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Monday, August 20, 2012

Calibre for Converting Docs to eBooks

So once upon a time my awesome and very talented sister finished her YA fantasy set in Japan and asked me to alpha read it for her. I, of course, readily agreed, and emailed her Word doc to my Kindle address so I could pull it up and have at it.

Then I discovered that the University of Idaho apparently doesn't have the type of Internet friendly to Kindles, so no easy .MOBI doc for me. :/ (This also means I'll have to go to the local Jack in the Box or something to actually purchase any books in the future. Bummer.)

I don't like reading books off the computer, so I set out to do what I had never done before--convert a document to .MOBI in a way that actually required effort.

After some Googling, I discovered Calibre, which you can download for free (and which most of you probably already know about). Figuring out how to use it was another question. I'm pretty sure Calibre doesn't like Word files (or at least it didn't like mine), but it will work for PDFs, as seen in the YouTube video below (though I did mine in RTF and found it formatted much better).



Muchos helpful, mckennaEDU. Gracias. (The video might look grayed out at first, but it recovers quickly.)

SO, if any of you ever have a similar situation, which I'm betting you won't, and you decide to peruse this blog for the answer instead of Google, there you have it. The hard way to get a Kindle-compatible document.

Cheers.

4 comments:

  1. If it's just for reading and not publishing, there are a lot of browser-based converters you can use that easily take a .doc and punch it into a .mobi.
    That's what I mostly use because Calibre only really works well in Windows and not Mac.

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  2. Interesting...
    I come across situations all the time that make me eternally grateful for my home computer wireless router (that I actually installed myself!)

    Great post! :D

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  3. I think I might be the only one, but I'm really wary of downloading programmes from the internet. I know I shouldn't be, but viruses scare me.

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