Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

Calibre has some advanced preferences for conversion that are supposed to help with pdf craziness but I have not figured them out.

I bet if you had Acrobat Pro or Nitro you could convert them to Word, edit them a bit, and get them to convert to mobi pretty nicely.

You can, but it takes a looooong time: you can do a find/replace on the title/author on each page, but I don't know of any easy way to get rid of page numbers.

same here. surely there must be some way of converting a pdf into a usable, if not perfect, mobi/epub file

― NI, Tuesday, May 7, 2013 6:56 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ehhhh they are v. different kinds of files; I can't imagine a conversion being anything better than "adequate" in the best of cases.

it's all text, bro. all it needs is some way of working out what are line breaks and what are end-of-paragraphs, plus yeah getting rid of page numbers, author name etc. it'd never be 100% perfect but i'm sure there's a way of getting it better than the ugly broken mess we get now. (obv the more image-heavy ones like comic strips, textbooks are a different matter but i'm talking about yer bog standard all-text book)

See, that's the thing, a lot of PDFs are not all text. A fair portion are just an image and then a OCR-ed invisible text layer which is what you get when you try highlighting, which is why copy/pasting even from Acrobat Reader is glitchy. Those that are text tend to include the text of everything on the page, including headers/footers, with those sections having no clear way to differentiate them from the content.

I mean, for books distributed as PDF you're unlikely to have the issues with the main body of text, but I was trying to copy from an essay I was reading in PDF the other day and it very clearly was a text layer over an image because the spacing was fucked.

ah ok, wasn't aware of that. main problem im having is the text size - had to ditch more than one pdf book because the text was tiny and unreadable. often get a problem when highlighting & saving text in that it saves either a load of garbled symbols, or different text from a few pages prior. messy.

the text would be scaleable... if it was actually text!

See, that's the thing, a lot of PDFs are not all text. A fair portion are just an image and then a OCR-ed invisible text layer which is what you get when you try highlighting, which is why copy/pasting even from Acrobat Reader is glitchy. Those that are text tend to include the text of everything on the page, including headers/footers, with those sections having no clear way to differentiate them from the content.

Exactly--try downloading a scanned book from the Internet Archive, and then actually cutting and pasting the text: what looks right as an image will be an OCRed garbled nightmare.

a nexus or other small tablet works a lot better if you are going to be reading a lot of pdfs.

yeah i read pdfs most frequently on my phone tbh

all my school reading is jstor pdfs these days and i read them on a galaxy tab

i miss my university jstor sub

it appears I'll be able to continue getting access to stuff w/ my college account in perpetuity, which is delightful.

*posts intranetz emoticon for envious, except he doesn't know it*

(cheap NOOK that i ordered has just shipped. second class post to an office that we leave on friday...)

(it has arrived. am currently paging through the 432 pages of tiny fonted terms and conditions... some of which doesn't render on the device... and also lots of "[hyperlink]" that aren't hyperlinks. last 300 pages appears to be a copy of every open source licence known to man)

i've been loading up a lotta PDFs on my nook but god pdfs are awful in general

PDFs are good for transferring documents that people need to print and where it's essential that formatting and layout are preserved. They're horrible for screen reading unless you're reading on a large desktop display.

Does anyone have any experience of converting between epub/mobi using Calibre? I used it for the first time the other night and the output mobi had a few issues with occasional spaces and periods disappearing. Are there better free alternatives? Is there something I can do to avoid these errors that doesn't require proof-reading?

"Amazon has developed an .epub to .mobi converter called KindleGen[18] (supports IDPF 1.0 and IDPF 2.0 epub format, according to the company)."

.mobi is (like .epub) another wrapped xhtml version, i can't really see how it'd lose information converting from the one to the other.

I assumed the errors were in the conversion and didn't check the epub, I'll have a look when I get home and see if the problem was with the original file.

yeah i've never had any errors when converting an epub to a mobi file using calibre. that 'send to kindle' klip.me site always ends up dropping a couple of characters every 2 or 3 pages though - mildly annoying but not terrible. still though, you'd think they'd fix it, it's been like that for well over a year

Calibre always a reliable converter for me, too

Yeah it was the original epub that had the errors. I'll just have to live with it.

"Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food." - Bob Marley Douglas Adams

> I'll just have to live with it.

if it non-drm you can edit an epub - it's just a zip file with html and css in it.

(that said, i broke one this morning being a bit over zealous with my edits.)

