How to manage my e-book library across my devices So I have a reasonable collection of ebooks, and it starts to be a mess.
My collection is a mixture of ebooks from Amazon (Kindle) and pdf.

I have one laptop, one kindle, one android tablet and one main PC.

For the reader part, I'm fine with what I have: kindle for novel, adobe pdf reader for windows PC and laptop and a good reader for the tablet.

What I miss is a way to centralize and share metadata around those books:
what I have read, not read, what's next, short comments, rating, ...

Right now I'm using Calibre on the laptop, because it was my main device.
The drive is synced to my onedrive account, so I can access my books from every browsers and thank to portable Calibre install, I can even run calibre from any windows machine.

So basically I have many book management systems (Kindle, Calibre) that are synced by cloud, but this is not good for my tablet: Kindle and onedrive are storing the file in internal memory (short) while I have a big sd card.
I also have no way to share my metadata with the table which starts to become my main reading device for pdf.

I would like to have a central library for metadata that I can update from many places, and a way to replicate my ebooks in all my devices, in my favorite location (sd card for Android) so I can read what I want without an internet connection. In addition this central library should be able to integrate with my kindle books and other library system.

Do you know if such a centralized software exists ?
If no, what would be the closest thing to my need ?

Ok, so here is my current solution, which is not perfect but that corresponds more or less with my current need.

PC with windows are using the portable version of Calibre. The library and the metadata are stored in a specific dir in  my filesystem that is synchronized with my local onedrive directory.
Android devices are using the Calibre Companion app ($4) and are configured to use my onedrive cloud account.
I'll probably change that in order to use a cloud synchroniser tool to mirror my cloud storage to the SDCard and point Calibre Companion to my local storage instead !
IOs: don't need it at the moment.

What needs to be improved:

possible conflict between metadata of pc version: I need to investigate if I can have a centralized version of calibre that can received updates from secondary devices. But right now I use the same machine for adding new stuff, so is is fine.
Need to find a way to push my ebooks with DRM to calibre. No really needed, because Kindle app is ubiquitous, but I would like to have one central place to organize my ebooks collection.


How to get book list from amazon clouddrive? I am sure that this is an obvious question. And that was already asked. But I can not find it. So first I apologize in advance for possible duplicate.

I  have on amazon.com/clouddrive a lot of books. Purchased outside the Amazon (I am polish speaker, and Amazon does not have Polish books). Is there any  convenient (or not...) way to download list of all the books that I have? With titles etc? Some external tool or something like that?

If you install the Cloud Drive Application on your own PC (Windows) or Mac (OS/X) I am not sure if there is a Linux equivalent then you will have the option to download your cloud drive, (or parts of it), all of your content will be available locally.

You can then view the file and folder names, which is not always very helpful, but you could also consider adding the folder that you download to into a Calibre library which will let you browse, search, convert, etc., your content.  Calibre is a free ebook manager that is available for multiple platforms and in multiple languages, (looking at the statistics the Polish translation is currently at 88% translated but not reviewed).


Printing ebook on A4 paper Thinking to print PDF format ebook onto A4 size pages, and bind up as a book.

The print outs are 2 by 2, double sided. So every A4 paper has 4 pages of the ebook.

This is the idea:

Split the PDF format ebook into multiple single pages (1 file becomes multiple files)
Reshuffle the split pages accordingly, and combine into 1 file (page orders changed)
Simply print out all the pages
Cut the print-outs in the middle
Bind them up as a book

When reshuffling the pages, taking a 32 pages small book as an example. 1 A4 paper have 4 pages, the numbers sequence are:

01 (first page), 02 (# of first page + 1), 31 (# of last page - 1), 32 (last page)

Eight A4 paper both sides printing of:

01, 02, 31, 32

03, 04, 29, 30

05, 06, 27, 28

07, 08, 25, 26

09, 10, 23, 24

11, 12, 21, 22

13, 14, 19, 20

15, 16, 17, 18

Will this method work?

would it not need to be
32, 1, 2, 31 (assuming flipping on the short edge of the A4) that way 1 and 2 will be on opposite sides of page and so will 31 and 32.

Also something else to think about is odd number of pages in the book or non multiples of 2...
take 10 pages for example...

[10, 1, 2, 9]

[8, 3, 4, 7]

[6,5,?,?]

you would have 2 empty pages in the middle of the book
so to counter that you'd probably need to take that into account

ALTHOUGH this isn't taking into account that you will cut the pages in the center. That would be binding in the middle

Thinking in terms of binding page by page...

Having 1 and 2 together won't really work seeing as you want them to be back to back

back to 10 example

[4, 1, 2, 3] or could be [3, 1, 2, 4] or [1, 3, 4, 2], etc. But I'd do first one to keep the cut edges at the binding side

[8, 5, 6, 7]

[?, 9, 10, ?] or [?, 10, 9, ?] or [9, ?, ?, 10] or [10, ?, ?, 9] where ? is an empty page.


font color not showing up on color Nook for new eBook epub I Mm an author and I hired a formatter to take my pdf book and convert it to epub and mobi so I can sell the eBook on Amazon. I am not technical so please bear with me.

The formatter sent me a draft copy of the epub eBook to review but there is an issue we cannot solve.

The font color is red when I read it on Calibre (on my desktop) but on my color Nook the red font does not appear.

The red font also shows on the Kindle Fire but not on the Nook Color.

I have searched and searched for an answer but can't figure out what the problem may be. Do you think this is a Nook issue or an epub issue?

Thank you.

JG

This could be either the Nook reading system or a problem in the code. The first thing to check is if your device is overriding publisher styles. Nook in particular is quite insistent about that, and will by default override all styles with its own. I don't recall exactly what menu that's in, but you should be able to find it.

If that doesn't do the trick, then there's probably something up with the code—either the CSS that defines the styles or the XHTML that defines the structure that the styles are applied to. If you're still having problems after enabling publisher styles, feel free to update this post or make a new one with the relevant sections of code.


On Kindle devices can you open an ebook as an email attachment? I know that you can email a Kindle ebook to the device itself using Kindle Personal Documents Service. I've been told that you cannot download a file directly using the Kindle Fire web browser.

If I opened up a .mobi file as an email  document attachment on a Kindle device,  would I be presented with the option to open it in Kindle? Or is the only way to do this through Kindle Personal Documents Service or Calibre?

(I'm writing a how-to about how to sideload on various devices and don't have access to a Kindle Fire at the moment).

Update:

Ipad/iBooks let you open .epub files from email attachments. So does Nook/Android. (You can also download them from a URL).

As far as I can tell though from the Amazon.com website, there is no way to open/add a .mobi file from email or a browser.


How to filter curse words? Many of the authors I read, enjoy placing curse words in their books but use them a bit judiciously. In addition, I am not a fan of cursing in general.

I am currently filtering out curse words using Calibre, but it's not working terribly great. Some curse words are not caught due to their being capitalized, hyphenated, punctuated, etc. Other non-cuss words get filtered out when they don't need to be: Christian to ******ian.

Perhaps there is a preformatted list of cuss words available which I can import into Calibre and use as a filter?

What you're experiencing is also known as the "Scunthorpe problem", which is caused by wordfilters going haywire. To make a long story short:

Wordfilters do not work. They never did and never will.

If you actually want to remove cursing from any text, you're looking at a major programming task.  There is no short-cut approach that actually works. It needs a substantial amount of code to semantically analyse every sentence in its context to find out if "cock" actually refers to a male chicken.

If cursing bothers you so much, I truely suggest picking your authors accordingly. There are tons of good authors out there who don't make judicious use of curse words. I assume there are more people bothered by this so there should be bloggers, forums etc. around giving recommendations.

P.S. I find it funny that you seem to have "Christ" on your filter list.


What is support of source code files in Kindle? I didn't have any Kindle in hand, so I might be completely wrong -- this is what I would like to do. Copy entire directory with C#, Swift, Python (and so on) files -- source code files -- so their content usually look like this:

parents, babies = (1, 1)
while babies < 100:
    print 'This generation has {0} babies'.format(babies)
    parents, babies = (babies, parents + babies)

I would like to click of any of such files and see the content of the file (see above).

Does Kindle support this? Does Kindle viewer support syntax highlighting for source code files?

No you cannot directly upload the files and use them. You would have to convert the file (with a syntax highlighter) to a format your kindle supports (EPUB,AZW3) and then upload those files.

I would not use PDF, I still have to come across a converter that correctly does whitespace (significant in e.g. Python) correctly. Although you might be indifferent wrt that.


ebook-edit in calibre automation with python I want to write a python automation program for merge html files in a epub using ebook-edit(in MacOS sub directory) in calibre. I know how to do it manually but I want to it many epub files automatically in python.
What should I do after the opening the epub file with ebook-edit?

import os, shlex, keyboard, time

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

filename = 'test.epub'
command_line = '/Applications/calibre.app/Contents/MacOS/ebook-edit '+ '"'+ filename+ '"'
args = shlex.split(command_line)
p = Popen(args, stdin=PIPE)

You are better off noting that Calibre is a python app. First look at its command line options. Then if that is not enough create an addin or just code that uses calibre python code.

One way might be to zip the HTML files together and pass that as the input file to ebook-convert see calibre documentation https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert.html#recipe-input-options


Is it better to let a footnote link wrap to the next line or force it to remain with the last word block it references? I'm preping an Epub file and found an example on my reader where a footnote link rolled to the next line.  E.G.,

This is some random text.[17]  After this is more.

becomes in my reader...

This is some random text.
[17]  After this is more.

I can add ...text.[17]... (link tag removed for convenience) to force the issue, creating...

This     is     some    random
text.[17]  After this is more.

All that extra white space is because I'm using full justification.  It looks better generally, but I might remove it due to problems with smaller screens.

My question is which solution is preferable?  Should I force the footnote link to remain with its referent text or let the link roll to the next line with the possibility that it looks odd and may even lose context to the uninitiated (if there are uninitiated)?

