By. 11:30 am, June 15, 2012. All your books in one place, DRM free. I love e-books. I love them so much that I’m considering buying a double-sided, sheet-feed scanner, chopping the spines of all my dead-treeware books and having an OCR frenzy on their asses.
In terms of the number of e-books available for download, Amazon of course has a much larger stock than Apple. So Apple allowing the Kindle app on its mobile.
What I don’t like is DRM. Not for any idealistic reasons (well, maybe a few) but for practical ones. My bookseller of choice is Amazon, as it has the best range and Kindle books work on any device. But the Kindle app for the iPad sucks, and with an update this week it is almost unusable.
If only I could read my Kindle books in the beautiful iBooks app. Well, it turns out that I can. And what’s more, I can keep all of my books in a DRM-free format in the cloud, ready to be downloaded to any device, whenever I like. This really is an easy and very neat little hack. It takes a bit of setting up, but after that it is almost automatic. Here’s what we’re going to do. Get the protected Kindle books onto our Macs.
Strip the DRM. Convert the books into the universal EPUB format. Put them in Dropbox for easy access. That’s it For this recipe we will need the following software You’ll also need to grab some for Calibre, provided by Apprentice Alf. The Setup The first part of this is probably the trickiest. You need to install and configure the plugins to work with your installation of the Calibre e-book managing app (and I’d just like to apologize for recommending such an ugly app).
Fortunately, you are a Mac user, so the process is easy. The full instructions are in Alf’s post, but you don’t need to follow them all. Just add the K4MobiDeDRM plugin and you’re done.
Because you are using the Kindle Mac app to download the books, you don’t need to add any ID numbers or other shenanigans. Next, you tell Calibre to watch a certain folder. You can’t tell it to watch the Kindle App’s download folder, though, as this contains a lot of junk other than e-books. Calibre also deletes files on import.
Open Kindle Books In Ibooks
So go ahead and make a folder in a convenient place. I called mine “Kindle Auto Add” and put it in my Documents folder. Now tell Calibre where it is by opening the preferences, clicking the “Adding Books” icon under the Import/Export tab and then clicking the Automatic Adding tab. Next, you need a way to copy the Files from the Kindle app’s download folder to the folder you just made.
For this we will use the excellent file utility Hazel. Point Hazel at the “My Kindle Content” folder in your Documents folder, and set up a rule to copy only AZW files to the Kindle Auto Add folder you created earlier: Now that’s done, we want to go back to Calibre and make sure it’s doing the right thing with new ebooks Go back to the preferences and find Common OptionPage Setup. In here, set the Input Profile to Kindle and the Output Profile to iPad.
Then, under the menu item XXX Books (where XXX is the number of books in your library — I know, it’s open source. Sorry) make sure that the Calibre library will be saved somewhere in your Dropbox. You’ll never need to touch these bits again. In Action To convert a book automatically, you’ll need to have Calibre running, and to have the Kindle app open on your Mac.
Just click to download any book and wait. After a couple seconds, Hazel will copy the book file to Calibre’s watched folder, and Calibre will open and convert it automatically, stripping the DRM and storing it in it’s own library.
This will take a few moments to a few minutes depending on the size of the book, and other seemingly random factors. Then, just fire up Dropbox on your iPad, navigate to the shared folder where Caliber keeps its library (in a simple folder structure, thank God) and choose to “Open In” iBooks.
Now you can read your legally-bought Kindle book in Apple’s superior software. Or, if you prefer, you can use any app that can open EPUBs, and you can access them from your Dropbox from any device you like.
Advertisement One of the main attractions of the is. This application provides a great digital book reading experience for all iPad users and a source of envy for others. But now book lovers who have an iPhone (and other supported iGadgets) can rejoice because is finally available for them. Apple released the iBooks app along with a free iOS4 upgrade. Another piece of good news is, aside from ePub – the open source digital book format used in iBooks – users can also open and read PDF files. So let’s see how you can convert ebooks to iBook within your iPhone. Upgrading To iOS4 & Installing iBooks Go to the iTunes Store and download the app.
It will be installed automatically the next time you sync your iPhone to your computer. But make sure that your iPhone OS has been upgraded to iOS4, otherwise the iBooks app can’t be installed on the device. To choose the books, you can use several options at the lower part of the screen.
You can see what’s currently featured, sort by ratings, browse around, or search directly for the books that you want. Just like an ordinary bookstore, you have to buy most of the books inside the iBooks store. But there are also choices of free books.
Just use the search function to look for “free”. Along with the release of the iBooks app, Apple gives us a complimentary copy of “ Winnie the Pooh” by A. Just do the search for that book. Select the book from the search results, and you will go to the individual page of that book. You can see more information about the book here, including the price and the option to get a sample. Click on the price button (in this case it’s free) to download the book.
You will be asked to provide your iTunes Store account and password. The book will be downloaded onto your iPhone and will sit on the shelf, waiting to be read. You can see that there are two book shelves, the one entitled “ Books” is to store ePub format ebooks (whether you get it from the store or not), and the other one is for PDFs.
Apple Ibooks To Kindle
Snatching Books From Emails The third method to fill your iBook shelves is to get the books from your email. If you receive emails with PDF attachments, you can move those PDFs to your iBooks shelf.
Tap on the PDF attachment. You will get a preview of the file. Choose “ Open in iBooks“. The PDF will then be opened and stored on your iBooks shelf. Reading eBooks using iBooks on your iPhone is a different experience. Even though it’s not as powerful as, it exceeded my expectations.
I will save the story for the next post, along with several tips to enhance the iBooks reading experience on the iPhone. Explore more about:,.