Posts Tagged ‘ebooks’
Tips & Tricks ~ Downloading to your Kindle from your online library
Last summer I went through a how to on backing up your ebook library using Calibre and Dropbox. At the time I did it solely because I am a paranoid person and my world would end if I lost my ebook library. Recently I stumbled upon a new benefit, downloading books from your Calibre library directly through the Kindle web browser.
Yes, that’s right. With a few select tools you can use the experimental web browser on your Kindle to access your library, and further, download mobi/prc/amazon formatted books directly to your Kindle’s memory.
Before we get to the step by step, let me make mention that this is going to look complicated. It is not a one step process and involves 3 different programs. However it is easy if you follow the instructions and once it is set up, even easier to maintain.
Part 1 – Setting up your Calibre & DropBox
In order for your Kindle to access your ebook library, it must be online somewhere and it must be cataloged. The easiest way for one to achieve this is to use Calibre and DropBox.
- A. Sign up for a DropBox account
- B. Download & Install Calibre. You can check out a slightly outdated post on why I love Calibre so much here.
- C. Follow these instructions to get your Calibre & DropBox installed and working together.
Part 2 – Creating your Library Catalog
Now that Calibre is installed and your books are being backed up in your public DropBox folder, you want to create a catalog that you can access using a web browser. Calibre2OPDS is perfect for this, and free, and open source. When we are finished here you will have an online web catalog that is secure and only accessible to you and/or whoever you give the link address to. It will allow you to browse through your books by author, series, cover, tags, etc from anywhere you can get a web connection and will look something like this:
So, let’s get to it!
- Download Calibre2OPDS here. I am using version 2.3 for Macs.
- Install the program and open to configure your options. You should get a screen with three “tabs”, the first being “Main Options”. Here you want to change the “Database Folder” to the location of your Calibre library folder within your public DropBox folder on your computer. You can also change your “Catalog Title” to something more personal. When you have adjusted those sittings, do not hit save or generate catalog, instead click on the middle tab, “Catalog Generation Options”.
- Under “Catalog Generation Options” you can customize what your online catalog of your library will or will not show. I am including my settings, however you may want to show the ratings or disable being able to view all books on one screen. Whatever you choose is your preference just remember to keep the “download” options unchecked. Once you are satisfied with these settings move on to the third tab, “Advanced Customization Options”, again do not click save or generate yet.
- Under “Advanced Customization Options” you can set the book formats you would like to be included in the catalog. I have chosen only those compatible with the Kindle but you could also include EPUB, LIT, PDB, etc. This is also where you adjust the number of books on a page and other similar details. When you are happy with all of these options, go ahead and click “Generate Catalogs“. Once you do a screen will pop up showing you its progress as it works, this will take some time. Be patient.
- Congrats! When it is finished you should now have a working catalog of all the books in your Calibre library. I can see you over there, smirking… saying… “Well that is nice, but where is it? Now what?”. Patience grasshopper. It will take a few minutes for your Dropbox on your computer to update the Dropbox on the web server. Go ahead and get some tea and a cookie, when you come back check to make sure your Calibre Library/Dropbox icons have the green check marks indicating they are done updating as shown below.
If so, now we need to get the url to your catalog. You want to browse to your Calibre library on your computer, find the _catalog folder and within that find the “catalog.html” file as seen below.
- Select the “catalog.html” file and right click on it. Select the “DropBox” option and then choose “Copy Public Link”
Go ahead and open a browser window and paste the link into the address bar. You should have a url that looks something like this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/0101011/name_of_your_library_folder/_catalog/catalog.html (Numbers have been changed to protect innocent books, your url will contain your own random numbers). Bookmark this page. That is the website url of your catalog that you may access from anywhere that has an internet connection. You should see something that looks like the very first image in this post and you should be able to browse and look through your library.
You will want to write the address down, or keep it handy at least, for the next step.
Part 3 – Accessing & Downloading a book using your Kindle
Here comes the fun, nerdgasm, portion of today’s lesson. Warning, these instructions will vary depending on the Kindle you own. I’m giving specifics to a Kindle 3 but other versions should not be too different.
- Pick up your Kindle and turn it on. Make sure your wifi is turned on. Hit the Menu button and choose “Experimental” then tell it to the launch the Web Browser.
- When the browser is up and running, hit the menu button again and choose “Enter URL”. This is the most tedious part, but you only have to do it once! Within the address bar type in the url you found above for your online catalog (ex. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/0101011/name_of_your_library_folder/_catalog/catalog.html). When the page loads you should see your online library looking something like this:
- Take a moment and do yourself a favor – hit the Menu button again and tell your Kindle to bookmark this page.
