iPad Day 2: Adventures with ePub’s

Day 2 ends with my misadventures with eBooks, in particular, ePub files. I know ebooks have been around for a while, but I’ve not given them much consideration, since I usually grab PDF’s and look at them on my computer. But obviously, since I have an iPad now, I wanted to check out reading ePub ebooks with the iBook reader. Problem is, how to convert my PDF’s to ePubs? Well, I found a lovely program called Calibre, which is quite handy for managing ebooks, and it even has a tool to convert various formats to ePub. The tool itself is free, and works quite well. So, I converted a couple of books to ePub. Sadly, it looks like ePub doesn’t handle the images and complex formatting too well (at least from a default conversion perspective), so some of my books ended up looking odd in the Calibre viewer. The next challenge I faced was getting the darn file to the iPad. I initially setup my iPad to be manually managed, so obviously, I tried to drag and drop the ePub file to my iPad in iTunes from the Finder. Well, as it turns out iTunes doesn’t like this. It starts to copy, gets about 95% to the end and BOOM, iTunes crashes. At first I thought it was the ePub file, but it turns out after some goofing around and trolling on the Calibre forums I stumbled upon the idea of Sync’ing my ebooks. So, dragging and dropping the ePub file to my library worked fine, and then sync’ing my books got my book onto the iPad… Yay!

So important safety tip of the day… Don’t attempt manual placement of ePubs directly to your iPad through iTunes. Instead, sync up your books.