I'm somewhat mystified that the reading system would put the footnote on the next line. Are you sure that in the HTML source  there is no random space (or extra character) between the last word of the sentence, the period, and the number reference in brackets?  One might expect these characters to run after another without spaces regardless of which line it appears on.

My preference would be not to hard code wrapping/justification defaults in the element (P? LI? etc)  and just let the reading system (and the reader) do it. Or maybe specify a default for body text? For one thing, this becomes less of an issue when displays are wider and reading systems become more powerful. You don't want your publisher css to depend on the user turning justification on or off.  If the user perceives that justification is impeding the ability to read the text, they can usually turn it off on settings. Handling of justification on reading systems will only improve over time.

I'd be curious what screen dimensions this issue is happening in. This is an anomaly that I personally am fine with mobile phone users experiencing if width is 600 or less.


Send to kindle - store in specific folder When using "send to kindle" feature (e.g. through Readability), is there any way to put the files on Kindle into some folder, not into main directory?

Usually I send some articles to read them later, but then they end up in main folder and there's a big mess. If they could be stored under some folder, e.g. "articles" that would be much cleaner. Any way to do so?

The equivalent in Kindle to folders is collections. Usually you can create this on the ebook reader yourself.

This Kindle help document https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201733490 indicates that there is a cloud component to collections on later devices, but I don't know what this means for kindle apps.

For the Android Kindle app's main screen, when you keep holding down on the ebook title,a  + option will appear  which allows you to add to collections.

UPDATE: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201715640 "Note: Collections created on devices or apps that support Cloud Collections cannot be imported to devices and apps that do not support Cloud Collections. Any existing collections you’ve created on non-supported devices will not change and will not be available in the Cloud."


How do I use calibre to create page-numbered ebooks for Kindle? I know Kindle can use APNX files for page numbering, and I've been told Calibre can generate those for AZW books, and I actually followed a tutorial on Reddit where they tell you to go to Calibre's Preference and add a "pages" column with certain attributes, but in the end, no APNX file was generated.

In fact, the only way to get page numbers that I know is through the APNX plugin, which not only doesn't work anymore but even when in the Calibre versions it did, would only generate APNX of MOBI books and eventually would refuse to work with certain books.

So, any help on this subject would be welcome.

You could use the Calibre KFX Output plugin, which requires Kindle Previewer, to generate a KFX file with page numbers.

If the original epub contains an NCX pagelist, an Adobe Pagemap or an epub3 NAV page-list, the converter will automatically generate correct page numbers.

If the original book doesn't contain page numbers, select KFX Output > Create Approximate Page Numbers to have the KFX converter insert fake page numbers.


Is it possible to get rid of the search button (magnifying glass) from the bottom bar? The Kindle Fire has a feature through which you can search your collections or the web at the touch of a button.  This component can be accessed from the bottom bar, where the home, back, and favorite buttons are.

While it sounds like a nice feature, it's easy to bump in passing.  I would like to eliminate this possibility.  Is there a way to get rid of the search icon within the settings?

The overflow menu is automatic and controlled by the OS (similar to the Action menu on devices based on the default Android experience). You can partly hide the whole Content Bar by making your app full screen but you can't hide it completely as it replaces the functionality of the home & back buttons on non-kindle android devices.

According to the Kindle Fire User Guide (on page 8, section “Content Bar“), the search button helps users search their content library, not search within the current app. Therefore, the search icon is fixed and it will take you to the platform search… unless you override it as described here (scroll to bottom).


is PDF not considered as an ebook format I had a debate with my colleagues over PDF as an eBook format. I maintain, that eBook is defined as any book that is digitized, and that epub or other HTML based eBook rendering is just a type of eBook. But PDF is also considered under the umbrella of eBooks.

Can someone give a scientific and technical argument whether PDF is considered eBook format or not.

It's pretty straightforward: ebook is a generic word that encompasses many different digitalized formats for reading.

So yes, that would make  a PDF a kind of ebook. But it all depends on how inclusive you want your definition of an ebook to be. I don't think there is any single definition.

The main complaint about pdfs is that you can't edit PDF files easily (it's usually  an output format) and that you can't resize the text in a responsive manner (You can only zoom in and zoom out the entire page). That limited its usefulness in smaller devices. In contrast, the epub format and others made it easily to navigate through tables of contents and change text size and global styles. In terms of responsive design, epub was a more flexible format (and indeed, it was constructed precisely for that purpose). PDFs were designed to be viewed and printed in a single size. You can change  size to allow it to be displayed on a larger or smaller screen, but it still was built primarily for rendering in one size.

On the other hand, there are lots of tools for producing pdf files (much more than EPUB), and now 9 inch and 10 inch mobile devices are able to view many different sizes without too much pain. Typically though, the pdf tools are office applications and don't allow you to manipulate source code or its styles.

Practically speaking, publishers don't create pdfs except for print copies because amazon doesn't sell pdf ebooks. (But amazon does support fixed layout ebooks, which is similar). But practically speaking, even nontechnical people have access to an application which can read pdf files.

PDFs have been around forever -- and associated with Adobe -- though over time it has been accepted as an OpenFormat and an ISO standard (in contrast to MS Word, for example).

An interesting question (and a frequent subject of debate) is whether ebooks should have embedded fonts or should have the option not to (and use the device's defaults). I might be wrong, but the PDF standard requires the font to be embedded -- which means requiring a fairly sophisticated tool to do this. (Epub just requires the ability to edit HTML).


Two Kindles synced to same account - reading location being shared, but not Kindle content? I have two Kindles (both 10th Generation Paperwhite) and one Amazon account.

Both Kindles are registered to the one Amazon account and I have enabled Whispersync in my Amazon settings.

However, if I download a sample from amazon.co.uk to one Kindle, the content doesn't appear on the other Kindle.

Also, if I buy a book from the Kindle store on one Kindle, it doesn't appear on the other Kindle.

Is there any way I can get round this? I would like to keep the same content on both devices.

The two Kindles do seem to know about each other and be in sync with the Amazon account, because I see warnings saying "Your last location in this book was..." on each device. So I'm not sure why content is not being shared.

When you buy book from Kindle, it auto delivers the books to your chosen default device or the device you might be buying that book from. So by default you'd get the book delivered only on one device. So to get it on both devices you'd have to do it manually. Like when the "thanks" page appears you can deliver the book to your another kindle as well or from kindle you can view the book and click to download (as long as both use the same account) apart from that, kindle unlimited gives only one copy so that might not work on 2 kindles one account thing.


What devices support reading scanned PDF documents well? To focus, please assume I care only about one thing: The experience of reading "side loaded," scanned PDF files of books downloaded off the Internet on a portable device.  There is an upper bound of around 200MB for a single file.

I am not interested in "native" PDF files (re-flowable), EPUB, or any other e-book format.  I am not interested in reformatting the PDF files, optimizing, ORC-ing, etc.  Not interested in e-book marketplaces or dictionaries or apps or note-taking or games or other bells and whistles.  Here's the workflow: I search Google for an old book, find it on archive.org, download it, copy/sync it to the device, read, rinse, repeat.

There are plenty of reviews of devices that cover reading different e-book formats, but rarely do they cover reading scanned PDF books.  If mentioned in a review, the topic usually gets a sentence or two, and that's it.  Or it only talks about "native" PDF support.  Or the review is from 2011 and out-dated.

I have for months been trying to get an answer to this, and this is what I've found so far as my options:

An e-reader with e-ink
An Android tablet (or other vendor) with a decent display
An e-ink Android tablet
Sony Digital Paper
Laptop computer (I already have one, I'm looking for a better experience)

E-ink would be best, because these books are all scanned black-and-white.  I work all day on the computer, the last thing my eye balls need is for me to stare at another lit screen into the wee hours of the night.  But most e-reader reviews that I've read said they just don't handle navigating scanned PDF files well (if they can even open them).  Is that still true?  Besides software support and ease of use (which is probably the biggest issue), the amount of RAM and processor power is likely a concern, too.

A tablet would work if it had a good, crisp display.  But the big concern here is eye strain.  At least a decent tablet will have enough RAM and processor power to handle a large PDF and allow me to navigate it.  So this is a workable option.  I have actually read a large scanned PDF book on a first generation iPad -- the PDF app kept crashing and the display was poor and pixel-y, but I persevered.  Still, my eyes hated me.

A hybrid would be the Onyx Boox which appears to be an Android tablet that uses an e-ink display.  This might work.  Reviews suggest it isn't a perfect device but still works well for PDF files.  But I can't tell if the reviewers are talking about scanned PDF files or "native" again.  Anyone have experience with this one?

Sony Digital Paper.  I was going to say that cost doesn't matter, but at $1000 I have to set a limit and this is just too much.  This thing apparently will have no problem loading and displaying and navigating any PDF, so this would definitely be an option, except for the prohibitive price.  Has anyone used one of these?  Is this a good device if one intends to use it to read exclusively and not do any note-taking?  Hmm, my wife would kill me.

Getting PDFs on it matters: USB or syncing would be best.  I use Linux exclusively and don't have access to Windows or Mac OS X, so this has to be possible via Linux (e.g., Dropbox support is good on Linux).  But I'm still more concerned with how well the thing supports actually opening and navigating the scanned books.

Back to the question: What devices support reading scanned PDF documents well?  I want to be able to turn the page without waiting 30 seconds.  I want to view a page and scroll around (if need be) without fiddling too much with zooming and waiting too long for rendering.  And likely there are important factors I'm not considering.  Please give me the lowdown.  If the market still isn't prepared to support this use case, that's fine, too, I suppose.  Thanks for your help.

I read scanned PDFs on my Android tablet pretty regularly and without problems.

