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In episode 27 of this show, Finding Professionals using Reedsy with Emmanuel Nataf, you may remember that Emmanuel mentioned that Reedsy were in the process of developing a tool for creating, editing and formatting eBooks and print books, called the Reedsy Book Editor.

Today they have made it available to the public and are promoting it on a well-known startup app site, Producthunt. So being the naturally nosey person who jumps on the latest trends, here are my initial impressions of the tool.

It is still very beta so many of my criticisms and observations will no doubt be changed in time. Firstly I have to say that I am in general extremely impressed by the tool and I think that it will have a real impact on the self-publishing world.

In summary what it provides is a website where you can create a book in an environment similar to the blogging and social media site Medium and then be able to use it to typeset your final book and create a formatted eBook and print-ready PDF. Previously this would involve either purchasing a product such as Scrivener, paying a formatter or spending quite a lot of time hand-crafting ePub files. So this is potentially a game-changing service, especially as it is currently free.

For Reedsy it provides a great way to get people into their eco-system, so they can sell the Editing and Book Cover design services from their site more easily. It also will eventually allow editors and authors to cooperate using this, rather than e-mailing files back and forth. This feature has not been enabled yet so I couldn’t try it out.