Writing a blog takes a lot of time and effort. Those are rewarded when one of your posts becomes popular, but that doesn’t happen often enough. So how can you give more exposure of your content and value it better? By publishing an ebook with your best content for example. An ebook can value your content in many ways. It can be an excellent marketing tool if you use it as a gift to people who subscribe to your email list, or simply to establish yourself as an expert.
Another way it can be valuable is to just sell it, if users need your content enough they’ll buy it. The downsides of creating an ebook? I can only think of one: ebooks can be difficult to create. That’s when MagPress enters the stage. MagPress is a WordPress plugin that allows you to publish your articles as an ebook. The ebook can be publish in the three most popular digital books formats: PDF, ePub and Mobi in under 15 minutes. But enough talking, a picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s save some words with a few screenshots.
Chose from a selection of templates and customize it to your needs. You can also add a cover image and chose fonts from this admin page.
The posts selection panel. By using our filters, find your articles in just a few clicks, then remove the unnecessary ones with the delete button. Did you notice the nice breadcrumb menu that let’s you know where you are?
You are almost ready to go, just re-order your posts and edit it if needed. On this admin page you can also change some layout options for each article.
Once you are done, you get a preview with the URL of your PDF, then you can create an ePub and. Mobi version in a single click. Any problem during the generation of an ebook, just re-do it from this panel. As you can see, it’s very easy and convenient to publish an ebook using MagPress. The interface is totally integrated to WordPress, so you can be sure that you don’t get lost.
There is also a bit of inline help to make sure everything is clear. To see it live, just check out the following demo video, and if you have any question, just ask through the contact form on our site. However, be sure that you can buy it safely and get your money back during 7 days if you don’t appreciate the plugin.
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7 Responses
Hm. Just bought this but doesn’t seem to be working. Went to create PDF, but got blank page. Seeing as how I use shortcodes, it might be easier to just cut-n-paste the blog posts I want into an existing e-book format I like the layout of. It’s all basic HTML zipped up after all.
on my to buy list 😉
This is really great plugin. I use it quite a lot lately. It is really easy to extract the info from blog posts and create new ebooks
I noticed that the limitations of the plugin are the amount of server memory available to create PDFs. Any ideas on length of publication to memory ratios?
Couldn’t give you a ratio like that, sorry. So far no user complained about not being able to create a PDF.
I’ve tested on dedicated server, VPS and several shared hosts and never had issues with PDFs that included text only, even for 200 A4 pages. The only two things that caused issues with a shared hosting was to create a PDF with over 50 posts and many images (images take a lot of resources).
Sorry the answer is a bit vague, but that’s the best I can do.
What about epubcheck (ePub validation), output code and rendering?
That’s what would make me pay for this plugin as the vast majority of tools generate quite bad files you have to rework by hand so that those files are (1) valid and (2) rendered properly on most devices.
For example, how are styles managed? Stylesheet, head or inline?
How are links managed, especially internal links?
How are images managed?
And so on and so forth.
No doubt this plugin is very easy to use, but the most important part when it comes to EPUB and Mobi is output. And very small details can just screw your entire file… I’ve been searching for a solution as more and more clients ask for this kind of stuff. Unfortunately, judging by similar plugins, it is still better to take the long path: editing files those plugins made could drive you insane. That is why I’m eager to know how this one performs in this important area.
Hi Sam,
I’m the author of the plugin.
I understand your concerns, I took good note of it and will check up everything. Can you drop me a line from MagPress’ site contact form? I’ll give you further info if you are interested.
Cheers,