I presently use a Lenvo Yoga 10 HD+ (previously I had an Acer Iconia A200), but any reasonable spec tablet should do you. I usually use ezPDF reader, but there's a lot of PDF readers out there that work fine (ezPDF was the first that I found that performed well for most things I look at).

If you're trying to quick-flip pages one after the other, it'll take a second or three to go to the next one. If you actually read each page, though, you won't see that, because it renders the next page in the background.

Things to look for:

Quick page flip (or at least page flip you won't notice)
Controls that make sense to you
Pan and Zoom controls appropriate to the platform
If you close the PDF and re-open it later, does it come back to the same place? I know a couple of readers I tried DIDN'T do that.
Reasonable screen size - the 10" display on my tablet is fine for 8 1/2x11 pages, as long as the type isn't minuscule.
Make sure the device takes an SD card - you'll want lots of space to store PDFs.

I find it's nice to side-load stuff to the SD card, and read from there.


Embed JavaScript in an e-book using an e-reader I'm looking for an e-reader that can embed Javascript in an e-book. I need to display a popup in the e-book but using a e-reader.

Apparently, it is not possible for the Kindle Reader but I'm wondering if it is possible with another device?

JavaScript is an optional part of the epub 3.0 specification:

  EPUB Content Documents may contain scripting using the facilities
  defined for this in the respective underlying specifications ([HTML5]
  and [SVG]).

What this means is that even a fully-compliant epub 3.0 device doesn't need to implement JavaScript support. The ones that do will generally be the "more bells and whistles" devices; the iPad, for example, supports JavaScript. The IDPF's epub Chrome extension Readium does as well.

Note that according to the epub 3.0 specification, the following criteria for reading systems that support JavaScript must be met:

  › It must support container-constrained scripting and may support
  spine-level scripting.

  › It may render Scripted Content Documents as an interactive, scripted
  User Agent according to [HTML5].

  › It must not allow a container-constrained script to modify the DOM
  of the parent Content Document or other contents in the EPUB
  Publication, and must not allow it to manipulate the size of its
  containing rectangle. (Note: Even if a script is not
  container-constrained, the Reading System may impose restrictions on
  modifications (see also the dom-manipulation feature).)

  › It may place additional limitations on the capabilities provided to
  scripts during execution (e.g., limiting networking).

  › It must implement the JavaScript navigator extension object
  epubReadingSystem defined in Appendix A, JavaScript epubReadingSystem
  Object . It also must support the dom-manipulation and layout-change
  features defined in Features in container-constrained scripting
  contexts.

  › It must regard the scripted [Publications301] property of the
  Package Document manifest item element as the authoritative definition
  of whether an EPUB Content Document includes scripting.

EDIT: Popup text and images are definitely possible using JavaScript in iBooks. For an example, check out Beneath The Ink.


How do I wipe clean kindle e-reader? How do I wipe clean (for selling) a kindle e-reader.  There is no option under settings.  I have also held the power button for 20 seconds.

To factory reset your Kindle to wipe it clean of data:

From Home, tap the Menu (three dots) icon, and then tap Settings.
Tap the Device Options, and then tap Reset Device. Your Kindle will restart.


What triggers the "adult" designation on Amazon Kindle books (romance genre)? I do software development for an ebook publisher specializing in Romance novels. One thing we encounter from time to time is that a book gets classified by Amazon as "adult". That effectively removes the book from normal searches. We can't figure out what triggers the "red flag" and Amazon isn't saying. The cover art doesn't seem to be any better, worse, more suggestive, whatever. Covers are definitely tamer than directly competitive books. Nothing stands out for us in the book content. It's a case of "If A, B, and C are fine, why did D get flagged?"

For anyone else who has encountered this phenomenon, have you come up with any insights?

EDIT WITH ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FOLLOWS:

To the best of my knowledge, you can only see the ADULT tag via Amazon's API. You won't see it on the book's listing on Amazon.

To see an example, search amazon for the author "Blake Cross". (The results are Not Suitable for Work!) I have no relationship to that author or what's published!

To see the "ADULT" tag exposed via Amazon's API, go to http://www.salesrankexpress.com/ and enter Blake Cross as the author name.

The author/maintainer of Sales Rank Express explains his take on the ADULT tag in his FAQ at http://www.salesrankexpress.com/#adult - in short, he says it appears to be arbitrary and inconsistent. He concludes, "By contrast, a surprising number of Kindle books are blatantly pornographic without being labeled 'Adult'."

Our own specific medium is electronic books (we stopped doing print books), Romance genre. We've concluded pretty much the same thing as the Sales Rank Express maintainer. It seems to be based on the book cover rather than the text content, and rather arbitrary. It seems to be more subtle things such as setting and situation, facial expression, and so on.

To the best of our knowledge, as publisher, there are NO clear guidelines; the publisher is NOT informed when an offering is deemed "Adult."

For something like Blake Cross's offerings, the reason for ADULT designation is obvious. The situation is far more subtle with a Romance-genre novel.

The question remains: For anyone else who has encountered this phenomenon, have you come up with any insights?

Check your product descriptions for certain trigger words. See this comment:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/12/2013/amazon-is-making-it-harder-to-sell-bigfoot-porn-ebooks/#comment-155994


Can I copy or publish, text from a website. Can I copy or publish text—from a website—that is in the public domain?

The text was already published as hard cover, in many apps, and as PDF. But never for Kindle (AZW3).

I am not a lawyer, but: If the text is in the public domain, then yes, you can use it. Be sure that it really is in the public domain, though—copyright lasts for a very long time. Also bear in mind that if the text is annotated, translated, or altered in any other way, or if it's a collection of public domain works, there may be further complications. If you have any doubts, you'd be best advised to contact an IP/Copyright lawyer.


Service to nicely print a huge E-textbook? I found an awesome textbook for my language studies. It is freely available as a pdf file, a Word document, as well as a browsable website.
For me, language study involves taking a lot of notes in my textbooks, connecting together the pieces of information I already acquired and understood, adding color to make grammar patterns emerge, etc.
For that reason, I want to physically print that textbook. However, it is more than 600 pages, and I can't find a place where I could print and bind those into a nice looking book.

Is there an online service that could print, bind, and send me the textbook, if I provide them with the pdf/doc file?
Bonus points if this service is located in - or can ship to - Japan.

Update: Additional information
The book is for personal use only, I will not sell it.
I found that printed versions were selling starting from 160$ on Amazon (unfortunately the sellers do not ship to my country). I am looking for less costly alternatives.

This is a shopping/recommendation question, which is generally not appropriate for this site.

I have to assume that you want the printed book for personal use and not to sell to other people. I also have to assume that you don't care about how the cover looks and that you want something bound. But you didn't mention how many copies you want or how much you wish to spend. These last two points are important.

I am not really recommending this store, but this business site lists various packages for printing books. http://www.officedepot.com/a/copy-and-print/presentations/ This will give you an idea about terminology for the different types of printing.

I think it's better to talk to someone at a local print shop. Such a person might have a better idea which kind of binding is most suitable for your budget and for page length.

Another option might be to look through the various print-on-demand services. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-4-online-selfpublishers-book-write/
(contrary to what this article says, I think Createspace is a good print-on-demand service). The main problems with these POD services is that they assume that you have a PDF ready for printing according to their specs, and you are probably not in a position to modify the formatting.


For Kindle DX Graphite, how to quickly add books to different "Collections"? I have over a hundred e-books on my Kindle DX Graphite.  It would take several hundreds of keyboard clicks to add them into different Collections using the most naïve method.  Is there some smart way to do this better such as connecting it to computer and moving files into different folders, or doing it on Amazon's Kindle library interface?

If you add the books to folders in the document folder then you can use a software called Koll3ctions to create the same collections as the directory structure. I seem to remember it needs you to restart the kindle after using Koll3ctions, so I rarely use it for just one or two books.


What does FlightCrew's "Unable to find zip structure: End-of-central-directory" mean? I am experimenting with building my own .epub files and try to validate them using FlightCrew.

Currently it says my file is invalid because it is

  Unable to find zip structure: End-of-central-directory

What could this mean what could be the reason for such a message?

That would mean your EPUB does not have a proper ZIP file structure.

You can try listing the content of your file with a normal zip unpacker, or test it with a real epubreader. If those do not complain, it could mean that FlightCrew has a bug.


How do I convert an RSS feed's entries into an ebook? How would I convert an RSS feed into an ebook?  I know that calibre can already do this but it is a bit bulky and I don't feel confident writing a recipe in Python to try to do this.  I do have access to pandoc and other tools on Linux, though.

If all you're wanting is to easily get specific RSS items to a Kindle, Instapaper has a service that makes this very simple:

http://www.instapaper.com/user/kindle

That's how I do it, and only for specific posts that I'm actually wanting to read on my Kindle. My usual workflow is when I'm reading through my feeds on my iPhone, I click "send to Instapaper" on longer posts that I want to read on my Kindle.


Exact readable screen size of Sony PRS-650 I use a Sony PRS-650 and I often create PDF files for it with LibreOffice. These are usually documents which I read only once and I don't care about portability. (I don't read them on other devices and I'm able to change the page size if I need to.)

What page size should I set in LibreOffice to see exactly the same layout (and avoid resizing of the pages) on my PC and PRS-650?
(Please note that there is a status line at the bottom of the screen on PRS-650 with battery charging indicator etc.)

I don't know if this is exact enough, but based on a combination of my own manual measurements and specifications listed in the user guide (warning links to pdf directly):

Screen resolution is 600(w) x 800(h) pixels
Screen measurements (approx, done myself) are 92(w) x 122(h) mm
Using this calculator, that gives us a dpi of approx 44.
Approx measurement of status bar is 5mm (using same calculator as above we get ~33 pixels)

Conclusion:

Readable screen height is 600(w) x 767(h) pixels or 92(w) x 118(h) mm


What ebook format to choose? Frequently we need to resolve what format, platform and so on, will be the most useful for a particular project.

