I recently bought a Kindle and have started loading it with techy books/papers/etc. that I can find for free. I am using the free calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com) software to do the conversion since pretty much everything I find is in PDF format.
It works OK for 1-column PDFs, but for 2-column the conversion does not work at all. I can read PDFs on my Kindle, but it is not as nice as reading an actual ebook.
I found one way to convert them in case anyone else is interested:
1) Upload the PDF to Google Docs
2) Choose to "Make a Google Docs Copy" which will convert it into the Google Docs document format that you can edit
3) Tweak as needed
4) Download as HTML
5) Load into Calibre and convert to your book type (mobi, epub, etc)
This will only convert the first 10 pages though, so you might need to split the original PDF (with a site like
http://foxyutils.com/splitpdf). However, if it gets too long this method will get pretty tedious.
If you have any questions or thoughts, let me know.
6 comments:
Thank you for this awesome tip!
One other thing I found was sometimes the columns get put in the wrong order in the Google Docs document, especially if the second column is a little above the first column. Easy enough to copy/paste
Nice tip. There really does need to be a better way to convert PDF to EPUB, but it's tricky. Now that you have the EPUB's, try out my mobile app Book Troupe to read and share them!
Matt, since you're a Java developer, you might be interested to know that Book Troupe uses Google App Engine for Java on the backend. Take care!
-Travis
Use a free utility software called k2pdfopt for multicolumn pdfs.
Samit
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Hello! If you are looking to convert pdf files to eBook formats like epub, have a look at this free conversion toolkit. kitpdf.com is easy to use and deliver fast results. Give it a try and see how it works! Thanks!
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