Content

Introduction
Getting started
Bookflows
The tools
Recipes

Introduction

Bookalope is a set of book production tools that analyze an incoming document to extract meaningful structure and its content, and then it converts that content into publishable books or into formats that are commonly used in book publishing workflows.

You can upload various text file formats, the most common of which are Microsoft Word or OpenOffice or Apple Pages. In addition you can upload ebooks in various EPUB formats, even if they’re invalid or broken (Bookalope will do its best to work around most ebook issues).

Once Bookalope has received your document, it gets to work: it extracts all content from your book and all the visual styling information of that content, e.g. font sizes and weights, line spacing, and a lot more. Using all that visual information, Bookalope’s Classification AI attempts to understand the intended structure of your book based on how the book’s content was styled. Structuring content is an essential step towards building accessible documents, and the separation between content and presentation is the core principle of how Bookalope works.

The rest of this page gets you started with setting up Bookalope, and it provides an overview of the various ways in which you can use Bookalope: as a web app, through an extension for Adobe InDesign, and programmatically by invoking the cloud API. You can dive deeper into any one of these topics from here.

Getting started

This section covers creating and managing your new account, and organizing your books.

• Account SetupWhere we talk about creating a new account with Bookalope.
• Profile ManagementIs all about viewing and modifying your account, billing information, and purchasing a conversion plan.
• Books and BookshelvesDetails how you can manage our books and conversions, and organize them into book shelves.
• Bookflows Everything you need to know about actually converting your book!

Bookflows

With Bookalope, everything revolves around a Bookflow: the conversion of a single book from start to finish, from its input file to its various export formats. Because the same book can sometimes go through multiple iterations of editing, or over time you perhaps decide to publish new editions of your book, Bookalope helps you to consolidate these multiple conversions (the Bookflows) into a single Book, and you can organize your Books into Bookshelves.

A single conversion, our Bookflow, consists of three steps that closely reflect Bookalope’s core principle of working with content and its presentation separately. We will explore these the Bookflow steps in detail later; in short, they are as follows:

1. Upload: Here, you upload your book.
2. Review: Once uploaded, Bookalope lets you review the structure of your book to make adjustments if needed, and you can review and edit your books content to make changes or fix issues that Bookalope found and marked up for you.
3. Convert: Download your book in whichever file format you need.

Although once you’ve uploaded a file you can’t go back to the Upload step, you can move between Review and Convert at will and as often as you wish. If you’d like to convert another book or manuscript, simply create a new Bookflow for the same Book, or create a new Book and Bookflow altogether.

In addition to these interactive steps which let you work with a Bookflow, there are two more steps that along the way that are important to know:

• Processing: This indicates that Bookalope is currently processing your Bookflow which means that it’s moving from one step to another. Depending on the step and the complexity of your book, processing can take just a moment or several minutes.
• Failed: On rare occasions, a Bookflow may fail to process. If that happens, the server automatically notifies our developers who will look into the problem, and it sends an email to you acknowledging the problem. Feel free to respond to us if this happens: we’ll work with you to resolve the problem.

The tools

Now that you know about Bookflows and how they work, let’s dive into the different ways of using the Bookalope tools to navigate these Bookflows:

• Web applicationBookalope’s web application is not the only way to interact with the Bookalope tools, but it’s definitely the easiest and most intuitive way. It’s also an interactive way of working directly with your document: editing and organizing its content, as well as reviewing and fixing issues. Most of this manual works with the web application.
• Extension for Adobe InDesignUse the Bookalope extension for InDesign if you want to push your active InDesign document to Bookalope or if you’d like to filter a Word document or ebook through Bookalope into InDesign. Because the extension navigates your Bookflow just like the web application does, you can always hop over to your web application and tweak your Bookflow there!
• Cloud APIDocumentation for our open-source cloud API and wrappers in different programming languages is available on Github too. If you want to integrate the Bookalope tools into your existing production workflow, this is the place to go and we have several examples online that illustrate how you can automate your book conversions using our cloud API.

Recipes

We’ve collected a number of Recipes for solving certain problems and managing common tasks using the Bookalope tools.