Right now I need to compare the features of digital book formats in order to deliver a digital dictionary. I didn't find a good and complete comparison based on project owner goals.

Here is a list of possible requirements that can be evaluated in a good comparison:

· Platform Support

· Security (content edition/password protection/script execution)

· Digital Signature availability

· Standars maintenance on time (maintenance of quality)

· Reflowable/Not reflowable content

· Level of compression

· Tipe of data support (text, image, video,  multimedia, 3D, maps, color...)

So, it's a request for opinions on what could be important to review. I'll be glad to deliver an online comparison in base of your thoughts.

I think epub3 is basically the standard format (especially now that Kindlegen is fairly well aligned with epub3 even though kindle doesn't support all features); what you have to decide is the toolchain to get the job done (especially regard to the editing process). You also have to decide whether you are going digital only or publishing digitally and print simultaneously.

I don't know what your content is or how many contributors or editors you will have. I also don't know your budget or what form your content currently is in; I assume it's in XML or in some SQL database. Maybe you'd be able to keep it in DITA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Architecture .
 For collaborative XML Editing, you're talking about pretty pricey things; maybe you can have data input in a php/mysql form which later could be converted into custom HTML.  Even though this probably has a hefty price tag though it's easier to maintain.

The other option is a mobile app. I assume there are templates for multimedia book apps which you can purchase and customize. I generally shun those kinds of solutions, but depending on your content and audience, this might be attractive. Also, an app could connect to a constantly updated online db.

On android especially epub3 support on software seems to vary widely, and so apps tend to look more uniform across platforms.

I can't speak of compression or performance, but I'd wonder how you expect readers to browse through. Will they be starting by searching for the keyword? I guess you can stick some javascript up front for a reader-friendly search form. That means you'd need the ereader platform to support javascript.

These are my superficial thoughts.


Is there a way to share my Amazon eBook collection with other family members? I have a decent sized collection of Amazon eBooks with a few titles that my family (siblings, parents) are interested in reading. Unfortunately, we all have our own Amazon accounts. Is there any way to share these eBooks?

We are all adults, so some sort of child sharing feature wouldn't be what we want. We don't have a problem with sharing being temporary or having a restriction where only one person can read the eBook at a time.

You can lend Kindle books to others through the Kindle store:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_rel_topic?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200549320

"A Kindle book can only be loaned one time" and loans are limited to 14 days.


Public domain search tools/websites Is there a united resource or program to search public domain works?
By united I mean it searches in more than 1 website for my search term.

The internet archive https://archive.org/ lists both works they host as well as works in other libraries.  While most (all?) of the ebook are available without cost the majority are public domain works, there are also many Create Commons & fair-use works. There is not a good way to search for only PD works, but due to the type of results returned that should not be an issue for most users.  The works that are not PD, are mostly appropriate for attribution sharing, which mostly allowed.

(There are not any absolutes here)

Selecting texts will return everything that is mostly written words. From single page documents to books. This is approximately equal to 'ebooks'.


Sort/Select chapters/paragraphs by POV I have often considered (and had suggestions) that it is worth reading some books only reading certain characters Point of Views. Particularly for Epic Fantasy, where there are many many characters.

Consider Wheel of Time, Which conveniently has stats on it POVs:.
If you only read the main character - Rand - you would only read about 20% of the word count, which is about 1 million words.
Having read most of that series twice I would say it would be the best 1M words in the series. The plot would move on at 5x the speed. (As the number of characters increases I really find the story slows down).
Consider instead reading just the 100  or so characters with less than 10 POVs. Again you would be just reading about 20% of the book, but this time you would only be hearing rumours of what the main characters are doing. Kinda like a person in the world, hearing about the greats.

I, myself, wouldn't do this the first time, but maybe in a reread. Could be interesting.

So I am looking for a tool to manage the POVs in my ebook collection.
This would be for personal use only, I wouldn't be redistributing modified books etc.

So a feature list:

Must support books with chapters labelled with POV
Should support books with unlabelled chapters written in 3rd person
Should support EPUB for input and output: but if it doesn't I can use Calibre to convert
Should support splitting on Paragraph as well as Chapter level
Ideally would collect stats on the POV's and allow selection like: "Only most common character."
Ideally would support going across multiple files, so that a whole series can be processed
Ideally would be a Calibre plug in.

I don't think this would be too hard to make, but before I do so myself, I thought I would check out what was available.
How it could be done for books that don't have labelled chapters,
a fairly solid heuristic would be taking the first dictionary word, and checking that it meets some word count requirement. More complex solutions could be made with machine learning.

Note: This question has associated meta question here. If an extended discussion of whether or not this question is on topic is needed, please use the meta question.

Calibre's EpubSplit plugin should be able to do what you need, but as far as I know you have to manually select which chapters you want to extract.


How to create clickable table of contents in a PDF? I have many technical PDF ebooks where there are no chapters (no clickable table of contents or other means for quick navigation through a document) and therefore it's really painful to search for information without full-text search. How could I create them? I would like to just take a PDF book and generate exact structure of chapters and subchapters, like:

Intro
First chapter

Tools you will need
Tool XYZ

Second chapter

Well, you could always buy a copy of Adobe Acrobat, which is actually designed solely for the purpose of creating and editing PDF files.

Or you could import the file into Calibre, convert it to ePub format, edit the ePub to add the table of contents, then convert it back to PDF.

There are other free tools for working with PDF directly. If you do a Google search, you would find this page which lists several free tools for editing or modifying PDF in various ways.


Converting RTL epub to mobi I have a Hebrew ebook in epub format; I would like to convert it to mobi, since I read exclusively on my Kindle. Hebrew reads right-to-left.

Kindle supports Hebrew ebooks (I have often used Tinderizer to send Hebrew articles to my Kindle). I tried converting this ebook to .mobi using Calibre, the book looked fine in Calibre's View specific format preview window, but on my actual Kindle device, the RTL-format was messed up - each word was readable (individual characters RTL as expected), but the words themselves were in the wrong order (LTR).

Is there a way I can convert my file into a readable .mobi file?

According to Kovid Goyal ( creator of Calibre) you need to convert to azw3 instead of mobi.


What is the most paper-like display resolution for e-book? What is the paper-like display resolution for e-book reading? Meaning, the resolution where the text display is 100% indistinguishable to average human with 20/20 vision from a regular paper book.

If the answers differ between different screen types, I'm more interested in LCD but eInk answers are fine as well.

There is no display resolution "where the text display is 100% indistinguishable to average human with 20/20 vision from a regular paper book." In fact, display resolution is not the most important factor in producing text as legible as a paper book. Notice I used legible, not indistinguishable.

Start by reading Wikipedia on font rasterization. Compare that to offset printing, the process that is used to produce most printed books. In offset printing, the quality of the paper affects how much the ink spreads as it is absorbed into the paper. There's no way to duplicate that effect in a digital display.

The perceived quality of text display on digital devices is affected by the font rendering technology (i.e. Freetype, Microsoft renderer, Adobe's, etc.), the text rendering technology (usually either an HTML/CSS engine like WebKit or a PDF renderer), the particular font, and the type of display (LCD, eInk, etc.). If all the other factors are executed correctly, the display resolution is only important at smaller type sizes. However, higher display resolution are almost always better because they give the various rendering technologies more resources to use.


Are dictionaries supported in epub 3.1? Are dictionaries, as described here:

http://www.idpf.org/epub/dict/

covered in epub 3.1?

Which readers support them? Are there any working examples of epub documents using dictionaries?

Are dictionaries, as described here [...]

The dictionaries and glossaries specification is not a part of the epub3.x standards.

  Which readers support them?

None that I know of.

  Are there any working examples of epub documents using dictionaries?

No.

If you want to use dictionaries, you'll have to create StarDict dicionaries, which are supported by most Android devices, but not by iOS devices. (There are iOS StarDict dictionary apps, but you can't use them as lookup dictionaries in iOS ebook apps because of iOS limitations.)

If the dictionary is rather small, you could theoretically embed it as an Sqlite database in epub3 books and query it with JavaScript.


How is an ebook made? What kind of software and hardware are used? What is the process that is needed in order to make an ebook? I'm an student from the International Baccalaureate and I need to analyse a case study.

For general purposes, Ebooks are simple websites, contained inside of a predictable folder.  This folder is composed mostly of the content of the ebook itself which is the form xhtml and css.  The other files are files which declare exactly what contents are in the ebook folder.  Each xhtml page, stylesheet, image, font, etc. is listed in one of these files so the folder understands what it is composed of.  By following the rules listed on the governing body of the EPUB standard http://idpf.org/ you can write one of these files yourself.  The other files can also be written on basically any front end developing software, Dreamweaver, Coda, etc.  So, in theory, while it would be tedious, you could create an ebook with just a simple text editor.

That being said, mostly everyone is developing stream-lined way to create EPUBs as an export from a WYSIWYG application, including newer versions of InDesign.  This way you would layout the ebook the way you want, with formatting styles for paragraphs, headers, etc.  and simply hit an export button and voila, you have your ebook.

I hope this answers your question. :)


EPUB 3 CSS stylesheet ignored in some cases? I created a MOBI file using Kindlegen. I fed the MOBI file to Calibre and converted it to an EPUB.

If I view the HTML files I used to create the MOBI file, they look great. All formatting is picked up from my separately defined .css file.

I took the EPUB file and ran it through the EPUB checker/validator. I corrected all errors (except one saying my html files need to be xhtml files, which is only a warning anyway).

I can view the resulting EPUB file in Abobe Digital Editions 4.5 and it looks great.

The problem I'm having is when I view it in Edge, it seems to be missing some of the formatting (headers aren't centered anymore, some specific text I have labeled as a quote and deliberately decided to not Justify the text becomes Justified like the main body text).

Since the EPUB passed the validator, I published it.

