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.
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.
12 Answers2026-07-26
But what about ongoing stories? I set my script to download new content in chunks, generally when the author has completed a story arc, or every 50 chapters or so. This way, instead of having to download a 1000-chapter novel all at once, I can process the new content separately from the rest of the novel, and it will usually correspond with the volume/bound format of the novel as it’s published on the web. So in addition to being a reasonable way to handle an extremely long work, it also aligns with the general organization of most web novels, treating each arc as its own mini-book. I keep a simple text file with the last chapter # for each, for reference.
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.
11 Answers2025-07-09
Scene breaks within chapters are usually marked with a centered asterisk or a blank line in the TXT file. A good converter will then keep these as visual breaks within a chapter instead of creating a new chapter for them. In Calibre these can be formatted in the “Look & Feel”-section for scene breaks within chapters.
The processor can also replace a line of three asterisks with a horizontal rule, styled as desired. Maintaining these small structures is as important as maintaining chapter ends. A finished work looks very different from a rough draft.
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.
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.
7 Answers2025-08-02
It’s taken me 20 minutes or so to read this lot as opposed to opening up a book and I have to admit that there’s a bit of irony here. Time to close up shop here on Reddit and fire up my Kindle.
8 Answers2025-08-19
Oh the humanity if we couldn't read our books offline, we'd probably revolt. As it stands, offline reading of stories and information is a basic accessibility feature, and (big) companies know that not everyone has reliable, affordable internet connection all the time. They’d like you to read their e-books everywhere, not just when you have phone signal. Which is why they’ve set things up so that by default you get to download the book. The option to Remove Download is secondary, but they want to make it easy for you to experience the better way of reading a book – that which is stored locally on your device and ready to go at a moment’s notice.
6 Answers2026-07-28
The whole Tachiyomi ecosystem was created to fill a very specific technical need, namely the demand for a unified, offline-capable reading experience for manhwa and other comics. As a result, the many, very detailed tutorials on the best sources for manhwa can be found in the many forums. A number of Discord servers even exist to help set up Tachiyomi for people. Because the official and unofficial websites for comics were so very fragmented and online, the community ended up creating their own ideal solution to read their comics, because the existing platforms didn’t even begin to meet this very persistent need.