Editing it would mean reading it all to find all the errors, by which time I'll have read it all with the errors, meaning I may as well just read it all with the errors.

tell me about it. i submitted 580 typos in Dombey And Son to gutenberg.org... they were very appreciative but, as you say, i didn't get to see the benefit. maybe in 10 years when i'm cycling through them again...

wonder what process is for converting pre-ebook books into mobi files for sale on amazon. i bought an irvine welsh short story book a while back and it was littered with ocr errors (a 'h' in italics becoming a 'b', etc). do they just shunt them through a quick fire scanner, ocr then upload to amazon - or do they have someone checking through them? considering the £££ they're making it should totally be the latter.

my experiences with the gutenberg freebie books thing have been even worse - orwell's essays and D&OIP&L are pretty much unreadable due to all the mistakes. i know i know what do you expect for free, but it makes for an appalling reading experience. hope it all gets resolved someday

Dombey was lots of tiny mistakes, missing end quotes and things. some major clangers - 'boy' for 'buzz' etc. but i only noticed the ones i noticed, if you see what i mean. didn't sit there comparing two copies of an 800 page book because that'd take forever (although i did go through making sure that none of the paragraphs had been run together, which took about 3 hours over the course of a week)

have also been scanning and ocr'ing a water damaged book, just to see what it would take. the ocr was about 95% and a lot of the errors were easily spotted with spell checker. i now have 360 separate txt files and no real idea what to do next. combine into chapters, i think. then mark them up.

i need to do the same with my scans of tom wolfe's first incarnation of bonfire of the vanities, from early 80s rolling stone magazine. my main problem is that the font is some obscure thing with fancy scrawly bits that don't translate. might just make it a dreaded pdf without an overlay of text

"Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food." - Bob Marley Douglas Adams

There are a few people who I want to smack over the head with this statement.

I almost bought the basic kindle yesterday. I need something to read 1st PDFs from encyclopedias / journals, 2nd scanned books and 3rd few things from Amazon or whatever place sells book-files. You can't really trust the reviews there and first dude said it's better to get a nook because it's open format? I checked, it's $10 cheaper and it has better features. Excuse my ignorance but can you read scanned books on these kindles-nooks? Don't know what to do, maybe I should get a tablet instead?

Kindle or Nook if you ever need to read outside, or go for days without recharge. Ie, for vacations and commuting. Either will lock you into proprietary formats for their own books.

Small tablet if you ever have to go near a PDF. The waits to update the screen, or zoom to readable fragment, are exasperating reading when journal articles on my kindle to the extent I prefer reading them on my smartphone screen.

Plus, I like highlighting.

if you are going to read a lot of PDFs, esp ones with illos, I would recommend the Nook HD. You can read em on the Nook Simple Touch too but it auto-converts them to text which can be weird with formatting in some cases. Nook HD renders PDFs as PDFs. Both are excellent at .epub, of course. My NHD cost 200 USD.

Nook does not lock you in, mine is chock full of things downloaded from the russians/documents i made myself.

Oh I see, the Kindle would have been a complete mistake!

Jon: the Nook HD looks good but since we are talking tablets now what makes it better than the galaxy 2 7 etc. which is $20 cheaper, is there a noticeable difference?

i liked the design a little more, the screen looks great, basically I had my annual bonus and the iPad mini wasn't gonna get a retina screen anytime soon and the reg ipad was too big for me & this was the best option.

plus I already had been using the e-ink Simple Touch for a couple of years so I could pass that on to my wife and we'd both have the books I'd purchased and the New Yorker digi subscription.

Kindle Fire is their competitor to Nook HD, not sure if it renders PDFs naturally or not though.

ok thanks : D

bloke from project gutenberg very uncomplimentary about google fire on PG frontpage. says to get a nexus 7 instead

(that said, reading his complaints and the hurdles you have to jump to get 3rd party content onto kindle fire, they aren't anything i haven't done myself with my kobo)

kindle fire, not google fire.

i'd get a nexus over a kindle fire

yeah for sure. Kindle Fires are ridiculously locked down.

Oh yeah I forgot, that was the other thing. Apparently you can root the nook hd and turn it into an android tablet. So I figured if I got sick of their os/if b&n went bust I'd have that option too.

the still-imaginary retina display iPad mini will be the best tablet for PDF-reading tablet people.

and comics...

only for daily strips.

horror stories about the nexus on amazon comments.

now I kinda want an ipad mini for reading pdfs. is it useless without retina display?