Does anyone have an idea why this is happening? Why would the HTML files work great and Abode can read the EPUB and interpret the CSS file perfectly, but Edge can't?

Im attaching a file with 3 different views so you can see how Edge loses the formatting. View Edge DE and BN

The quote HTML:

For we are his
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand, that we should walk in them.

—Ephesians 2:10

The quote CSS:
p.MsoIntenseQuote, li.MsoIntenseQuote, div.MsoIntenseQuote
{
    margin-top:1em;
    margin-right:4em;
    margin-bottom:1em;
    margin-left:4em;
    text-align:center;
    text-indent:0em;
    border:none;
    padding:0em;
    font-style:italic;
}
p.MsoIntenseQuoteCxSpFirst, li.MsoIntenseQuoteCxSpFirst, div.MsoIntenseQuoteCxSpFirst
{
    margin-top:1em;
    margin-right:0em;
    margin-bottom:0em;
    margin-left:0em;
    text-align:center;
    text-indent:0em;
    border-top:.1em solid;
    padding:.25em;
    font-style:italic;
}
p.MsoIntenseQuoteCxSpLast, li.MsoIntenseQuoteCxSpLast, div.MsoIntenseQuoteCxSpLast
{
    margin-top:0em;
    margin-right:0em;
    margin-bottom:1em;
    margin-left:0em;
    text-align:center;
    text-indent:0em;
    border-bottom:.1em solid;
    padding:0em;
    font-style:normal;
}

The first thing is: which reading system are you targeting? Edge is just a test environment, right? Or is this how people using Windows devices are reading ebooks these days? I always regard testing in browsers to be at best a preliminary approximation.

I regard Adobe DE and Readium on Chrome as my 2 most reliable testing platform on a Windows machine. Then I try Google Play Books, iBooks  and then test mobis on various kindle platforms.

I suspect that Edge uses a different rendering engine than the other browsers and might have different default settings for formatting. That might explain discrepancies. But the principles of responsive design dictate that you're not going to have pixel precision.
A quick look at your screenshot indicates that what renders in Edge looks pretty close to the other rendering.

You would need to give the CSS code and what features are different/missing for me to give any better information. It looks like your project is not commercial and maybe that's why you worry about Edge rendering because you think people might open it up in a browser.  But I test a lot of ebooks, and I don't think I've ever tested tested on Edge.


This title is not currently available for purchase? I have been primarily reading eBooks using Play Books on my Android tablet, however today I tried out the Amazon Kindle app and tried to download some of their free eBooks to test it out and compare the two applications.

However, whenever I try and get an eBook through the Kindle app I see "Available for download now" in the main list but when I tap on a title I get the message "This title is not currently available for purchase" as follows;

This currently seems to be affecting everything that I tap on in the Kindle app. Have I done something wrong? How can I "purchase" a free eBook through the Kindle app on Android?

It looks like this is an Amazon based issue.

This book is currently unavailable because there is an issue with its description, content, or formatting.
We are working with the publisher to fix the issue. As always, we value customer feedback.

Note that is book is avaiable at Wikisource & PG


How to hide/delete/ignore a specfic span type I am generating HTML output for ePub from LaTeX source.
But, am having difficulty eliminating the "Chapter " at the start of each chapter. So, wondering if there is an easy way to tell the HTML reader that this is some form of comment so as to not display this in the output?
Chapter&#x00A0;1

Ideally, I'd like to eliminate the
 that follows this as well, but not sure that that would be easy.
Notes:

The command line tool I am using htlatex which takes a .tex file and produces HTML.

If you have an html editor which supports wild card or RegEx search and replace like Adobe Dreamweaver you could delete these out of the source code very quickly.  See image below-

Also you can go to RegEx tester sites like these to form the most effective search expression for your needs. http://regex101.com/


Does a screensaver serve any purpose on eink displays? I have a Hanvon ereader with a first generation Vizplex E-ink display. The device comes with a screensaver, which just loads some pictures after some time. Does this serve a purpose, such as to prevent burn-in, similar to the purpose of screensavers on CRT computer screens?

Technically it isn't a screensaver since the images are static (unless of course the device cycles through images at regular intervals). Either way, e-ink doesn't suffer from burn-in, so it really isn't necessary.

What a screensaver (we'll call it that) does do is show that the device is sleeping, so it will not respond to commands (either via touchscreen or buttons, depending on the device).


Is there a guide for copyright for countries other than the US? I've seen some questions that deal with copyright issues and it is clear that this is an international group and we could all benefit from having access to info about copyright as it relates to our own country. I'm in the US and I'm pretty well versed on copyright for a non-lawyer, but laws in different countries will obviously vary.

If we are using, creating, transferring, buying, or loaning ebooks, copyright applies, so it would make sense in this group.

Since this issue will be important to this group, I found a couple of resources that will explain copyright terms in different countries.

The data on the first site hasn't been updated in a while but it does include info on fair use.
Foreign Copyright Laws
Tree-view chart on Foreign Copyright Law

The good thing about the above site is that it is exhaustively cited so people can at least see where they can get started in researching their own copyright questions.

There is also good ol' wikipedia with a list of country's copyright lengths.
List of countries' copyright lengths

If you know of others, add them and we can build a useful resource.


What is the correct term for eBook? According to Wikipedia there are several variations of the term; e-book, eBook, e-Book, ebook, digital book, or even e-edition.  Is there anyone that is most widely accepted or used?

Donald Knuth, inventor of TeX, writes on a related word:

A note on email versus e-mail
Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write "non-zero" and "soft-ware" instead of "nonzero" and "software"; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling "e-mail'". Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form "email" has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, "email" has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England—but for an entirely different reason.)

Extending the principle, there is no question that "e-book" (and also "Ebook" and "eBook") will go out of style shortly.  The only real question is if "ebook" will stick or if we will end up on just "book".  It's instructive to note that if someone tells me to mail them a document, I will reach for my computer and not for a paper envelope.


Are there any specific features that I should look for in an eBook reading application? I am a beginner to eBooks, and as somebody who has been "outside" of eBooks I've only ever heard of Amazon's Kindle and seen a variety of options for purchase on Google Play.

I have recently purchased an Android tablet. I want to start buying my reading material as eBooks, but first I need an application to read them! Having looked, there are various applications available that all support different features like web browsers or text to speech.

Are there any specific features that I should look for in an eBook reading application?

To add to already good answers:

NOTEs:

"[Phone]" marks features that have more impact and usefulness on a smartphone and may be less important on a tablet.
I won't delve into content management/library organization features (e.g. dealing with multiple books), as that warrants its own Q&A in my opinion, and was also mentioned as a bullet in Jason Down's answer. If Jason doesn't mind, I can expand in my answer.

Readability/UI.

Night reading mode
[Phone] Optionally hideable UI elements to free up screen (menus, navigation, buttons, Android notification bar).

Good design usually shows miniature clock and battery indicator in the corner, that way you can still see those 2 important notification bar info indicators while reading without the bar taking up space.

[Phone] Support for locking the reader in a landscape/portrait mode for when you accidentally flip your phone sideways - or vise versa, ability to choose the orientation of reading independent of OS.
(already noted in another answer, but so critical I have to mention here as well): Support for customized fonts, and if possible, colors.
Disable CSS (seems like a small deal, till you meet an ebooks where the publisher evidently fell in love with Geocities style of content design :)
Support for reading books aloud (Text-to-Speech)
Ability to select text, and copy it or share it to another Android app.

Navigation:

Ability to advance through the text by tapping large areas of the screen (typical good design does page up on clicking left 1/3 of the screen, page down on right 1/3 of the screen)
Easy random jumping (go to page #N, go to table of contents in single clicks)
Full text search!
Book progress indicator, ideally with 2 features: clicking on it in the middle lets you actually advance into the book to where you pointed; and being able to hide.
Bookmarks!
[Phone] Ability to page up/down by using volume up/down hardware keys. Critical for single-handed reading on a phone.
Autoscroll if you like that feature (personally, I never use it)

Supported content - probably most important!:

Support for varying e-book formats.

Your main reader app should at the very least support the major ones (ideally, most of: txt, html, epub, prc/Mobi, pdf).

Support for your main e-book format (e.g. if 90% of your ebooks are in Amazon Kindle format, it's important
Support for DRM on books you freqently use may be important for some.

If it's important for you, support for your preferred ebook vendor (Google Play Books; Kindle/Amazon book store, Apple, Samsung).
If you read ebooks in other languages, support for popular encodings for them (nothing more annoying than trying to read a Russian ebook and finding the app doesn't support KOI-8).
Support for network- or cloud-based libraries
Related to the last one: ability to sync up the book positions/bookmarks between different devices running the same app (I know FBReader does that via a helper app, not sure if Kindle reader or Google Books does).
Ability to share a book via Android share menu, from within the reader.
Ability to manage book collections/libraries, if that's important to you

Reality check features

Price (and if the app has a free/paid version, which features are important and in the non-free version). For example, Calibre for Android is a paid app (Windows one is free)
Last but not the least speed of loading and speed of reading. On my old phone, Kindle App was absolutely horrendously slow, to the point of being unusable.

Less popular but occasionally cool:

Amazon X-Ray
On the fly translation. I know Google Books and FBReader support it, but seems more of a gimmic, IMHO.

If you don't plan on editing your eBooks on a PC, you may want to consider editing abilities of the app

Editing metadata
Editing content.


Why can't I remove books from my device? I used to be able to remove books from my Sony PRS-T1 reader using Calibre (either one by one or en masse). I am running a fully updated version of Windows 7, and I have the latest version of Calibre (1.20), and tried today to remove some books (both one at a time, and multiples at a time), and I keep getting the following error when I try:

  calibre, version 1.19.0 ERROR: Error: Error communicating with device

  [Error 5] Access is denied: u'M:\Sony_Reader\media\books\The
  Zombie Survival Guide_ Complete Prot - Max Brooks.epub'

  Traceback (most recent call last):   File
  "site-packages\calibre\gui2\device.py", line 85, in run   File
  "site-packages\calibre\gui2\device.py", line 596, in _delete_books
  File "site-packages\calibre\devices\usbms\driver.py", line 345, in
  delete_books WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied:
  u'M:\Sony_Reader\media\books\The Zombie Survival Guide_ Complete
  Prot - Max Brooks.epub'

While the filename listed will change (depending on the book I am trying to delete), the message is the same - I can't delete ebooks from my device.

