While Apple's iBooks app looks splendid and offers a wide variety of titles via the iBookstore, collecting e-books in a format other than ePub means that you can't read them with the app. Fortunately, you can convert your PDF, Word, RTF and other text files to ePub for use on the iPad--and soon, the iPhone.
Read on to find out how you can convert your existing digital books and documents into ePub format.
Difficulty Level: Easy
What You
Need:
- A book in PDF, Word, RTF, or other text format
- A Mac
- One of the free applications we’ll cover below: Calibre, Stanza Desktop, and the online service, ePub2Go
- iTunes, with the latest software update
- An iPad, or some sort of portable device that accepts ePub format
For each example, we’ll be using Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll downloaded from the Project Gutenberg website.
Calibre Project (free download)
The free Calibre app supports a ton of different input formats including: CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC**, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, and TXT.
We also like that this application includes a metadata tool that automatically goes online to download all of the associated tags, summary, and book cover.
To get your e-book ready for your iPad, click the Add Books button in the tool bar to import you book.
After importing your book, you can change the metadata information or add a book cover by right-clicking on the book and selecting Edit Meta Information > Edit Information Manually. This will open a window that will allow you to change the title, author, rating, book cover and publication date of your selection. When you’re finished, you can click the OK button to save the changes.
When you’re ready to export your book into ePub format, right-click on the book and select Convert E-Books > Convert Individually (or select the book and press the “C” key). In the resulting window, ensure the output format selection box in the top-right has the ePub format selected.
You can adjust the different settings available to Calibre by selecting any of the options available on the left hand side of the program window. When you’re ready to convert your book, click the OK button. After a few seconds, you’ll have an ePub book in your Calibre library. 
To get your newly converted eBook (or iBook) into iTunes, right-click on the book you just converted in your library and select Save to Disk > Save Only EPUB format to disk. A standard save dialog will be displayed. You can save this in a temporary location like your desktop.
Once the folder with the ePub file appears on your desktop, drag and drop the file into the iTunes icon in your dock. The book will automatically be imported into iTunes’ Book section complete with the book art you included with Calibre.
For more information about Calibre and conversions, check out their help documentation.
