[vlapinta]

I need some help converting books. Since Amazon is charging for conversions, I wanted to try and convert and transfer pdf books to my kindle. I have Calibre. I am confused as to how to do it? Do I just highlight the book I want to convert and hit convert Books on the top? Is it that simple? This seems to change it to Epub. Will this be readable on the Kindle? Also some of the PDF books cannot be converted because it says they are DRM. Is there any way around this so I can read it on my kindle? One last question, how exactly do I transfer them to my kindle with USB? I would need exact steps.

Thanks again,
Vicki

 

[Jill75]

You might want to check this article out on converting ebooks and pdfs to be transferred to your Kindle 2 using a program called Savory.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/04/27/convert-and-read-pdf-and-epub-on-amazon-kindle-2-with-savory/

A Kindle 2 user, Jesse Vincent, has developed a software program for Kindle 2, Savory. Savory, which run natively on Kindle, can convert .pdf and .epub files into .mobi format supported by the Kindle 2 ebook reader. Thus, Savory can executes the format conversion on Amazon Kindle device itself. Thus, Kindle 2 owners do not need to manually convert PDFs and ePubs using web-based or desktop tool beforehand, but can straight away download e-books into Kindle 2 though WhisperNet or 3G.

Some limitations of Savory is that Savory only supports Amazon Kindle 2. Amazon Kindle 1 (original or first generation Kindle) is not supported. Beside, the PDF or ePub ebooks have to be DRM-free, and not locked. Savory cannot convert and transcode license or DRM restricted PDF or ePub files to unprotected MobiPocket format.

After installing Savory, Kindle's browser is configured to allow download of PDF (including picture-perfect capability) and ePub documents. Savory runs a small program that watches the 'Documents' directory for any new files with names ending in '.epub' and '.pdf'. When found, Savory will run open-source file conversion program called Calibre to convert the documents to MobiPocket format.

Kindle 2 users can install Savory by download and extract savory-image.zip, and then mount Kindle2 to PC with USB and drag savory-image.ext3 into the "system" folder on Kindle2. Beside installing Savory, user should also apply a Kindle Update, update_Savory-0.06.bin, by copying the file to root directory of the Kindle, and then unmount the kindle and go to "Menu" -> "Settings" -> "Menu" and click "Update Your Kindle".

 

[webhill]

Vicki - to the right of the heart icon near the top of your Calibre window is the word "output," and then a drop-down menu. Choose Mobi as the output format instead of ePub

As far as PDFs with DRM, well, you're not supposed to copy most DRMd files. However, I once had a PDF that wasn't supposed to be DRMd - as in, the rights holder told me that the file should not have DRM and yet Calibre wouldn't modify it because it claimed it had DRM. For that particular file, I opened it in a PDF reader, then used the printing option. on the mac, when you go to print a file, there is an option to save the file as a PDF. So I did that, and then imported that secondary PDF into Calibre, and was able to convert it no problem - whatever bogus DRM was on there before was gone.

Hope that helps,
h.

 

[vlapinta]

Vicki - to the right of the heart icon near the top of your Calibre window is the word "output," and then a drop-down menu. Choose Mobi as the output format instead of ePub

Thank You,
now I see what I was doing wrong! I changed the output to Mobi. Thank You... I knew it must be something simple, but I wasn't seeing it!
Vicki

 

[pidgeon92]

There is a lengthy post regarding Calibre, it should answer all of your questions....

calibre? for kindle