Kindle (Mac): 2. Creation
With the Universalis program open, open the "File" menu and select the "Create Kindle e-book" option:
We suggest that you choose "This month" for your first experiment. Once you've chosen this, the next screen you see will be:
At the very top, the "Save As" name will be something rather unfriendly-looking. Don't worry about this, and don't change it. Universalis gives a unique filename to every e-book you create, and on the Kindle you will be seeing the human-readable name of the e-book, and not the obscure name of the file it's in.
Just below this, you can see the location where your file is going to be saved. The location doesn't matter as long as you know where the file is going, so that you can find it later. We normally recommend saving the file to the desktop (and not to "Documents", as in the picture) because files on the desktop are always easy to find. There is nothing more frustrating than spending time creating a file and then not knowing where on your computer it has gone. To save to the desktop, scroll the list on the left-hand side of the window. After the "Devices" list you'll find a "Places" list, and in the "Places" list you'll find "Desktop": click on it.
At the bottom, you can choose which of the daily pages to include in your e-book. "About Today" is greyed out (but ticked) because it always has to be included.
When you're happy with everything, click Save. After a few moments, you will see this message:
How long this message stays depends on how big an e-book you're creating and how fast your computer is. On a fast computer, creating a one-day e-book, the message may flash up too quickly for you to notice. On a slow computer, creating a one-year e-book, it may stay for as long as 15 minutes. Don't worry about the slowness. You can carry on using your computer for other things while the e-book is being created.
At the end of the process, the Kindle (Mobipocket) file will be on your desktop:
Note: Creating e-books in advance
If you're going to be travelling, you may want to create e-books for future periods. Or you may find the whole e-book creation process rather tedious and prefer to create several e-books at a time.
You can create an e-book for a future period like this:
- Set Universalis to display a date within the e-book period you want. For instance, if you want to create an e-book for June 2015, set it to display a date in June 2015 (if you need reminding, the operating instructions are here).
- Tell Universalis to create an e-book. In the menu, "This month", "This year", and so on will refer not to today's date but to the date you set in step 1.