- Now, go ahead and choose a category to browse into using the joystick/navigator on the Kindle. I am choosing “Recent Additions” And then the most recent material.
That will bring you to another screen showing you the covers of the books within that category. Use the mouse to select one.
- When you select your book you are brought to the book’s catalog page, complete with title, cover, description and other useful information.
Scroll all the way down towards the bottom until you see the link that says “Download this ebook as MOBI” – use the mouse to click it.
- A pop up should appear asking you if you are sure that you want to do this…. (don’t you love those?)
Click yes. When it is finished you should get another pop up confirming the download.
- Congratulations fellow Kindle lover, your book should now show up on your Kindle home page and be available for your reading pleasure.
- The next time you would like to use this feature, simply open up your Kindle web browser, go to your bookmarks page and find the link to your library. Click it and repeat the download process!
Stuff you should know….
- I did this on both a 1st generation Kindle and a 3rd generation Kindle. I assume it works on a 2nd generation as well but I do not have one to test it on.
- The catalog does not automatically update itself whenever you add a new book to calibre or change something in the library. To update the library you must run the Calibre2osds program again. It will keep all your settings, so all you will need to do is open it and click “generate catalogs” and wait patiently. If you are a smarty pants you can set up a cron job or schedule a task to run it.
- None of this is probably necessary if you only buy your books from Amazon.com. However, if you receive a lot of review books, buy from other stores, or use any of the free book sites, this can be an incredibly useful tool.
Hopefully you got just as excited about this as I did. If you have any questions or problems, feel free to comment and I will help you out if I can!
E-Reader Chart Updated
With the announcement of the new Kindle 3 and the new Sony readers I went ahead and updated the E-reader Comparison chart here. I still need to update the larger e-reader chart but homework is calling for today. You can check out a review of the new Kindle 3 here.
I am obviously biased, but I absolutely can not wait to get my hands on a new Kindle 3. I’m still debating if I need the 3G or not and am willing to wait til this winter to order since technically nothing is wrong with my Kindle 1. But I am itching to click “buy now” on it. You should be too! Absolutely great new features and the lowest price yet!
Tips & Tricks ~ Backing Up Your Books (Updated 5/14/11)
Today Kris brought up something that I had never thought about over on her blog…insuring your ebooks. I never considered the possibility because I am a paranoid person, I back up EVERYTHING. Well most of the time at least. When it comes to books tho? I never delete an ebook unless I hate it and I always have a backup. So, let’s talk about the ways you can back up your ebooks from your ereading device.
Most ebook retailers keep a bookshelf of all your purchases so that you can re-download them at any time. Amazon for example will let you re-download books to your Kindle directly from the Kindle using your Content Manager. You can also login to Amazon.com from your computer and from your digital library resend your files to your computer hard drive or to the Kindle. This is certainly an easy to do it if you buy all your books from one or two select stores that offer this.
I believe that all ereader devices offer the ability to plug your device into your computer and download your books from the device to a folder on your hard drive. This essentially gives you a copy on your ereader and one on your computer. This may be enough for some people…. it isn’t for me. I don’t like to keep books I have already read or am not reading currently on my Kindle. Instead I keep all of my library on my hard drive and only put on the Kindle things I am reading or going to read in the next few weeks. It keeps clutter down… it makes me happy. If you are this type of person too, you want to combine this method with an alternative backup system like one of the ones below…
If you keep your library on your computer you can always duplicate that by copying it to an external hard drive such as this or by burning your books to a DVD. A DVD is like 4gb work of space so it will hold a lot of books. The problem with this is that you have to remember to back up when you add new books…. I am just not that on top of it. I do burn my books to DVD about twice a year but it isn’t my main backup plan.
DropBox.com is a online storage service that will sync with your computer. You get up to 2gb with a free account and that is plenty of space for an ebook library. I have well over 600 books in my library and have only used 30% of my space. All you do is sign up for an account and then install a bit of software onto your computer. This bit of software will allow you to specify a “drop box folder” on your computer. Anytime you make changes to this folder it will update your online storage account with those changes, ie. you specify your calibre library as your dropbox folder and you edit the Metadata of one of your books… the dropbox software will see that and update the same files you changed in your backup files located on dropbox.com
Because of the automatic syncing it works extremely well with ebook libraries. I mentioned Calibre in the example above… I bet some of you are still not using this software. If not, why?? It is the easiest library software you will find and just had a major update that lets you add custom columns so you can mark books read! Go, download it. now.
