9 Answers2025-07-11
Why would you want to convert documents to read on your eReader? Most reading apps these days, including Google Play Books on Android and Apple Books on iOS, allow you to add PDF and DOC files to your library on the web, and they will magically convert them for you. (Seamlessly, for free, and, amazingly, often well.) But you asked for an offline method, so we can discount the cloud-based approach entirely. Why? Because you probably need to keep your files local for privacy, lack of internet, or because you’re working with sensitive documents. In such cases, converting within a local application is the only way to go — although the results from cloud conversion are often surprisingly good, and require zero effort on your part. Offline conversion gives you complete control over the conversion process and resulting file, but you have to manage the application and all its settings yourself.
8 Answers2025-05-29
For extremely academic content with lots of citations and a bibliography, proper formatting is crucial. Inline citations ([1,2]) have to be rendered as superscript and the bibliography has to be complete and not messed up by the converter. You can use ‘Extra CSS’ to style common citation patterns. For example, will style all tags with the class “citation”. Also, make sure the converter recognizes the bibliography as a separate section and not as just more paragraphs. You can help the converter by marking the bibliography’s heading tag (e.g. ) as a major division in the ‘Structure Detection’ settings. This will then also ensure proper page breaks before the bibliography.
12 Answers2026-07-28
For those concerned with quality, it is not just a case of pixelating images. All PDF documents contain metadata including bookmarks, hyperlinks, form fields and layers. A true lossless merge will not only preserve the visual content of the documents but also the structure. Free tools for merging PDFs often appear to work well at first but soon reveal that all the bookmarks and hyperlinks have been stripped from the document. If you have PDFs with internal links or a table of contents then you need a more complex tool. Here, again, Acrobat Pro is the best tool but there are others on the market that are equally good and more affordable. PDF-XChange Editor is a good example of this and it does a great job of merging PDF documents whilst also preserving all of the document properties and interactive elements.
6 Answers2025-07-08
Converting mobis to EPUB in a batch is also very psychologically rewarding. The large folder full of technical debt just looks so bad. But once everything is converted to EPUB, you have a very modern and unified e-book library. You can then read your e-books with any e-book reader, send them to friends and even edit them (if necessary) in your favorite text editor. It’s a big one-time hassle to set everything up for batch conversion, but then you have forever of e-book accessibility. I set up conversion for my whole library about two years ago and since then I haven’t given e-book file formats a second thought. It’s very liberating.
6 Answers2025-07-04
I use my Kobo as the final destination for my permanent collection of books, such as classics, favorites and reference books. Casual reads that I got through Kindle Unlimited get read on the Kindle app on my phone or on my old Kindle. As a lot of time and hassle would be spent transferring these to my Kobo, they remain in my permanent collection.
10 Answers2025-07-07
The core of our anger at Acsm is that it prevents us from fully owning the book we purchased. We want to be able to put it on our device of choice, read it in our app of choice. By converting our purchased book to epub we have cut the leash. Therefore the search for a mobile app is a search for a way to regain control of our books as soon as possible, on the device where we read. And thus a computer-workaround, which would be acceptable in many other situations, is unsatisfactory here. It forces a detour, it breaks the flow of reading. We want to be sovereign in our purchases, and the current tools do not allow us to be.
13 Answers2025-07-08
Most browsers have a “Print to PDF” function. Most people don’t realize that there are default settings for the margins in PDF Print to PDF functions. So, if you’re creating PDFs of your manga and they have huge white borders around the pages, check the Print function for the PDF to see if there’s a setting for the margins. Set them to “None” or “Minimum”. Also, uncheck the boxes for “Headers and Footers” as you don’t want the URL of the webpage that you’re printing from and the date to be printed at the bottom of every page of your manga.
Most people are unaware of the relatively small number of settings that can alter the appearance of a PDF in this way, and so end up printing a normal webpage, and not a ‘manga page’ as intended. Experimenting with the various print preview options to alter these few settings will reveal just how easily a relatively professional looking PDF can be created in a couple of minutes, as opposed to completing a 'hack job' that could have taken hours.
4 Answers2025-07-15
ACSM files are protected until Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) extracts the real EPUB. That EPUB is then easily converted to any format using Calibre. I have done this for many books in my personal library. After getting the initial EPUB from ADE, the conversion is easy and fast. In Calibre you can then choose from many conversion options to a specific ereader format. The conversion itself then happens quickly and efficiently with many options to fine tune the output.
7 Answers2025-05-23
Just a word of warning: digitizing a book will usually involve several different software applications: one to control the scanner, another to compile images of appropriate quality (i.e. sufficient DPI), a third to do the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on those images and a fourth to assemble the resulting text into an ebook of the appropriate format and to add all the necessary metadata (i.e. the ebook’s title, author, etc.). Yes, it can feel like a bit of a mêlée. But it can also be very educational – about image quality, about text encoding, about ebook metadata, and more.
You will look at your commercially produced eBooks in a new light after having gone through this process.
9 Answers2025-08-08
Note that problems with DRM can also manifest as formatting issues. I had trouble with a purchased EPUB file (with Adobe DRM protection) lately. Problems seemed to stem from a wonky authorization status of my Adobe ID in the reading app. To verify the status of your Adobe ID, go to Preferences > General in Apple Books and look for the ID in the list. For other reading apps, check the relevant account settings. In extreme cases, a corrupted DRM protection might even prevent opening of the EPUB file. However, in some cases it will open, but with some really ugly styling. The only fix is to download a brand new copy of the book from the store – preferably one that was downloaded in authorized state in the first place. That’s why I try to avoid purchasing DRM-protected EPUBs and instead opt for stores that offer DRM-free versions of many books, like Kobo.