E-book conversion on a Mac

I’ve been eyeing the Amazon Kindle for some time. Unfortunately, I’m too poor to buy one right now, but that can’t keep me from preparing for one, right?

The other week, I got my hands on the Kindle app for iPhone (I’ve been using Stanza to read LIT-formatted eBooks); it’s a very polished eBook reader app. It may not have all the extra features that Stanza does (color/typeface modification, namely), but it does make for a solid, crash-free (as far as I’ve used it) reader. Better yet, it can further my fantasy of one day actually getting a Kindle, so I can buy and read eBooks to my heart’s delight and still have them on a device I plan to get one day.

So I set out on a nerdy quest to get all the LIT eBooks I’d been reading and convert them into a format for the Kindle. One site I found was particularly useful, and it led me to Mobiperl: a collection of Perl apps that parsed and converted various non-DRM’d eBook formats into the MOBI format (MobiPocket; the Kindle uses it, along with the Amazon-proprietary AZW format). I also found PDFRead, which should allow me to parse PDF files and convert them into eBook formats as well. PDFRead took a lot of setting up to do; namely there were a ton of prerequisites to install (really, there were prerequisites for the 4 or 5 prerequisites for PDFRead to install). Fortunately I’ve got MacPorts, so getting those was a snap. It just took forever to build and install them (it even installed a newer build of the GNU C compiler than what I had). Mobiperl took some getting used to Perl (and I’m still not used to it), or at least to figure out how to use CPAN to install a set of prerequisite packages (like Palm::PDB). But after that was said and done, and a pre-compiled-for-Mac ConvertLIT binary was downloaded and installed on my path, the lit2mobi command line tool worked like a charm. In fact, it even worked better than a Python app that’s supposed to be an all-in-one tool for cataloguing and converting eBooks, Calibre.

Now, I had grown to like Calibre; I started my whole eBook rampage yesterday with this app, and I still like it… but only for cataloguing and downloading missing information for my books. It’s like my iTunes for eBooks, but I do all my converting outside of the app. I tried converting a LIT book to MOBI format using the built-in conversion feature of the app, and it turned out like garbage (spacing was all off, characters were missing or replaced with weird symbols, etc.). Mobiperl, however, works like a charm.

As it turns out, PDFRead was a bust. It takes the PDF file, turns it sideways (WTF?), makes it look like it’s run through a photocopier, and then saves it as an HTML file somewhere within my /var/ directory. That’s not acceptable to me, especially with all the time I spent yesterday downloading the prerequisites. I’ve been looking into Mobipocket Creator which should work, but unfortunately it’s Windows-only, which puts my Mac-centric eBook process a little off. At least it runs in CrossOver!