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| The Calibre ebook reader interface. |
Just as I was making the jump into ebookery mode, Borders Group Inc., the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain, has canceled an upcoming bankruptcy auction and will now close its doors.
Perhaps that was expected...but the ebook reader I'm waiting on is the Kobo Touch which was, until a moment ago, distributed by Borders. However, in a quick-to-follow announcement, Kobo has pointed out that Kobo and Borders are not joined at the hip and the company -- and its device -- will proceed with its own independent business plan.
What me worry?
While I've been waiting for my device to arrive I've been exploring ebookery options and experimenting with what's on offer that could be incorporated in my future ebook lifestyle.
The main activity that has engaged me has been to utilize and master Calibre
calibre is free and open source e-book computer software that organizes, saves and manages e-books, supporting a variety of formats. It also supports e-book syncing with a variety of popular e-book readers...calibre is primarily an e-book cataloging program....calibre supports the conversion of many input formats to many output formats...(Ref)
Despite the fact that I don't as yet have a separate e-book reading device to sync to, Calibre has proven extremely useful as my reading hub as it has enabled me to construct a library of texts in a wide range of file formats.
So I started to collect stuff as fancy dictated without having a portable device in which to carry it about.
But aside form the usual online offerings (eg:novels, pdf articles,etc) in various standard ebook type formats, which I could download and read later offline, I discovered a couple of very useful online tools that could feed my calibre library so that I did not have to read all my online material as a web page.
- dotEPUB is software in the cloud that allows you to convert any webpage into an e-book. What this means is that any page of a length that I want to read later, I can convert to an epub format, download and read at my leisure in the same way I'd read a hard copy book or magazine.
- Convert HTML to PDF Online is a useful conversion tool for those sites where images and diagrams are a key part of your reading experience.
What this means is that the the most cumbersome task of any online existence -- that of having to read large swags of text or long articles -- is sublimated by converting them into a brain friendlier format.
So for me, this means when I'm confronted with more than 1000 words of text online which I want to read, I epub it; or when I'm dealing with a complicated DIY article with illustrations as to technique and method, I convert it to PDF and download it. I still read/study the material on a computer but the 'pages' are easier to read than they would be if they were web pages and online.
Here are these two options for this post and this page:
Convert this page to a PDFGive them both a try.
