Amazon is already starting an aggressive marketing effort (at least directed towards their marketing people (they pay me a minimal fee if one of my readers purchases another book at the same time) and supposedly Kindle authors:
Kindle Create is a free tool that can be used to transform your completed manuscript into a beautifully designed Kindle eBook. Additionally, with Kindle Create you can:
Automatically find chapter titles and create a Kindle table of contents
Formatting support for books in 12 languages
Review and select visual themes designed to suit the genre of your eBook
Preview your eBook to see what readers will see-and make the changes you want
Quickly format using various book elements like First paragraph, block quote, separators and more
Kindle Create works with .doc and .docx files exported from any source, including Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, Google Docs, and other applications. It also supports creation of interactive textbooks from PDFs. Kindle Create is available for PC (Windows 7 and above) and MacOS (10.11 and above).
Has anyone looked into this yet? It sounds like yet another 'Don't worry your pretty little heart about formatting those nasty print documents, we'll do everything for you' products (like Kindle print, which I don't know of a single author using!).
Is there ANY reason why someone who already knows how to format Kindle books would even consider it?
The link they provided me (Kindle Create Publishing) looks like it's an attempt to copy Apple's little used iBooks Author. Nominally, it makes certain assumptions about how to format (i.e. if you're writing fiction, it automatically flushes your first paragraph to the left), but beyond that, they also offer the very things I was asking about earlier (i.e. you can now include music and videos into your ebook, the exact same way that iBooks Author has been doing for years). While I'm sure my author/musician friend will appreciate this, I seriously doubt anyone here on SOL will care.
