Tuesday, 18 January 2011

Ebooks: creating them yourself (updated on 31 march 2011)

I found this software:   http://calibre-ebook.com
It allows you to create and convert your own ebooks. Let say you have a pdf. You can make an ebook of it. It's for free and runs on different Os systems (apple Os, windows, Linux).

E-book creation tutorials

Various tutorials on how to create/convert e-books with calibre.

I don't know if we will be able to read ebooks files (epub? which formats?) But then this software can create lots of formats, starting from Word, Openoffice, Pdf's, Html,.... Surely Adam can read various files(I hope;). I even remember seeing on the NI-blog an image where I think we can see the pages curl (I like that:)

Free programs like scan2pdf can help here with scanning (through your printer) but interesting is the new booksaver coming up:
see "http://www.gizmag.com/book-saver-scanner-from-ion-unveiled/17532/"
With the ionaudio booksaver: coming on this spring and presented at CES 2011 we get for the price of 150$ a Booksaver that claims to be able to convert 200 pages of a book in ereadersformat in 15 min.

Somebody with experiences?
(To be clear: this chapter has the meaning to create ebooks from materials that you own and are permitted to copy for personal use, not for selling and making profit)

EBOOKSTORES ALL OVER THE WORLD
In meanwhile  we can still find local internet-stores for buying ebooks:

* ALL LANGUAGES:
http://manybooks.net/  (for free: different classic books in all languages for free)
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page (free books all languages, different types)

* DUTCH:  
http://www.cosmox.be/e-books (NEW! epub: buying, they have lots of recent popular books)
http://www.ebook.nl/ (epub: buying, have all recent popular books)
http://www.selexyzebooks.nl (epub: buying, have all recent popular books)
* FRENCH:  
www.ebooks-gratuit.com (For free! different formats: uploaded by people: french comics, books,...)

* ENGLISH:      
http://www.free-ebooks.net (to be rated yet)
http://www.getfreeebooks.com (to be rated yet) 
http://www.archive.org/details/texts
http://www.amazon.com
http://www.baen.com/As a starter for SciFi and Fantasy fans out there I highly recommend Baen Books
They have a free library with several hundred books and the books you pay for are usually $6.00 or less


                           (can some people help me search and make this list bigger?)
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10 comments:

  1. Heyloa Keyloa19 January 2011 at 00:52

    Calibre runs pretty smoothly. And since the last update, quite a bit more stable. I have a little jetbook lite and only convert to epub because of it, so I can confirm that conversion from pdf (or anything else) to epub works pretty decent. :)

    I can recommend this program, but only from my jetbook lite point of view of course. If I ever get my hands on an Adam, I'll definitely try to use it for that purpose as well, but most likely I'd keep some of the books in pdf format. Mainly pdf books that I don't read right now that have charts and such. Can't convert it to ebook and keep the charts, can't read it on my jetbook because I'd have to scroll all the time (an A4 pdf zoomed out is waaaayyy to small to read). I'm hoping that the size of the Adam might fix this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Vissen19 January 2011 at 09:17

    Some additions to e-book sites:
    http://www.free-ebooks.net/
    http://www.planetebook.com/
    http://www.getfreeebooks.com/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Zaigham19 January 2011 at 19:19

    Great suggestion. I used it on my iPod Touch, and currently use it on my Android. Very useful piece of software.

    ReplyDelete
  4. )oe(22 January 2011 at 10:20

    apparently it's not sure which e-reader will be provided with Adam:
    - Aldiko? http://www.aldiko.com
    Features:
    -adjustable, customisable
    -imports all popular formats like epub and pdf
    -dictionnary

    - Kobo? http://www.kobobooks.com
    Features:
    -imports all popular formats like epub and pdf
    -dictionary
    -multi-touch gestures
    -annotating
    -markup
    -freebooks, others for 9,99

    Others:
    Kindle

    Cool Reader:interesting! reads text as book!
    http://coolreader.org/e-index.htm
    Features
    * Opens books from .txt, .doc, .html, .fb2 or .rtf formats with automatic codepage (cp866,cp1251,KOI-8r,latin-1,unicode,utf-8) and format recognition (headers, paragraphs, etc...)
    * Supports RAR, ZIP, HA, ARJ, LHA archieves
    * Shows text as continuous Scroll or as Book.
    * Fully customizable colors, background images, text blending modes, and other ergonomic parameters.
    * Font antialiasing using a few different methods.
    * Fullscreen or windowed view mode.
    * TTS (Read Aloud) using SpeechAPI 4.0 и 5.1 (new!)
    * Pronounsation dictionaries (new!)
    * Dictionary editor (new!)
    * Table of Contents
    * Bookmarks
    * Text search
    * Mouse selection and Copy function
    * Export of formatted text to HTML or RTF
    * Stores history of opened books, their last positions and bookmarks.
    * Extra-smooth, customizable scrolling.
    * Multilingual interface

    ReplyDelete
  5. Randy Whitson25 January 2011 at 01:33

    For free e-books, try:

    http://manybooks.net/

    http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

    http://www.archive.org/details/texts

    http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rs=154606011&sort=price&ref_=sr_pg_389&bbn=154606011&qid=1233262084&rh=n%3A154606011&page=389

    ReplyDelete
  6. )oe(25 January 2011 at 23:20

    @Randy W.: Very nice list ... and in different languages!!! Thanks! List is updated

    ReplyDelete
  7. )oe(29 January 2011 at 09:55

    "...The e-ink mode is very kewl, i downloaded FBReaderJ and was able to view many books(MOBI files) with great ease."

    ReplyDelete
  8. )oe(10 February 2011 at 23:36

    ereader that reads PDF's: Wordplayer is one

    ReplyDelete
  9. Ebook Erstellen22 October 2011 at 11:22

    This is a good common sense article. Very helpful to one who is just finding the resources about this part. It will certainly help educate me.

    ReplyDelete
  10. )oe(23 October 2011 at 22:34

    glad you like it. I need more input ofpeople and their experiences however

    ReplyDelete

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