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

html and Calibre?

[stormcloude]

Cataloguing html books in Calibre just seems to turn them into zip files. Can I just put those on my ereader or do I need to convert them to something else first? If I need to convert them, what is the best format?

Also if I have two entries for the same book in Calibre is there a way to merge them?

Re: html and Calibre?

[eva]

Yes to the second question. I can't tell you the exact name of the menu entries since my system is in German, but you can select the books, rightclick them, and then go to the menu under "Edit Metadata" or similar. There should be an option "Combine book entries" or something like it. Remember which book you selected first and select the appropriate merging option.

Re: html and Calibre?

[stormcloude]

Great. I will play around with it more and see if I can figure it out. Thank you!

Re: html and Calibre?

[elf]

First question--you convert them to whatever format works best for your ebook reader. If you have an ebookwise (I looked at your profile), you convert to .rb for it.

Official advice is that you never, ever, EVER touch Calibre's database folder & archives; you convert-and-export to somewhere else. Someone who speaks code or database of Calibre's flavor could probably ignore that advice; for the rest of us, Calibre is an interface for changing ebooks from one place to ebooks of a different format (or the same format) somewhere else, and you don't touch its working files at all.

Re: html and Calibre?

[stormcloude]

I am in the process of getting a Sony 505 (OMG, Sony's repair service sucks!!) so eventually that's what I'll be converting files for.

But also to get books on the ebookwise, do you think I could convert files to rtf, then copy the rtf files elsewhere to another folder and use them in my ebookwise software? (Ebookwise is notoriously horrible at reading pdfs. That's the format I have the most trouble with for that particular device and finding a better and easier way to convert them would be awesome.)

Re: html and Calibre?

[elf]

For the Sony, you probably want .epub. (Some prefer .lrf, and I read a lot of just plain .rtf files. Because I'm lazy. But RTF doesn't allow for a table of contents or pictures.)

And yes--you can convert to .rtf or .html, export them to somewhere else on your hard drive, and run those files through ebookwise's library software.

*Everything* is awful with a lot of PDFs. The best PDF readers are things like the Kindle DX--which is only okay because it has a larger screen that leaves them readable.

Converting them well depends on how the PDF was made, not the conversion software; some PDF creation programs keep enough data in the file to convert them (like paragraph breaks and bold/italics); some have stripped out that info so when you convert, you get plain text with a hard return after every line.

Re: html and Calibre?

[stormcloude]

Actually I think the eBookwise is especially sensitive to pdf files-- mostly because it only accepts a limited number of simple fonts, so if you have anything out of the ordinary, it will really mess up your ebook. Lots of times quotemarks and apostrophes turn into gibberish characters in conversions I've done. I haven't noticed that in the (admittedly very few!) pdfs I've looked at in Calibre.

Re: html and Calibre?

[elf]

Followup: possibly the ebookwise only reads .imp, which Calibre can't do; you'd need to use another conversion program.