Is there anything I can do to solve this error?

It might be that the TRS-1 plugin for Calibre is broken, or that Calibre deletion is broken in the version you have. I would try to delete files outside of Calibre using the steps here, and if that works blame things on Calibre, file a bug-report and wait for the next version.


Is there a detailed guide for creating an ebook for Kindle in HTML/CSS I want to be able to create an ebook on my own for Kindle. I want to do this in HTML, and then later use KindleGen and KindlePreviewer for generating a .mobi file and previewing. I've looked around the web for guidance, but while they do have basic instructions, such as creating page breaks, including text, and including basic CSS, they do not seem to go into much detail.

What I need is a guide that might help me create CSS and HTML for an ebook that comes out perfectly in all versions of Kindle, is there any such guide in the form of a book or a web page available out there? Something that helps me include custom bullets and images, stuff like that, and helps me iron out the kinks I get when I try to use the usual HTML/CSS for my ebook. Such as a current problem that I am having of custom bullets appearing shifted way away from the text, and the image of these custom bullets appearing with different sizes in different versions of Kindle.

(I know basic HTML and CSS and willing to learn as much as I need to create that perfect ebook)

Your best bet is to start with a solid epub file and run that through either KindleGen or Kindle Previewer. Other tools such as Sigil and Calibre are convenient, but often cause problems down the road by inserting their own bits of code. If you want to be certain that you know what is causing your problems, it's always best to do it yourself.

The single best resource for creating a solid, valid epub file is the IDPF's epub 3.0 specification. Once you feel like you've gotten it pretty close, use epubcheck to find and iron out the kinks. A valid epub 3.0 file should transform seamlessly into a valid mobi/KF8. Once you have the valid epub, you can begin your Kindle-specific styling. Make sure you pay attention to the specific requirements of the Kindle Publishing Guidelines when you are doing so.

For basic getting started guides, you might check out Harrison Ainsworth's "EPUB Format Construction Guide." It's a bit dated by now, and only deals with epub 2.0.1, but it will cover the basics pretty well. O'Reilly has a book on EPUB 3 Best Practices that's not too shabby, but it might go into more detail than you need to get started.

Do a bit of reading, but not too much, and then find a non-DRM'ed epub file and tear it apart (just change the filename from .epub to .zip and unzip it) to see what makes it tick. Change stuff, re-zip is (how you do that will depend on the operating system you use) run it through epubcheck, and see what error messages you get. Getting a valid book is quite doable with minimal experience.

As far as styling goes: there are lots of quirks in reading systems and devices. If you want to only do Kindle, you're cutting out a lot of potential issues, but each of Amazon's devices has its own quirks as well, so be prepared to test a lot, and ask lots of questions when problems come up.

Best of luck!


What information does my Kindle share with Amazon? One of my Kindles spends most of it's time in the car.  Most books are loaded to it from my PC, via Calibre. I almost never turn the WiFi on because it just burns up the batteries looking for a connection.

When I do turn the WiFi on it seems to stumble all over itself trying to do something. It can take an hour or more, and often requires more than one hard reboot to get it working again. In my imagination it is telling Amazon, what books I loaded on to it from Smashwords.

According to Amazon.com Privacy Notice, they don't track anything from Kindle, but this seems unlikely to me. What information does my Kindle tell Amazon via the WiFi?

Hard to guess what information sends or what the device can do when connected via WiFi when this information is not open and probable it will not be.

Take as an example this incident( article excerpt/ my emphasis):

  Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle

  ...

  Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless
  network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic
  books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish.

  ...

and also this incident where the account was also closed(excerpt/my emphasis):

  Why did amazon close a woman’s account and delete all her kindle books?

  ...

  According to Amazon’s terms of use, “Kindle Content is licensed, not
  sold, to you by the Content Provider.” It states that “Risk of loss
  for Kindle Content transfers when you download or access the Kindle
  Content.”

  ...

This are by no means isolated, and are a far cry from the Privacy Notice you mentioned, and made me keep always the Wi-Fi off and backup my documents.


How to create an ePub full-page image which properly reflows I'm interested in taking some text and making an ePub e-book out of it. It has full-page images in it. Is there some way in ePub to make an image become a full-page image that properly gets reflowed when the font size changes? That is, I want the image to always take up a full page, but when the font size changes, the text should reflow so that the image is still full page, but doesn't break the text off on the previous page.

I'm describing this very poorly.

When I was a kid, I would read the novels my father had acquired when he was a kid. Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Rick Brant, Ken Holt, Tom Swift /Jr., etc.

These books had a style of illustration, where every so often there would be a full-page illustration. It had a line from the text of book below it in italics. It was usually within a page or two of where the text it illustrated came from.

I'd like to recreate this in an ePub book I'm formatting. There are pull-out illustrations, which don't need to be at a particular place in the text. If reading the book on a device which displays a page at a time, what I want to have happen is for the text to reach the bottom of a page, you "flip" the page, there is a full-page illustration, you "flip" again, and you're back reading the text. It shouldn't matter where the page breaks are, the text should flow to the end of a page, then the illustration, and then the text resumes. If I change the font size (because my eyes are getting worse), it should still be a full-page illustration that doesn't cause the previous page of text to break off half-way down.

Is this possible?

Thanks…

Either put the images in their own html files or use the code above, page-break-before, or -after.

In these situations I generally use the css height: 100%, on both the container and the image itself, so if you use

you could create this css rule that does what you want:

div.fullscreenimage , div.fullscreenimage img {height: 100%;}


Will selling on Amazon significantly limit readership of free ebook? If an author wants to release a free ebook, how many readers (10%, 75%, ...) is he/she likely to lose by choosing to release only on Amazon and not as a more accessible pdf, html, etc. format and putting in on his/her own website? Let's assume the author will do one or the other but not both.

I guess it is also possible that there will be a net increase of readership due to the additional exposure (although with the number of books on Amazon I'm not sure how much exposure there would actually be).

In the end, I am interested to see any research that has been done in this area.

The answer is closely tied to the author's purpose. Amazon can provide significant exposure. From the question's comments, the purpose may be to track the number of readers.

If the real purpose is simply to track the number of readers, Google Analytics or other tracking systems can give you that information with free software. There are other options (meaning other public websites) available which track downloads for you.

On the other hand, tracking your own downloads on a relatively unknown web site as compared to tracking a LOT of downloads on amazon... if you want more exposure, go to the established venues such as amazon.

Wherever you place the book, do work within that site's paradigm or ecosystem. There are ways to get better exposure on Amazon, for example, with lots of books and online tutorials available. If you're going through another venue, find out how to best work within that venue.

Consider multiple venues, multiple e-book file formats, and so on. This becomes an exercise in online marketing or search engine optimization. If tracking is the important consideration, research the various download-tracking options. Once you understand the tracking options available, that may help direct your decision as to how to go about distributing the book or books.

If you have a specific book, niche, or genre in mind, do some searches for free e-books in that genre. That may help you understand the expectations of the book's potential audience. If they're already out there looking for similar books, that fact may guide you in where and how to make it available.

Another way to look at your question is, "How many readers do I gain by putting it on Amazon?" If the book is free, the author is surely under no obligation to publish it EXCLUSIVELY on Amazon. Use amazon in addition to the other options.


How to convert msword to epub? I need to convert a first draft of my book to .epub format. What's the best way to do it and get a clean looking book

Save your draft as a .docx file and convert it with Calibre to an epub.
(For best results make sure that each chapter title is formatted using a heading style, e.g., Heading 1.)


list-style-type: none; does not convert from epub to mobi I have a book written in epub, and have some lines written with ul style. The styles.css includes the following:

ul.Q {
margin-left: 0.0em;
list-style-type: none;
margin-top: 0.8em;
}

li.Q {
text-indent: -2em;
margin-left: 2.5em;
margin-top: 0.0em;
}

The main document has a reference to this in the header:

<link href="../Styles/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>

and the following lines:

“There is no one righteous;

no, not one.

In epub this works as expected. Here is a screenshot from Sigil:

Now, if I upload the epub to KDP much of the other formatting does not survive the conversion. So I converted it to .mobi using Calibre and uploaded that. It seems to work perfectly everywhere else, except that here the screenshot looks like this:

Note the bullet points. This is a screenshot from KDP's online previewer. On my Kindle, it has the same issue. For some reason, .mobi is not respecting the list-style-type: none.

I have run my stylesheet through an online checker and there are no flaws. And other elements of the style sheet are working in this same chapter, so I know it is linked correctly.

So the question is: how do you make .mobi respect the list-style-type: none? Or is there a different workaround?

Update: according to this forum mobi does not support list styles. So what workarounds  do people do for this? I guess the right thing (since I don't want the bullets) is just to use a div?
Any thoughts?

At our shop we create a separate set of EPUB source files to convert to MOBI, and we perform a bunch of automated hacks on them before zipping and converting so the eventual MOBI file will be formatted correctly. In the case of list-style-type: none, our hack is to replace the li with a p and the ul with a div.


I am looking for a software or a way to list, extract, count, in short, analyze a book which is in epub or pdf format As someone who is interested in learning languages, I want to find a way to know the each word and their repetitions inside a book that I am going to read.

Here is one way to find the number of words in an epub file sorted by their frequency, with the words used the most at the top of the list.

This is done on a Mac laptop and will also work on Unix hosts.

