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Amazon wants to make it easier for people to craft textbooks for its e-book platform, so the company just released the Kindle Textbook Creator, an app that makes it easy for publishers to create their own richly-formatted textbooks that can be viewed on a wide variety of devices.

Using the creator software, textbook authors can take a PDF file of their book and transform it into an interactive Kindle book that they can then sell on Amazon. It’s run through a new education division of the company’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, which allows authors and independent publishers to submit their books directly to Amazon.

Screen Shot 2015-01-22 at 9.01.41 AMCreating a book with KTC also provides a significant benefit to students, who get access to a number of features like the ability to save notes in a virtual notebook and create flashcards from content inside the textbook. Those books can be read using Kindle software on Amazon’s Fire tablets, iPhones, iPads, Android tablets, Macs and PCs.

The tools that KTC offers are similar to Apple’s iBooks Author software, which also allows people to create richly-formatted e-books. There’s a big difference between them, though: iBooks Author books can only be read through the iBooks app on Macs, iPhones and iPads, as opposed to the Kindle’s cross-platform reach.

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