Ok, now that you have Calibre, let’s talk about how to make DropBox and Calibre share a library folder. easy
- Step 1 – Sign up for a Drop Box account.
- Step 2 – Follow the DropBox instructions and install the software. The software will ask you to place a folder called “DropBox” on your computer somewhere and within this folder is where your library will be. Think carefully about where you want to store your books, you should obviously choose a spot where you have at least 2GB of space if you think you will fill your drop box. Unsure where to put it? Generally, your “My Documents” folder would work fine. You can see mine is put inside a partition on my hard drive called “Storage”. It has a green check on the folder because it has been synced recently.
Current Calibre Users – You do not need to recreate a library folder. At this point you can move your current Calibre folder from it’s former location to inside the dropbox folder. Example, if you have a “Calibre Library” folder in your “My Documents” you want to copy the entire folder and then paste the entire folder inside your “DropBox” folder. You can rename it if you want as we will have to tell Calibre where the folder has moved to anyway.
Step 4 (version a)- Set your Calibre preferences. Open up Calibre(if you were a previous user it may give you an error saying your library is missing or it may just open up and all your books will be gone. DO NOT WORRY!). Once Calibre is open, hit the “PREFERENCES” tab along the top menu bar. Under the General tab you are going to specify the location of your ebooks, this is where you want to browse to find your “MyBooks” folder within the “DropBox” folder. Once it is set, click OK. You are done! Once you do that, if you had a previous library all of your books should now be visible in Calibre again tho it may take some time or it may take a restart of Calibre depending on your system.
Step 4 (version b)- Set your Calibre preferences. Open up Calibre (if you were a previous user it may give you an error saying your library is missing or it may just open up and all your books will be gone. DO NOT WORRY!). Once Calibre is open, look to the top menu bar and look for a book count tab situated between the “Convert Books” and “Save to Disk” options. Your top menu may look different! I believe I’ve customized my top tool bar, but you are basically looking for a link that drops down to show your library options. Under this library tab you want to choose the “Switch/Create Library” menu item. This will open up a pop up that will inform you of your current library location and allow you to browse to find your “MyBooks” folder within the “DropBox” folder. Once it is set, click OK. You are done! Once you do that, if you had a previous library all of your books should now be visible in Calibre again tho it may take some time or it may take a restart of Calibre depending on your system. 
Now whenever you update your calibre library, it will update your online library of books…. giving you 2 complete backups of your ebooks. If you get a new computer or lose your hard drive all you have to do is download dropbox again and it will create the folders and put all your books back into them.
If you want to go a step further and create a viewable web catalog of your books that you can can browse on your phone, check out Dear Author’s post on creating a cloud. I admit I have done it, but being a Kindle owner it would require me to keep both kindle format and epub in my library to read with stanza. Because of that I never read on my iphone unless through Kindle for iPhone. I keep mine set up tho because I like being able to browse the covers of all my books.
I hope that helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have or contribute any other backup ideas you have!
Guest Post: The Mighty Buzzard talks Ebooks and Pirates
And before you even say it, no…. we are not talking about the sexy pirates. Tho I do love a good sexy pirate… especially if he is all scruffy and can talk with an accent of some kind….. hmm pirates… *dreamy look*
Anyway, before I get distracted by the idea of sexy pirates, let me say I am very happy to have a special guest posting here at KindleVixen today. The Mighty Buzzard graciously agreed to stop by and talk about ebooks with me. I am sure you are all tired of hearing me rant and rave on twitter about them and the new Agency Pricing Model that is looming over our heads today. The Buzzard brings up some great points, if only the publishers would listen. So thanks to him for being here…. take it away sexy techy dude… (I love a man who can make use of a good formula).
There’s been a lot of chatter lately about REP. It’s gotten me to thinking about ebooks in general and piracy. Now I could go off on a rant but I’ve been coding a lot lately, so I’m going to go for logic this time even though there’s been no evidence that publishers are swayed by things like that.
Publishers, you are competing with piracy. It makes no difference that you have legal right to distribute the material and they don’t, they’re still competition. Further, they’re not going away. If the RIAA and MPAA combined can’t do a damned thing to even slow piracy, you’re certainly not going to with much shallower pockets. You have to offer more value than pirates if you want to make a sale.