The overview of the process:

Install Calibre
Use the ./ebook-convert command in Calibre to convert the epub file to text
Transform the entire text file to lowercase (so "Word" and "word" match)
Convert punctuation to whitespace (so "period." and "period " match)
Convert all whitespace to a new line.  This puts each word on its own line.
Exclude any blank lines from the list
Sort the list of words alphabetically
Pipe (send) that list of words through uniq -c You now have a count of how often each word appears.
Sort the result in numerical order.  If you use the sort command with the -r argument, the most frequent words are at the top.

Here's an example of steps (2) through (9).  The head command lists the top ten words in the final output.

$ ./ebook-convert ./book.epub ./book.txt
$ cat   ./book.txt | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr "“" " " | tr "”" " " | tr "," " " | tr "." " " | tr " " "\n" | grep -v ^$ |  sort | uniq -c | sort -gr  | head
 5303 the
 1960 and
 1934 of
 1910 to
 1874 a
 1168 i
 1067 you
  844 in
  812 that
  703 it
 $

The result is pretty boring.  The word 'the" appears 5303 times, while the word 'it' appears 703 times.

I suspect in most books the most common words are the tiny conjunctions, articles, prepositions and pronouns.  Perhaps on something that is not a novel this might be more interesting.

Good luck!


Keeping lines together in ePub I want to publish my book as an epub to Google Play Books. It contains multiple choice questions in the first half of the book, followed by the same questions with the answers highlighted and explanations in the other half.

I have used Calibre to make an ePub version with some success, however there's a problem that the questions may overlap over two pages. The setting in Microsoft Word, "keep lines together", allows me to do this on Word and this remains working when I convert it to an ePub using Calibre and read it with Adobe Digital Editions however it does not work with Google Play. I have explored the settings in Calibre (thinking it is likely to be there) with no luck.

Is there an ePub converting software that allows me to force keeping lines together when I publish it on Google Play Books?

You can use page-break-inside: avoid; in your CSS to keep information from breaking across pages where possible in a reflowable epub file, though not all reading systems will honor it. Another option would be using page-break-before: always; to force a page break before the content that you want to keep together. This is somewhat more widely supported, but still not universal. In the end, pagination is a relic of print and not something native to digital, so trying to force it might not be the most efficient way to go. Are there other ways you can accomplish the same end, perhaps with hyperlinks?


writing inline footnotes for html to mobi conversion using calibre I'm generating html code that I convert to .mobi format using Calibre.  I have implemented endnotes with backlinks as follows:

text.html:

this is some text [1]

footnotes/1.html:

Here is a footnote [..]

For Calibre's HTML to .mobi conversion, what HTML code should I write to use in-line footnotes instead of endnotes?

Thanks

I've figured it out. To make the inline footnote works, must put the footnotes in the "Footnotes" section. Here is the example:
I have the file: "HDN is the best.html"

    <title>HDN is the best</title>

Best of HDN

[1] HDN is the best

[2] HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

HDN is the best

Footnotes

[1] It's true.

[2] It's double true.

There, just convert the file "HDN is the best.html" and see for yourself.
Now here is the tip: when you convert this file "HDN is the best.html" to mobi file, Calibre may count footnotes as chapters, that'd be a mess for your table of content. So you need to prevent Calibre from doing this by using the cmd (using the option --toc-threshold 0) instead of using UI, here is the cmd:
ebook-convert.exe "E:\temp\TempMisc\HDN is the best.html" "E:\temp\TempMisc\HDN is the best.mobi" --toc-threshold 0

location of ebook-convert.exe is .\[Your installed Calibre folder]\Calibre\ebook-convert.exe
Note: this tested and work on my Kindle Paperwhite (second generation), but doesn't work on Kindle app for my iPhone. But it's good enough for me because I read mainly on Kindle Paperwhite.


Kindle paperwhite needs repair I have a kindle paperwhite and it continues to give me the message that it needs repair.Have tried to reset it but it does not respond. Any suggestions?

I searched all over and could not find the solution until I came across a russian site http://kindle.zzweb.ru/paperwhite/repair/. Basicly it sates this:

Connect the Kindle Paperwhite to a computer USB-cable.
Create an empty file in the root directory DO_FACTORY_RESTORE.
Safely disconnect the reader from your computer.
Reboot your device by holding the power button.

I did this and my kindle paperwhite did a factory reset and I was able to use it again. I had previously tried to format the drive and place a firmware update on the drive so I do not know if this will remove your books. Please try and back up your books if you can before you do this.
Hope this helps others.

Copied from: https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/2xojx2/how_to_fix_your_paperwhite_if_it_says_your_kindle/


Using eReader to display maps Is there a way to get map data (for example from OpenStreetMaps) on my eReader to access it in a user friendly way?

I've already thought about two ways to display maps on my reader:

Generate one big PDF file and scroll around in it
Generate Images from the regions I'd like and put together up an epub-File so I can browse through the pages.

Both ways are not really a good way to display maps. While the PDF-solution would allow me to move and zoom in a more natural way, I'm not sure if my eReader would be able to handle such a big file. A "map book" to browse would be even harder to navigate in...

Since I find scrolling and zooming on an ebook cumbersome, what I would do with a large image/map is divide it in smaller pieces, slightly smaller than my screen resolution (30 or so pixel less -> 15 on each side). After that generate separate HTML pages, for each image part, and put in hyper-links from page to page on the sides (alternatively I would investigate if I could make the image selectable using image maps).

If the map was divided in 9 pieces:

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

Displaying number 5 would look like:

     2
 +-------+
 |       |
 |       |
 |       |
4|       |6
 |       |
 |       |
 |       |
 +-------+
     8

Selecting the numbers would get you to that piece of the map. You could extend this with numbers near the corners to go the diagonally linked image pieces.

As with maps printed in books (with numbers to the top and bottom of a page with the page numbers connecting map pieces), you could have a range of pixels overlap between the map-parts.

If you have many pieces, or this is not a one off, you should probably write a program that takes care of the division of the image, the HTML generation and combining in an EPUB.


Is there online eBook authoring tool which can produce ePub and PDF formats? I would prefer an online tool so that I am not tied to a particular computer for adding content. Additionally I would expect an online collaboration tool ( distribute chapters to authors and editors) to collaborate with other authors and editors. Exporting to ePub and PDF is a must have requirement.

I have heard of 2epub but I have never used it nor would I believe you would get a good quality ebook.  I would suggest doing this with InDesign that will allow you to create .epub or .pdf files.

You can export as an .epub file:

Export to .pdf file:


I have two error messages that are affecting many of my ePub 3 files I am stumped! I have two validation errors left to correct. Unfortunately, they impact many pages.

1.ERROR: epub9.epub/OEBPS/j83643-Flower-Fairy_-epubBody-1.xhtml(26,162): ‘OEBPS/image/illus010b_clip_blurb.png': referenced resource is not declared in the OPF manifest.

It is in the manifest under images. It is also listed in the images in the image folder. I checked j83643-Flower-Fairy_-epubBody-1.xhtml and it is in there as well. So What do I do next. This error message is given for most of the images. The scanned images with long names are ok.
I see no difference in their context.

Then the error message changes for the same images: WARNING: epub9.epub: items (OEBPS/image/illus010b_clip_blurb.jpg) exists in the zip file, but is not declared in the OPF file.

I don’t know why the semantics changed. It also gives this error for some of the audio and smil files.

If I could fix one example for each type of error, I could fix them all. I have checked the image, audio, smil, and xhtml files. They are listed in all of them and in the content opf.

Hope someone out there can help me,
Janis

The first error message is telling you that the file referenced is not declared in the <manifest> section of the content.opf file. The second one is telling you that the file exists in your epub, but is not declared in the <manifest> section of your content.opf file. The important thing to note is that in the error messages you listed, there are two different files being talked about:

image/illus010b_clip_blurb.png
image/illus010b_clip_blurb.jpg

See the two different file extensions? That's probably part of the problem. The file j83643-Flower-Fairy_-epubBody-1.xhtml is looking for a png file and not finding one. Meanwhile, there's a jpg file of that name that isn't declared in your <manifest>.

The first thing to do is to open up the content.opf file and check to see what it's expecting to be in there. If the png is listed in the <manifest>, simply converting the image from a jpg to a png should make your error go away, as the xhtml file would be able to find the file it's looking for, and the content.opf file would no longer be finding an unexpected jpg file.

If the png is not listed, you'll have to either add an entry for it and convert the image to a png, or add an entry for the jpg and change the <img> in the xhtml file to refer to the jpg file.

If your file paths and names are all correct and the file is in the <manifest>, I'd suggest checking the encoding on the content.opf file to be sure that it's utf-8, as using ANSI encoding can cause some weird errors sometimes.


What are criteria for determining whether an ebook file is pirated or non-infringing? After reading an  earlier question which was marked closed as off-topic, ( Many sites propose free or cheap ebooks? Which are legitimate? )  I want to ask it in a different way.

What are some criteria for a consumer to determine  whether a purchased or downloaded ebook file is legitimately bought and that provenance is verifiable?

Are there any methods or immutable file properties which could be used to show provenance?

If a publisher offers a non-DRM ebook for sale directly to consumer, what steps can the publisher do to reassure consumers that it it authorized to sell this ebook? (not just for today, but for 10 or 20 years down the road).

My first solution is to compare the author's website with the distributor or publisher website. But in some cases a publisher may authorize a company (like Amazon or Smashwords) to distribute through companies with different names in other countries -- sometimes the author or publisher may not know all the specific names of channels or might not have gotten around to listing all the sanctioned channels.

There is no real way we have had cases where major ebook places sold books that later were shown they did not have the right to ..

e.g. Amazon and the copy of 1984 they pulled back see here

  An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.


