We recommend Adobe Digital Editions for reading ePub (ebook) files. For an online ePub reader, we recommend O’Reilly’s Bookworm. With Stanza, you can read ePub files on your iPhone or iPod Touch. With Calibre, you can convert an ePub file to other formats. Calibre will also let you put these ebooks on your Kindle.
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What is needed is an easy way to CREATE epub files. I have yet to find one. If I have a Word or HTML file, there should be an easy way to generate an epub–so that I can read it on Stanza on iPhone, say. The problem I run into over and over is that formatting such as italics gets lost.
For example, the novel Blindsight by Peter Watts is available for free online here. (He was the guy beaten and arrested at the US border recently, by the way. I want to read his book because it was highly recommended by Luke Burrage on his excellent SFBRP (science fiction book review podcast).)
Now, if I import the HTML or a Word file with this pasted in it, into Stanza, the italics come out missing. If I import it into Calibre and try to save it, it gives errors, saying it’s not supported. There should be an easy way to generate epub books given a Word, RTF, HTML, URL, or even PDF file/link. What am I missing? BK Marcus says he has to edit the HTML to have the proper formatting and tags; this is not feasible for most people. Others say Stanza works for them but I have to think they simply are not realizing that they are getting a book with italics stripped out–which for me is a deal breaker. I refuse to read a book with the italics taken out…
Anyone have any suggestions as to a simple, reliable way to convert Word, HTML, into epubs that have italics and other formatting preserved?
A followup: I just looked at the Hazlitt Time Will Run Back epub file. When I view it in the browser using a Chrome epub reader extension, it looks fine. Italics are there. I imported it into Stanza, however, and the italics are again stripped out. What gives? Anyone else having this problem?
Update: I uploaded the Time Will Run Back epub into bookworm, where it looks fine. then I converted that to Stanza on iphone using Bookworm, and it again looks fine. I also uploaded it to two other iphone readers I use, ReaddleDocs and Readdledocs Book readr, and both displayed it fine.
So the only problem is: if you import epub into Stanza on the mac, it does not show italics. Why?
If Bookworm allowed you to import Word or HTML files that would be a workaround; but it only imports epub. So it’s a big problem as far as I can see.
my favorite was satans bushel. i didn’t really like cinder buggy it was too slow. Driver was very good, haven’t read the last two
Stephan, I downloaded the PDF and converted it to ePub with Calibre. It seems to have worked fine in my Sony Reader. I see italics in the text. I don’t know how it will work in Stanza, though. I used the latest version of Calibre.
You might try eCub to convert from HTML to ePub, though I haven’t used it and therefore don’t know how it will work.
To clarify: I’m talking about “Blindsight”.
Kinsella, I donno about reading those files on computer, but converting it in Kindle format using Mobipocket Creator and putting it on kindle works fine, although opening the same file in Kindle For PC messes it up a bit.
Who is this magical “we,” and why would any individual (sans collective) recommend anything from the DRM monster that is Adobe? Their idea of technical innovation is to have the FBI arrest security experts who display Adobe’s Kindergarten approach to security is nothing more than ROT13 (think Captain Crunch decoder ring).
I do not to pretend to be an expert on digital book formatting, but I know of no reason (other than DRM) why XML would not be sufficient for marking up the contents of a book. Or CSS for that matter.
Of course, if Adobe hadn’t screwed the pooch so badly, there wouldn’t need to be any reason to convert pdfs in the first place. It is a document markup and display format, after all.
Pedro, Renegade: Here’s what I’ve learned. First, if you read an epub file into Stanza it does not display italics on the desktop version, but if you share/download it to the iphone its stanza app does.
IF you convert a non-epub file into stanza , it loses italics.
If you take HTM and import it into Calibre, you can convert it to epub, open it wiht stanza, put on iphone, and that works fine. (though it’s kluge-y)
If you open a word file on Calibre, it gives you an error wehn you try to convert to epub.
I can view Word files on various reader apps on iphone but the problem is you can’t resize the text.
Unfortunately, you can’t send non-Amazon documents to kindle app on iphone. ONly to a Kindle itself. You can only send Amazon-purchased books to an iphone kindle app.
This whole field is an incredible mess. I have to think an easy, good free or cheap document-to-epub app is coming. Ideally it would be stanza itself.
So, from now on, if I can’t find a kindle version of a book (which I’d happily buy–Watts book is not even on kindle!), if there is a free version online then, here are your options:
1. if it’s epub, import into stanza, and download to iphone
2. if it’s in html, import into calibre, convert to epub, import to stanza, download to iphone.
3. if it’s in some other format like PDF or Word, or other format, then past into Word to make word if necessary; convert the Word file to about 20-25pt text size, then put that file on iphone and read with a specialized reader like ReaddleDocs or AirSharing.
I suppse you could try to convert PDF to epub with Calibre but I am skeptical this would work well.
Calibre coverts PDFs correctly to ePub, as long as they are “structured” PDFs (by that I mean they contain proper text, and are not made of scanned images of the pages a book).
In the case of the “Blindsight” PDF, the only thing that got ugly in the conversion is the table of contents, which is not marked as a table of contents in the PDF.
Pedro,
But is there an easy way to remove the header and footer from each page?
As far as I know, it doesn’t. At least, not that I know of. And now that you mentioned it, I just checked the ePub file again in the Reader and, indeed, the header and the footer are there, which is not very nice. I guess things are not as easy as I thought. Sorry.
Well, it seem there is a way of automatically removing header and footer with regular expressions, but I haven’t tried it yet. There’s a discussion in the folling URL.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=54148
If I try it and succeed, I’ll let you know how I did it.
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