Barnes and Noble launched its new pubit! service today, where authors can upload their manuscripts and have them automatically converted to ebooks.

While I’m not crazy about the name (as I had my concerns about the iPad name initially), it looked like it might be easier to use than the Amazon Kindle service. I published my printed books using CreateSpace, but making them into Kindle ebooks looked pretty convoluted. So I gave this service a try.

I went through the process as far as uploading my book file and previewing it with their Nook previewer. It’s a nifty service, and it showed me how terrible the results would be. Going from my beautifully typeset, illustrated book that had been laid out in Pages, exporting it to Word (.doc), and then importing it into their format made a hash of the layout. PDF is not supported, which is probably good, because reading a PDF on these readers can be very tough – the text does not usually flow well.

The next step would be to edit the original file and/or to edit the changed file. Since I know HTML pretty well, I’ll probably have faster results with the latter than the former.

I also made a stop by the Kindle publisher. It is a little more difficult to do the initial publishing steps, but it also looks like there may be more flexibility. Without much time, though, I would probably find the pubit service easier to use.