Which major eBook reading applications support JavaScript? I've been trying to find an eBook reader for Windows that fully supports EPUB3 (i.e. allows JavaScript) but I've had no such luck. So does anybody have at least one such application for each of:

Windows 10
Max OS X
Android
iOS

I don't believe any reader 'fully' supports EPUB3, in part because the EPUB3 and its satellite specs (e.g. annotation, distributable objects, widgets) are so broad that it's not viable for any one reader to implement it all.

On Windows, your best options may be Adobe Digital Editions and Calibre. More detail below.

The Readium project is an open attempt to provide a framework for reader developers with the widest possible support. The Readium Chrome app is a Readium EPUB3 reader, but now that Google has deprecated Chrome Apps it is no longer maintained.

There are readers that support a large proportion of Javascript, though not everything. And this support is poorly documented and hard to debug:

iBooks supports Javascript on "iBooks 1.5 or later and iOS 5.0 or later; macOS X Mavericks 10.9 or later". This internal Apple document has details on JS support. It's also possible to enable dev tools (aka Web Inspector) in iBooks.
The R2 Reader, which is essentially Readium, is available for iOS and Android. Readium uses the operating system's default browser engine, and as such supports a lot of Javascript.
Adobe Digital Editions uses a derivative of Readium SDK for its rendering engine. So it supports Javascript in a similar way. ADE is flawed in many ways (I find its CSS support very patchy).
Calibre is an open-source ereader and ebook-management app for Windows, Mac and Linux. It has a complex interface, because it can do so much, so it's not for everyone. It seems to support Javascript and CSS well.
The AZARDI reader from Infogrid Pacific supports Javascript. I find its UI confusing and its CSS support patchy, too.
Microsoft's Edge browser once opened epubs and, in theory, supported Javascript. However, Edge's EPUB reader's built-in Javascript heavily restructured the DOM of an epub document, which often breaks any Javascript in the epub itself. Microsoft removed epub support from Edge in October 2019. It's unlikely that epub support will return in future when Edge switches its rendering engine to Chromium.

At the moment, Google Play Books documentation says it does not support any Javascript:

  Google Play Books doesn't support non-standard audio or video tags, or interactive functionality such as that enabled by JavaScript code.

FYI, this Ebooks question from a few years ago is similar.

UPDATE Jiminy Panoz maintains the excellent Blitz framework, and he says the following ereaders support Javascript. I've not tested these myself.

  Kobo on iOS and Android
  Readium-based apps in general e.g. CloudShelf Reader, Bookari, Helicon, Lis-a, LEA reader, Infinity Reader.
  Lektz, Gitden on Android/iOS
  Reasily on Android
  Vitalsource Bookshelf on desktop
  Bookworm on Linux

For more information on various aspects of reader support, see his support data here.


Using K2pdfopt to prepare a document for printing Can I use K2pdfopt to take a PDF, crop it to the tightest bounding box, and generate a new PDF with 2 consecutive (portrait) pages set side-by-side on the same (landscape) page such that they are scaled to maximally fill an A4 page (preserving aspect ratio)?

If so, what command line options will allow me to achieve this?

By removing margins and such re-scaling I can save a lot of paper when I need to print a document.

This is commonly called "2-up" page placement, and, no, k2pdfopt cannot do 2-up page placement by itself.  Sorry.  But you can run k2pdfopt in "fit-width" mode with the width and height of the output page set for normal portrait like so:

k2pdfopt -ds 2 -w 8.5in -h 11in -mode fw -ls- ...

This will strip the margins and create 8.5x11-inch pages.  (The -ds 2 scales up the source document so it will fit the full width of a portrait page.)  Then you can use CutePDF's print-to-PDF driver (free download) to print that 8.5x11-inch PDF 2-up by selecting 2 pages per sheet in the printer preferences.

Or you can use Coherent PDF's command-line tool (free for personal use).  In this case, I use cpdf's -twoup-stack option, so I want the k2pdfopt output pages to be exactly half the size of an 11x8.5 page.

k2pdfopt -w 5.5in -h 8.5in -mode fw -ls- myfile.pdf
cpdf -twoup-stack myfile_k2opt.pdf -o temp.pdf
cpdf -rotate 90 temp.pdf -o final.pdf

Examples here.


Indesign -> Kindlegen -> Kindle flattens TOC? I'd like 4 levels of hierarchy in my Kindle navigational TOC (aka "logical TOC" in Kindle Publishing Guidelines terminology), but when I do this:

1. InDesign CC → File → Export → (choose my nested TOC)
2. `KindleGen in.epub -o out.azw`

the "Kindle for PC" software only shows the first level of headings, effectively flattening out levels 2, 3, and 4. However, I know Kindle for PC can show at least 3 levels, as I see in another Kindle book in my library.

Interestingly, if I click Kindle Previewer → View → NCX View, I see the nesting properly. Do I need Indesign 6 with the Kindle Export for InDesign CS6?

It seems that the NCX is limited to two levels of hierarchy. I tested the actual hardware for the Fire HDX, Kindle, and Kindle Paperwhite. They all had the same results. Kindle for PC only shows one level. Lastly, I realized that the multiple-levels displayed in Kindle for PC (in a separate author's book) worked because the author (apparently) submitted a PDF, not an EPUB.


Batch conversion of arbitrary formats to djvu, mobi, epub - not with calibre I have a few thousand files, mostly PDF, many postscript, that I need to convert to several other formats. I can't use calibre (don't get me started) - I have considered writing scripts to dump pages to image files and using dubious cli programs to compile the images to these formats, but thought I would ask here before reinventing the wheel. Hopefully someone has an elegant solution. Epub is just zipped html with a specific file layout, the others ( djvu, mobi ) seem a bit different.

I've been converting PDF to other formats for over 3 years. I've converted at least 20 books.

A PDF file is not easily convertible, except for text paragraphs. I have a lot of experience extracting text from PDF. PDF is an endpoint, not meant for further processing or extracting of text. You will find you have a LOT of problems extracting images and tables. Images generally don't extract at all. Tables will be really messed up and converting to other formats will require a LOT of manual cleanup.

That said, if you want to extract the text I found this site to be better than others: http://online-convert.com. It supports many input and output formats. And I tried at least 5 other sites and 5 other OCR programs for the PC.

You will not get the accuracy you want from any program as far as I know. There might be better programs, like Abbyy Finereader but they are not free and there is no such thing as perfect conversion from PDF to anything else, especially for images and tabular data.

Books of fiction are easy to extract the text from because they are just wrapped paragraphs with few or no images and no tabular data. So to test your conversion, find a more challenging book with tabular data and images and see how it goes.

Some PDF books have the text inside them and extract fairly well. Some PDF files are just a bunch of images, one scanned page per image. For these you need OCR.

Also, there is no OCR that is 100% accurate. You might get 90-95% accuracy. But we don't know which letters or words are inaccurate, so that means we have to check every word in the output. This takes a lot of time.


Rich e-book authoring, other than iBooks Author? i am writing (or should i say, developing) an ebook on iBooks Author with all the cool features it provides. After this I wanted to do a version of it for other platforms, such as the Kindle. From what I know, there is no way of creating a book that has the ability to receive user interaction (eg a quiz or that kind of thing).

Do any of you know any form of doing this?

Well it is not entirely true. I have made some ePub3 eBooks with user interaction back in 2013. You can use JavaScript to do the job. Problem was than there are wasn't many readers which could use it. Now we have readium and ADE4 with ePub3 so things may be different. Still it was for ePub3 not kindle eBooks.


Can you defragment a Kindle Paperwhite? Different websites say different things about defragmenting Kindles, the ones I found are all several years old, and some say defragmenting is a poor idea compared to re-indexing.

How can you defragment a Paperwhite?  Or is it a bad idea?

To defragment a filesystem you need a software that does that.

All you have to do to defragment the memory of your Kindle Paperwhite is to connect it to a PC/Mac and run a defragmentation utility on that drive.

Edit: Being a flash drive though, as @Daniel suggests, it's actually not a good idea to defragment it, because there will not be any real benefit in terms of performance and actually doing it many times will shorten the life of the memory of your device.

There is always something to learn out there!


How to download ebooks from Kindle to PC? I'm am trying to download some Kindle eBooks that I have bought to my laptop. I tried connecting my Kindle to my PC via USB and then try to access the files from there, but I can't find the files that actually contain the book. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if this just isn't possible. How can I download eBooks from my Kindle to my PC?

The Kindle is a Kindle Paperwhite and the laptop is an Ubuntu. Not sure if that matters, though.

Calibre, on the other hand allows one to edit epub books, convert between file types and generally maintain your ebook library on your computer. You can then send them to your various readers. Some of those features require removal of DRM to do but there are many public domain ebooks.


E-reader that syncs progress across Linux and Android? I've found some e-readers that support Linux and Android such as FBReader, but are there any that can sync progress across the two?

There's a way, but it's kinda tricky.

There's a bunch of android apps which sync the progress across the devices (like Moon+ Reader). So, if you can set up an Android emulator on your Linux machine, that should do the trick.


Is there a way to read DjVu files on a 4th gen Kindle? DJVU format is a very good format both in terms of file size an readability.

Is there a way that I can read DjVu files on a 4th generation Kindle?

There is no out of the box possibility.

The easiest way would be to convert the file to pdf, of course this would make the DjVu advantages disappear.

The alternative is to modify your Kindle by installing a compatible reader. One possibility that is still actively developed is Librerator (which is also a superior for viewing larger pdfs). You will however have to jailbreak your Kindle and install KUAL, which will possibly void warranty.


German TTS for kindle PC Is it possible to listen an ebook with another language then english ?
If yes, how can I switch to german for example ?

The German Amazon (Amazon.de) is a good source for (German) Kindle audio books.  Die website wird www.amazon.de, dann verwenden Sie den Suchbegriff (auf Deutsch) "Kindle-Shop" --> "hörbücher kindle".

Ich hoffe, dies wird Ihnen helfen -- wenn du einen Kindle hast!