Let’s have a go at the math behind this nebulous term “value”. Start off with the value of the content of an ebook to the customer (Its value to you doesn’t matter. At all.), call it $C for content. We also need to value the convenience of the distribution method for the customer, call it $E, because their time and effort is valuable to them. We’ll need to valuate any moral repulsion they have to violating copyright and not contributing anything to the author (Yes, only the author. Customers don’t give two shits about publishers.), call it $M. Of course we need the price of the book, $P. Because you seem to want to use the hell out of it lately, set $F equal to the fear of jail/lawsuits. Conversely, there is the defiance of heavy-handed methods that the user feels, or $D. One last bit, cross-title (hopefully) targeted advertising on the site of purchase, $A. Believe it or not, this last one does have value to the customer as well as to you; they want to be able to find other books they’d like.
So we have for publishers legit distribution chanels:
$C + $E + $A – $P – $D = total value to customer
and from piratical channels:
$C + $E + $A – $M – $F = total value to customer
Recognize that since we have factored in morals and fear, the customer will be going with the choice with higher value every single time. Now $C is the same value in both channels, so we can effectively discount it for this discussion but you should keep in mind that it exists when considering the math of release windows because you set $C to zero if you don’t release what the customer wants before the pirates.
In $A, you should have an incredible advantage over piracy but you seem to not want to invest much into it. So you have only a very small advantage that you could lose at any time.
Using $F as a method of devaluing piratical distribution channels hasn’t worked very well for movies or music. Do you assume that you have some innate attribute that will cause it to work for you? Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But let’s assume a very small positive value here just for argument’s sake even if it will increase $D for a good chunk of potential customers.
Experience has shown that you can increase $M by getting authors to connect positively with their fans. Negative comments from authors or publishers have no effect on $M and serve only to increase $D. Always. Every. Single. Time.
Increasing $E is the most important place you really should be able kick the hell out of the pirates but you’ve instead chosen to let them have an overwhelmingly commanding lead because of the need to control the material through DRM and exclusive hardware. People want to be able to get a book in a click or two and they’d like to be able to shift format for use on their device of choice. Forget control. It’s an illusion. You never had it and you never will. Worry about your total value to customer. If it’s higher than the pirates’, you will win.
Lastly, there’s $P. Pirates will always have the advantage over you here, what with $P being zero in their case. So, tell me, how does increasing $P, thereby decreasing your total value to customer, help you compete?
I’m not going to bother summarizing. I don’t feel like going back through all that and shortening it to fit in one paragraph. Make yourself some bullet points or an outline or something. Office guys like that kind of crap.
~The Mighty Buzzard
Reviews of the Barnes & Noble Nook start to surface.
The official review from Engadget has made its way to the surface. Some quick quotes:
In our tests — and this may just be due to the Kindle we were using — we felt it very slightly outperformed Amazon’s option in contrast, though the Kindle has a considerably faster refresh rate when turning pages. In fact, the Nook’s refresh speed was sometimes a little annoying, with us actually having moments in between page turns of waiting for more content — not a feeling you want to encounter if you’re trying to mimic the book-reading experience.
In regards to navigation:
once you get the hang of the system it starts to make some sense, but it’s nothing we’d describe as intuitive, and your rhythm is thrown off by one major factor: the extremely sluggish response of the device. That’s right, you’re not zipping and zooming through any of these menus, you’re patiently waiting for the device to do its thing. That laggy scrolling we saw in the demo the day this was launched? Not really much better in the release version.
User Interface:
While the UI is different (not necessarily a bad thing in our eyes), there are also places where it is plain bad (necessarily a bad thing in our eyes). There’s instability to spare in the review unit we used. More than once we saw the familiar Android force close / wait message when trying to load a piece of the software up, and we encountered a lot of unexpected pauses and lag when trying to get through menus, causing a number of incorrect selections and general annoyance.
Conclusion:
when it came to day to day use, we felt let down in a big way, and can only imagine how magnified that feeling would be if we’d gone and shelled out nearly $300 for the device.
In the end, the Nook is an intriguing product launched by a powerful force in the world of booksellers, but the initial offering feels long on promises and short on delivery.
I can’t imagine that Barnes & Noble is having a very good day today. Additionally, it seems that Nooks are now not shipping until January, completely missing the holiday season – that can’t be good for them. They haven’t handled this release well, hopefully they can get it to together and give Amazon a run for their money…. then we all win 
After this posted, I stumbed upon more reviews:
CNET
Gizmodo
NY Times
All Things Digital
Consumer Reports
Business Week
A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) by George R.R. Martin
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