I tried a fair bit of cleverness just now. I found a bit of fan fiction online and copied the text to my Drafts app on my iPad. I’m at Chocolatea on Wifi and no access to any devices other than my iPhone, my iPad, and my Nook HD.

I wanted to get the text from my Drafts app over to my Nook HD. The best way? ePub. Or at least that was the challenge I had set for myself. Now I knew I could probably do it with the apps I had, Wifi, and Dropbox gluing it all together.

I opened the text in my Drafts app in Pages, which allowed me to export it in DOC format to my Dropbox app. So that was easy enough. Now I had my fiction in DOC format on Dropbox. None of the online file converters understands Dropbox, nor how to unpack the Public link URL that you can make with Dropbox. Instead of getting your document, you get HTML gunk from Dropbox. So I have another app on my iPad called Files Connect. I used that app to copy the DOC file from my Dropbox to my Windchilde account, so I could host it online *simply* (hah). Once I had a URL link that worked for the DOC file I went to Online-Conversion.com which provides a public service to convert DOC files into ePub format. I handed it my URL, let it go and it offered to email-attach the results to my email. Off it went. I opened Mail on my iPad, opened the email from the service, found the attachment and tried to open it on my iPad. My iPad gave up and offered to send it to a host of other apps that might handle ePub format, one of those was Dropbox, so I saved the data off to my Dropbox. Then I connected to Wifi on my Nook HD, started the Dropbox app and found my ePub file. I renamed it, then I exported it to my Nook HD.

What a mess. I got what I wanted to do but it took me about 2 hours of head-butting against online services and a lot of rigamarole just to do this one thing. I was half-hoping that Pages on my iPad would be Dropbox aware, and ePub aware, and it isn’t. No free apps exist that I could see that create ePub files from pasted in text or from other file formats.

At least it used up some time waiting for Scott to get out of work. At least there is that. As for interoperability, that’s hilariously not going to happen. At least not between iOS and Nook.