If you make and sell print or digital books for a living, the time and headaches that Vellum will save you more than justify its steep price. Just prepare yourself for some extra work and a lot of trial and error to ensure you produce a polished finished product. Nor should you shy away from using Pages to make books for sale commercially, even on Kindle. Pages (or the also-free iBooks Author) is perfect for creating books to share with friends and family, or educational materials for class. For light or limited use, its accessibility and convenience far outweigh any formatting headaches. If you're just dipping your toe into creating ebooks, absolutely stick with Pages. Vellum's print style options look sharp and library-worthy, too. Pages requires you to set all those options manually, a tricky and time-consuming task. Just choose a page size, and Vellum takes care of everything else: margins, headers, footers, page numbers, even avoiding odd breaks in the text across pages. It's certainly no slouch in that department, but Vellum still outshines it. You'd think Pages would have the edge in print production, since it's, you know, a word processor. But if you want to add a link to one of your other books within the text, Vellum can also store identifiers for each major bookstore, all in one link, and distribute the correct identifier to each corresponding format you create. I've mentioned its ability to simultaneously generate ebooks for different stores and readers. Vellum's designed with multiple formats and stores in mind. And Vellum easily supports multi-volume compilations, which would require a lot of cutting, pasting, and formatting in Pages. Vellum also comes with pre-made templates for elements such as copyright pages, blurbs, epilogues, forewords, and afterwords that you can easily drop into your manuscript, then edit as you please. Some, like a big, bold capital letter dropped and wrapped by the surrounding text, I couldn't replicate in Pages. To change that formatting throughout your book, you only need to switch a single setting in Vellum's easily browsed formatting gallery, which offers a handsome array of preset style options. More importantly, Vellum identifies and formats chapter openings, beginnings of new sections of text after breaks, and other areas of the book automatically. Images are even easier to add and adjust in Vellum than in Pages. It generates an excellent, well-formatted table of contents without being asked. Vellum's interface, on the other hand, keeps its more limited selection of formatting choices always in easy reach.
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