AD Book Builder

Use your Mac to publish books.

AD Book Builder requires a Mac running macOS 10.11 or higher.

Current version: 0.2.1

Formatting Books Is Painful

Formatting books is tedious. You have to worry about things like fonts, line spacing, and margins. You create the file for your book, preview it at Amazon, and things are slightly off. The margins are off. The chapters don’t align. You go back, fix things, and try again. After doing this 5–10 times, you can finally publish your book.

And that’s just print books. If you want to publish a book on the Kindle, you have to dig into HTML and CSS code to correct the mistakes. You have to be a web developer just to publish a book.

Things get so bad you end up paying someone to format the book so you don’t have to deal with the pain anymore.

AD Book Builder Comes to the Rescue

With AD Book Builder you don’t have to worry about formatting details. Mark the parts of your book that aren’t body text, such as chapter titles and section headings. AD Book Builder handles the rest, generating a book you can publish at Amazon, Apple’s Books Store, and other online and brick and mortar bookstores. Spend more time writing books and less time formatting them.

Installation Instructions

  1. Download AD Book Builder.
  2. Double-click the zip file to expand it.
  3. Drag the AD Book Builder application to your Applications folder or wherever you want it to reside.
  4. Double-click the AD Book Builder application icon to launch AD Book Builder.

Quick Start Guide

Creating a Book

A new book should be created when you launch AD Book Builder, but you can also choose File > New to create a new book.

Entering a Book Title and Author

Choose Book > Edit Title and Author. A sheet opens to enter the book’s title, author, and unique identifier. If you have an ISBN number for your book, use that as the unique identifier. Click the Update Info button when you’re done to save the title and author.

Renaming a Chapter

Select a chapter from the list of chapters. Press the Return key. Type the new chapter name.

Adding a Chapter

Click the New Chapter button in the toolbar or choose Chapter > Add Chapter.

Removing a Chapter

Select a chapter from the list of chapters and press the Delete key. You can also choose Chapter > Remove Chapter. If you accidentally remove a chapter, choose Edit > Undo Remove Chapter to restore the chapter.

Entering Text

Select a chapter to show its contents in the text view. Type in the text view.

You can also copy text from another application and paste it in AD Book Builder. When pasting, it’s best to choose Edit > Paste and Match Style.

Tagging Text

Select the text you want to tag and choose a tag from the Tags menu. You can also command-click in the text view and use the Tags submenu in the contextual menu.

Text is initially set to be body text (paragraph) so you don’t have to tag every paragraph in your book. Tag only things like chapter titles and section headings.

If you accidentally choose the wrong type of tag, remove the markup text using the text view.

When you create an ordered list, AD Book Builder uses the . character for the list items instead of a number.

. First item
. Second item
. Third item
. Fourth item

The numbers appear when you publish or preview a book. List items start with the number 1.

Publishing a Book

Choose Book > Publish or click the Publish button in the toolbar to publish your book. A save panel will open for you to choose a name for your book and a location to save it.

Current Bugs and Limitations

  • The only available publishing format is EPUB.
  • EPUB books support only paragraph text and section headings.
  • The table of contents contains chapter titles only.