: Best tool to create ebooks? What is a recommended tool for turning a completed manuscript (a Word document) into an ebook (specifically, an EPUB file or Kindle-compatible Mobipocket file)? I would

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Check out Sigil. It's a multi-platform EPUB ebook editor with the following features:

Online Sigil User's Guide, FAQ, and Wiki documentation
Free and open source software under GPLv3
Multi-platform: runs on Windows, Linux and Mac
Full UTF-8 support
Full EPUB 2 spec support
Multiple Views: Book View, Code View and Split View
WYSIWYG editing in Book View, supporting all XHTML documents under the OPS specification
Complete control over directly editing EPUB syntax in Code View
Table of Contents generator with multi-level heading support
Metadata editor with full support for all possible metadata entries (more than 200) with full descriptions for each
User interface translated into 15 languages
Spell checking with default and user configurable dictionaries
Full Regular Expression (PCRE) support for Find & Replace
SVG support and basic XPGT support
Supports import of EPUB and HTML files, images, style sheets, and fonts
Documents can be validated for EPUB compliance with the integrated FlightCrew EPUB validator
Embedded HTML Tidy: all imported files have their formatting corrected, and your editing can be optionally cleaned
Native C++ application

Downloads at Sigil's github page. If you like to be notified of new releases, there's the Sigil website.

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I wrote a piece of software that converts OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) files to Kindle and ePub.
To answer your questions:

It automatically recognize chapters and creates a table of content for both Kindle and ePub
You can easily add front and back matter, it will be recognized and added to the table of content. To do that, you just add a heading to the page (same as for chapter titles) and make it invisible.
Styling from the odt file is converted: indent, justification, font style and size, drop caps, images and wrapping, etc. All the editing can (and should) be done in LibreOffice.

Also a few other advantages:

The final mobi file is accepted by Amazon (because we use kindlgen as a final step in the conversion.)
It runs on Windows and OS X and is quite fast.
It allows you to embed fonts, or, if the font cannot be legally embedded (general case), to convert headings and drop caps into pictures that can be legally embedded in the ebook.
There are templates with front/back matter to explain how to format the document.
The software is completely free.

I hope you'll find it useful.
You can get it here:
soft.alkinea.net

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You can check Pressmo.com - works fine, you can use PDF files, it has a flip page effect and the conversion is fast.

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Apple's Pages can import MSWord docs and export ePub.
support.apple.com/kb/HT4168?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
Only helpful if you are using a Mac of course :-)

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Go with www.smashwords.com/
This website has a web app for converting word documents. But it's a very stringent one; Converts only those documents that adher to the guide lines provided in it's free E-book --> www.smashwords.com/books/view/52
Although it looks like a big book, many of the pages were filled with big pictures. So, it won't take more than 2-3 days to complete it. Also, it gives a clear perspective of how not to write an E-book with word, which you can use for your future books. Also, once your book passes the test, your book could be made available through their store which serves E-book apps such as Apple's ibookstore, Aldico etc.,

Also, many authors, who have published the kindle version of their books at Amazon, refer to it as a definitive guide.

Hope this helps. Happy writing

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I have been using Calibre to format my e-books, and I have been very happy with it. However, as PseudoCubic noted, it will not accept a Word document as input. Ideally, you should convert your file to html first and then format it with Calibre. If you convert your Word document to html, make sure you choose the Web Page, Filtered option. Otherwise, Microsoft adds a lot of extra tags and stuff that will really mess up your html file.

For some other suggestions on converting your file to html, I would recommend going to this guide by Guido Henkel. He will walk you through all the details for making sure that your html file is properly formatted first, and then he shows you how to use Calibre to include your cover image, table of contents, and other material.

I haven't used Scrivener, so I don't know whether or not it can create both file versions (ePub and mobi) straight from your completed document. If your book is already finished and you want to use Scrivener, then you will have to import it there first, and you may want to review your content to make sure the formatting still appears the way you wanted it. If you are a Windows user, you'll need to use the beta version for Windows.

There are other tools that will convert your files, but all of them work better converting html documents because the tags for the formatting are clearly defined. If you are comfortable working with html, then you may want to give that a try first.

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Scrivener can compile to various formats including EPUB and Kindle formats, and gives you lots of control over formatting. Here is a video tutorial showing how it's done.
It is available for both the Mac and Windows, with a Beta version for Linux.

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You might want to try Calibre, which is a pretty powerful ebook conversion tool. To my knowledge it won't accept a Word document directly as input, but you can convert your manuscript to another format from word first, like HTML, plain text, or even PDF, and import it into Calibre for conversion.

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