E-book conversion with Calibre

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Draft

Introduction

Calibre is a one stop solution to all your e-book needs. It is free, open source and cross-platform in design and works well on Linux, OS X and Windows.

Features

List of general features: Library Management - Format conversion (all major ebook formats can be converted from) - Syncing to ebook reader devices - Fetching news from the web and converting it into ebook form - Viewing many different ebook formats - Giving you access to your book collection over the internet using just a browser.

Converter: can create chapters out of single text using XPath expressions, add title image, title, author, data, etc.

Source formats: LIT, MOBI, EPUB, HTML, PRC, RTF, TXT, PDF. Some convert better than others, e.g. PDF pictures don't translate.

Output formats: EPUB, LRF, MOBI

Easy to install under Ubuntu (tested with 8.04 Hardy Heron and 9.04 Jaunty). You can do it with one command line.

Preparing input

MS word documents can be made into an e-book, but exporting these as HTML using the Web page, filtered option in Word 2007. In addition, we strongly suggest to install the BookCreator tool, i.e. a .dot Word template with VBScript code that will assist creating a layout that will make conversion much easier.

You also can use HTML cleanup programs:

Tag Soup
Tidy - (Windows version)

Creating books from multiple files

In order to convert a collection of HTML files in a specific oder, you have to create a table of contents file. That is, another HTML file that contains links to all the other files in the desired order. Such a file looks like:

<html>
   <body>
     <h1>Table of Contents</h1>
     <p style="text-indent:0pt">
        <a href="file1.html">First File</a><br/>
        <a href="file2.html">Second File</a><br/>
        .
        .
        .
     </p>
   </body>
</html>

Then just add this HTML file to the GUI and use the convert button to create your ebook.

A tested example file is here, i.e. an index of an old VRML manual I wrote over 10 years ago with Latex.

Links

List of Calibre tutorials

The official "Grand Tour Video"

ABCs of e-book format conversion by John Schember, (this short tutorial is also included in the Calibre installation as ebook as of nov. 2010)

Absolute e-book beginners also should read Beginner’s Guide to Calibre by John Schember, jan 2010. This tutorial explains how to read books with calibre and how to download stuff and upload to your device.