The Random Ebooks Questions Post

[elf]

Ask your questions! Get answers! Maybe even useful answers!

Ask anything! Ask about ereaders, or filetypes, or conversion methods, or where to find books, or which authors don't like ebooks, or what software works on which computers, or anything else ebook-related. Preferably, put the question, or part of it, in the subject line. That way, the questions will be easy to find, and new readers who show up can see if their question has been asked before.

Feel free to post links to your journal where you've spelled out your questions in detail (or just make a new post here; it's totally fine to make a long post about "thinking about ebook readers; what's the pros & cons of these two?")

Answer questions! If you know about a certain aspect of ebookery, jump in with answers!

Comments

.lit file reading?

[fizzyblogic]

I don't have an ebook reader yet (still saving up), so I read ebooks on my laptop (running Windows XP) and I have some .lit files a friend gave me but I'm sort of floundering about programs to read them. I have a Firefox extension to read epub files in the browser, and looked around for a lit one but couldn't find any. Should I go with Microsoft's Lit reader? Should I get Calibre and convert the files, and if so what's best to convert .lit files to in Calibre? Are there any other conversion programs to recommend?

I'm very, very new to ebooks, and tend to get overwhelmed when I try to research on Google. /o\

Re: .lit file reading?

[jumpuphigh]

calibre has an ereader built into it which makes it very convenient. So, you could use calibre to convert and read both. I don't know if it will read .lit and don't have any .lit files as once I convert, I usually delete the file I'm converting from. However, you can read epub files and converting with calibre is really quite simple.

Re: .lit file reading?

[elf]

Microsoft is the only company with an actual .lit reader; it's their proprietary format. (For all I know, there's a way to read them in Internet Explorer.) Calibre converts .lit to other ebook formats very well (.lit is its preferred source format; converts well to pretty much everything), and Convertlit and the GUI version are both free, simple programs that convert .lit files to .html files.

Convertlit will run portably on a flash drive. (So will Calibre, but it's a lot messier.)

Re: .lit file reading?

[eva]

As an alternative to portable running, I have installed Calibre on both my netbook and my desktop and synchronise the ebook folder as well as the library through Dropbox. Works great, even though the netbook is under Ubuntu and the desktop under Windows.

Re: .lit file reading?

[eva]

I would definitely recommend Calibre for the book sorting and archiving features alone. You can also use it to view epub files. I'd experiment around with the conversions it offers and see which formats you like best. I do much reading on a netbook, so I like to have formats that I can view in programs with a true fullscreen mode without any menu bars, so I might choose pdf or rtf. Sadly, as far as I can see, Calibre doesn't have such a mode in its internal viewer yet.

I'd recommend keeping the original files (Calibre does allow you to keep multiple formats of the same book in the archive). When you get a reader, you can then convert things to whatever format is recommended for that reader; Calibre supports a number of devices.