove it.<p>I'd say the product has a lot of promise, but you have a long way to go until you reach MVP stage.