More Mobipocket Conversions

Some of my ebooks are in html format. I briefly experimented with reading them on the P800's web browser but the files are quite large and really thrash the P800's CPU. The phone is barely usable while the html file is open, at least with the default web browser. I was unable to access the html file with Opera.

I found a slick hint at MacOSXHints which details how to use txt2pdbdoc and the pdftotxt portion of xpdf to add the ability to export documents, via the Print command, in the pdb format. This means you can export any text from almost any document (it only exports text, not images), be it a webpage, a spreadsheet, a pdf, or an email. Note that the author had some trouble getting backslashes to display in the main hint, he's posted a correction here.

This solution, while extremely elegant, does have its downfalls. For one thing single carriage returns seem to be lost in the conversion, so you end up with extremely long paragraphs. This can be a problem, especially for novels with lots of dialogue. I had hoped to use this method to easily convert some pdf and html ebooks I have. I was unable to find a fix for this, so I am stuck with exporting the text from pdf and html ebooks manually.

For pdf ebooks I've just been choosing the File:Save as Text command in Acrobat Reader and then converting the resultant text with PorDiBle.

For html ebooks I've been opening the html file in Safari and choosing Edit:Select All, and then choosing Safari:Services:TextEdit:New Window Containing Selection. I then save the resultant TextEdit document as an rtf file and drop it onto PorDiBle. Note, according to this slightly dated Doc Converter review, earlier versions of PorDiBle could convert html files. Unfortunately this no longer appears to be the case. The review also mentions MakeDocDD, which I plan on experimenting with, but my initial test resulted in the app crashing.

Both of the manual conversion methods above produce properly formatted ebooks, within the limitations of PorDiBle (notably it's inability to translate some common higher ASCII codes, '...' is a particular bugbear of mine).

This may seem like a lot of trouble, but given that reading a novel takes ten hours or more, the two or three minutes it takes to convert an ebook becomes entirely acceptable. Especially when you save all your conversions to replicate your entire library in pdb format!

Finally, in the course of my experimentation I decided I needed an OS X pdb reader rather than bluetoothing the books over to the P800 to check the formatting. A quick google search turned up eReader. There doesn't seem to be a lot of competition, but eReader doesn't suffer for it. Everything works, it looks decent, and performance is good. What more could you ask? The Pro version includes skins and changeable fonts and font sizes.

Update: I recently discovered the OS X version of Palm's very own DropBook. It works well but like PorDiBle has problems with certain unusual higher ASCII characters.

Related entries

eBooks and DRM - 28 August 2004
iSilo for UIQ goes beta - 9 December 2004
Free eBooks for your P800 - 9 October 2004
Batch audio conversions, new contender - 12 July 2005
eBooks on the P800 - 3 June 2004
P800 - second opinions - 16 May 2004
Cory Doctorow free ebook - 21 June 2005

Comments

Subscribe to comments

Enter your email address in the box below to receive an email notification whenever a new comment is posted to this entry.

Email address:

Post a comment

Name:


Email Address:


URL:

Remember personal info?
YesNo

Click a smiley!



Comments:



Please enter this security number in the space below (this prevents automated responses).