While Apple’s iBooks app looks splendid and offers a wide variety of titles via iBookstore, Apple’s stock pales in comparison to the variety of e-books available on the wider internet as free or paid downloads. And with the right tools, converting those other formats into iPad-compatible ePubs is a fairly simple process.
For starters, you’ll need an e-book or other document you wish to convert. With that in hand, download Calibre (calibre-ebook.com), a free open-source tool for creating and managing electronic texts. Calibre supports conversions for a wide variety of e-book formats, including CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, and TXT files. Say that 10 times fast--or slow!
Use Calibre to add metadata, including a book cover.
Start Calibre and click the Add Books button in the toolbar to import your book. After importing, you can edit or add metadata information, then you can plop on a book cover by right-clicking on the book and selecting Edit Meta Information > Edit Information Manually. Change the title, author, rating, book cover, and publication date as needed, then click OK to save the changes. When you’re ready to export your book into the ePub format, Control-click on the book and select Convert E-Books > Convert Individually. In the resulting window, make sure the output format is set to ePub and click the OK button.
Calibre can turn almost any format into an ePub.
To get your newly converted e-book into iTunes, Control-click on the book and select Save to Disk > Save Only ePub Format To Disk. Then all it takes is a drag-and-drop into iTunes to import your new ePub, ready for syncing to your iPad.
If you have any PDF documents lying around that are less than 30MB, then ePUB2G0 (epub2go.com) is a great web service that can do the conversion process with little fuss. The web app is free, but bear in mind that ePUB2GO is picky about formatting, and your files need to be free of vector art.
It's not pretty, but ePUB2Go just works.
From the website, hit “The PDF is on my Computer” button and select the file to upload.
When the conversion process is complete, use the View/Save On My Computer option to save your new file. Once you’ve saved the file to your Mac, rename it (if needed) and add the .epub file extension. Then drag into iTunes, add artwork if desired, and sync to your iPad. Simple.
Sure, the iPad lacks a true file system, but you shouldn’t let that stop you. Between the support for Bluetooth keyboards and apps like Pages and Numbers, Apple is banking on the iPad being a capable sidekick that can get some real work done. Unfortunately, one of the biggest hurdles to incorporating the iPad into your workflow is getting your work to flow back and forth to the iPad.
Use the Apps tab in iTunes to manually transfer documents to and from your iPad.
Prior to the iPad’s launch, the OS 3.2 SDK pointed toward a shared file directory that would mount on your Mac when connecting an iPad. Unfortunately, Apple abandoned that plan in favor of app-specific file syncing. To sync documents to your iPad, you’ll need to connect to your Mac, and hit the Apps tab in iTunes. Scroll down, and you’ll see a File Sharing section where you can manually transfer documents. Unfortunately, you have to sync documents to specific apps, so you’ll have to decide if you want to open a document in Pages or GoodReader, for example. And if you delete an app that has stored documents, those disappear too. Another solution is to mail a document to yourself and retrieve it on your iPad. After working on your iPad, you can email an edited copy of the document back to your Mac. Cumbersome, but it works.
GoodReader offers quick (but bare-bones file transfers via Wi-Fi.
The third option (and the one we like best) is to use apps that support syncing via Wi-Fi, like GoodReader for iPad ($0.99) or FileFly ($1.99). Wi-Fi transfers are a lot simpler than having to tether your iPad to iTunes. And if you need access to files stored in the cloud, you can use GoodReader to access files stored in a Dropbox account or an app like GoDocs iPad/iPhone ($3.99) to access your Google Docs.
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