E-book conversion with Calibre
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.
Preparring 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.
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.