This Ultimate Ebook Creator Review was published back in March 2, 2013. Since then, the author has corrected all the issues in this review. It is now working correctly and is recommended for Kindle Ebook formatting.
I purchased Ultimate Ebook Creator based on some recommendations in the Warrior Forum Kindle Book Club. Unfortunately, the software was very buggy. Here is my Ultimate Ebook Creator Review.
Ultimate Ebook Creator Review – Formatting
In my testing for this review, Ultimate Ebook Creator did not properly format two Kindle .mobi books. The margins inside both books were inconsistent and messy. The first book was copy/pasted from Word, so I thought the issue was pasting from Word to Ultimate Ebook Creator. But that wasn’t the case. My wife typed up the second book entirely inside UEC and it still messed up the formatting as shown below.
Ultimate Ebook Creator Review – Bullets
Simply put, bullets frustrated me immensely. They appear correctly on the Kindle Previewer but on ALL actual devices, they appear as boxed question marks or boxes. The author recommended I paste images as a workaround. I’m not going to go through 100+ pages copying/pasting images for bullets. The software has a bullet formatting button on the editor. It should work correctly. I should note that the author of Ultimate Ebook Creator released an update after I mentioned the bullet problem but it remains unfixed.
Also, bullet formatting in Ultimate Ebook Creator is hit or miss. Sometimes it appears indented, sometimes it doesn’t.
Ultimate Ebook Creator Review – Pasting from Microsoft Word
When pasting from Word, Ultimate Ebook Creator pastes all the various styles, fonts and inconsistencies that exist in the original Word document. I ended up with a Frankenstein book with Arial here, Verdana there, etc. The Ultimate Ebook Creator software was unable to overwrite the styles with the built-in editor, either. The author recommends copying/pasting from Word to Notepad to Ultimate Ebook Creator. That would technically work, but any prior formatting work that was performed in Word is completely lost. This leads to a lot of manual work reformatting the text from scratch. I feel Ultimate Ebook Creator text import abilities need to be improved dramatically.
Ultimate Ebook Creator Review Licensing
The software comes with two license installations. Unfortunately, the software checks your license at every time you start the Ultimate Ebook Creator software. This suggests the software is reliant on an online licensing server of some kind.
What happens if the server goes offline or the product becomes abandoned? Do you lose access to all those ebooks you typed up in their proprietary .uec files? I don’t know the answer to that. I understand software must be licensed, but I don’t believe a perpetual start-up license check is necessary.
Ultimate Ebook Creator Review Conclusion
I got a refund. I’m now using Scrivener to write my books and create my Mobi files. I’m very frustrated with the formatting inconsistencies in Ultimate Ebook Creator and so are my customers.
Hi Jesus,
You may have been using an ealier version of Ultimate Ebook Creatore.
A lot of these issues have been addressed and fixed.
You can download and try the new version which is at v1.9.4
That’s good to hear, Nitin! What exactly was addressed? I’ll be happy to update my review.
Jesus,
Thanks for the ‘honest review of UEC. I have Scrivener and did not know that it is a great compiler. I too have purchased a whole lot of Kindle generator programs that truly all sucked when you looked at the finished product — hyped by loads of marketers. I felt so jaded with all this that I’ve been hand coding them all.
I know html from the pre-2000 era.
So, when you stated that Scrivener does compile text for nonfiction writers, well, I just had a heart flutter of joy. I’ll now have to bear down into learning ‘that’ part of the program. Glad to find that it works on bullets and left alignment. I’ll have to check how it wraps text around images.
Thanks again.
The last thing I needed to do was buy another product that falls short.
And for those reading, I owned, tired or have purchased at least 7 of these programs. As Jesus stated, I hate programs that rely on my use of their server…and TRUSTING that they really are not keeping a copy of what I upload for formatting.
By the way…didn’t at least ONE set of marketer mine the data of such a type of app (web hosted) and used that intel to compete DIRECTLY with their purchasers? (Yes, that DID happen). I prefer to keep my projects ‘secret’ until they launch.
Be well,
cj
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Hi Jesus,
Thanks for your insight. I have been looking for a while and its nice to see some good reviews. Well, yours is the only review that comes across as an actual honest review. I really appreciate that. I’ll have to look into Scrivener.
The other thing I found weird is this whole idea of their licensing. You have to be online? That’s really disappointing. I remember another piece of software that promised to “secure” your PDF’s when you sold them. The only thing is that you have to be online to read them once someone purchased them.
Just something weird about it. Just doesn’t sit right. Again, thanks for the review!
Hi Jesus
As you know I am the creator of Ultimate eBook Creator and I want to thank you for your honest reviews of my product.
As you may not be aware UEC has come a long way and now at v2.3.2
Is even more powerful with many bugs fixed and a brand new pro editor and also spell checking that supports 80 languages.
Over 3000 eBooks have been published on Amazon with UEC from all my customers so far.
So please tell you readers to checkout all my new video tutorials and features.
Thank you…
Nitin
Thanks for the update, Nitin.
Readers…please be aware this is an old review. It’s quite possible the bugs mentioned above were already resolved. I don’t have a copy any more, so I can’t verify, unfortunately.
Hello Jesus,
I would really appreciate your comments to my post, but please note that I am not a technical person by any means, 🙂 , I just have this idea that I really think would be worth writing, but I’m really having trouble chossing the software that would best suit these requirements.
I have some teaching experience and my goal is to create a blog where I can share several “educational videos”, as well as to promote and sell my Ebook,
The book needs to have quite a few images, pointers, reference notes, links to the videos and, basically, it needs a lot of visual appealing to keep the reader interested and to guide them thru the material, something with just words and few images would just not “cut it”, it really has to look like a school textbook for elementary school, lots of images, lots of bold letters, arrows, links so the student can go to the explanatory video of that particular subject, etc.
I looked at several sites but some sell the software and also “keep” and “promote” the book on their websites and/or Amazon and other Ebook stores,
I am in a very tight budget and the target market is very specific, so I think is best to sell it thru my own blog and loading an intro video in youtube and maybe promote it as well using electronic magazines, social media and other electronic means that are focused in that market,
Any comment would be very much appreciated, 🙂
Thank you!!!
Claudia Sofia
Hey Jesus,
It’s been a few years since Ultimate eBook Creator was released, so do you have any recommendations on ebook creator software?
My experience with ebook software has been pretty bad (I’ve made 7 ebooks). They’ve all looked terrible, and they all were difficult to design. It was like I was fighting the software I was using just to make it readable. >:(
I recently saw Sqribble, and I was wondering what your thoughts on it were? It seems to have some great features and easy to use, but do you have knowledge of an even better ebook software?
Thanks for your time
Haven’t used it. I’m currently using Word to write the books, then Amazon’s converter to get it into Kindle format. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202140110
Hi Jesus… I’m a long time user of UEC and “Hands down” It’s one of the best if not the best eBook creator tool around, nice to see Nitin commenting as well.
I am using UEC no for a few years. It is the best tool I have found. I did not find any format issues yet. It makes my jumps in the book perfectly.