We have reviewed several tools in the past that allowed you to download books from the service. A new tool has been released recently in a new version that allows anyone to download all readable books and magazines from Google Books.

Google Books Downloader is a free application for the Windows and Mac operating system. The program needs to be installed, and it is suggested to select the custom installation option to avoid the installation of Arccosine (whatever that is). It is definitely not needed for the program’s core functionality.

You need to open the Google Books website in a web browser to copy the web addresses into the downloader. Just head over there and search for books that you would like to download. All that needs to be done afterwards is to copy the web address and paste it into the application afterwards.

You may want to check the output format options before you click on the Start button to download the selected book. The program will download and convert the selected book to pdf format by default, with options to change the format to png or jpg instead.

The only other options that are available are to change the book’s output resolution (default 800px, with options to change from 350px to 1200px) and the destination folder the book will be saved to.

Windows and Mac users can download the latest version of the program from the official program homepage.

One of the programs for that job is Hamster Soft’s Free eBook Converter which supports more than 200 different formats according to the company website. Among the supported devices are Apple’s iPad and iPhone, Amazon Kindle as well as Sony, Acer and Bq ebook readers.

The installation suggests to install another program from the same developer. You need to pay attention to the installation if you do not want the second program to be installed. Free eBook Converter downloads the installation files from the Internet during installation, keep that in mind when downloading the program.

The program itself has a minimalistic interface. Users can drag and drop compatible ebook documents into the program interfaceor use the Add Files button to use the file browser to load documents into the program interface.

All files are then displayed with a small thumbnail screenshot, their name, file size and file extension. Individual documents or all can be removed from the listing. A click on next loads the device and format selection screen that displays the available devices and formats that the selected documents can be converted to.

Devices are displayed at the top. A problem here is that it is not clear into which format they are converted to. The formats and platforms on the other hand show all the file extensions and formats the documents can be converted to. This is likely the better option if the device owner knows the supported ebook formats.

A click on the convert button runs the conversion and stores them automatically in the same directory as the source files. Hamster Free Ebook Converter displays options to open the source folder after the conversion or to return to the selection screen to add more files or convert the ebooks again into a different format.

The program did have some troubles converting pdf documents into txt files during tests. Not all contents of the pdf ebooks were accessible in the text document after the conversion.

Users who are looking for a free program to convert ebook and other document formats can download the Free Ebook Converter at the developer website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. The program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 and an active Internet connection during installation.

The biggest advantage over saving websites as HTML or PDF documents is that it is possible to add multiple pages to the ebook. You could for instance add all Ghacks Firefox articles to the ebook, or a Wikipedia entry plus all links to related topics that are posted on that Wikipedia article.

Once you have installed GrabMyBooks you can use the add-on’s functionality by right-clicking on a page, link or highlighted section on a page.

The contents that have been selected for inclusion are then displayed on screen with direct links to delete or edit them. Additional links lead to the local Mybooks page that offers to display all articles and text selections on the screen.

A click on Grab My Book on that screen creates the ebook in epub format directly. The page contents are most of the time picked up correctly by the extension. You will however notice that images and other media will not included when page contents are copied with the help of GrabMyBooks.

That’s by far the biggest downside of the program. An option to add multiple pages at once to the ebook is missing as well, which could speed up things for users who for instance want to create an ebook that contains an article and all pages that article links to. For that, users need to select each link individually on the article’s page which can become tiresome if the original article links to more than a handful of websites.

Lastly, the fact that GrabMyBooks is not available on the Mozilla add-on repository but only on a third party website may keep some users away from installing and using the add-on.

Alternatives are available, but most are not as comfortable. You could for instance copy and paste web pages, text and even media contents in a Word document instead, and convert that Word document in the end into an ebook format like Epub. Websites where you can do that for free are available on the Internet, 2EPub is one of them. The website supports files with a maximum file size of 25 Megabytes, which should be enough in most cases.

Interested users can install GrabMyBooks directly from the developer website. Cautious users may want to wait until the add-on has been added to the Firefox add-on repository before they check it out.

That is where Calibre comes in. This amazing ebook tool is a cross-platform ebook manager that not only allows you to manage your ebook library, it also allows you to convert your own books (papers, documents, etc) into a format that your ebook reader will read. No matter if you have a Kindle, NOOK, Sony eReader, or whatever…you can convert those documents into useable forms for your device. Let’s take a look at just how this process is done with Calibre.

Formats in, formats out

Calibre can format into and out of the following formats:

• Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC**, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT
• Output Formats: EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, SNB, TCR, TX

You will notice the input format does not include .doc. That is intentional as the .doc format is fairly inconsistent with it’s standards. It has been my experience that the .rtf and .pdf formats are the best for input.

Preparing for formatting

I won’t go into detail about managing your books in Calibre. But I did want to mention how metadata is edited. By editing the meta data of your books you can change/add the following:

• Cover image
• Title
• Title sort
• Author name
• Author sort
• Rating
• Publisher
• Tags
• Series
• ISBN
• Comments
• Date
• Published date

Figure 1

In order to edit the metadata of your book simply right-click your book and select Edit Metadata > Edit Metadata Individually. When you click that the metadata editor will open (see Figure 1).

You can also do a bulk edit of metadata. When you are editing in bulk you will edit the metadata of one book and then click the Next button. If you are editing only a single button, edit the data and then click OK.

Once you have edited the metadata, you are ready to convert.

Converting

Figure 2

To convert your file into an eReader-friendly format go back to the main screen, right-click your book, and select Convert Books > Convert Individually. Of course you can convert in bulk as well. When the conversion window opens (see Figure 2) you will notice numerous tabs in the left pane.

The most important of these tabs is the Page Setup tab. From that tab you can choose the page format for the document. As a general rule, when you select the Output format (from the top-right drop down) the correct page setup will be configured for that output. But if you have very device-specific formatting you would  need to visit that tab and configure the output document correctly.

You can convert your file from any of the tabs. All you do is select the output format type (upper right drop down), edit the metadata (if you haven’t already haven’t done so). And then click OK. Depending upon the input and output type, the process can take some time. But in the end your newly converted file will be in the ~/Calibre Library directory and ready to transfer to your device.

Guten Reader is a Java application, which means that users need to have the latest Java Runtime Evironment (JRE) installed on their computer system before they can launch the ebook reader.

Guten Reader offers a simple interface with two main areas; A left sidebar that offers a search, the search results and a few text formatting settings, and the right area that displays the selected ebook so that it can be read in the application window.

Users can enter a search term, including book titles or authors, and the application will fill the results listing with hits. It is furthermore possible to pick selected authors directly from the pulldown menu next to the search.

A double-click on any search results item loads it in the main area. The book is loaded completely which means it may take a few moments before it appears, especially on systems with slower Internet connections.

The formatting options at the bottom allow the user to select a font and font size, and to enable text smoothing and the highlighting of dictionary words.

And that’s it. But that’s actually all that is needed to enjoy the ebook reader. There are a few things that the developer could optimize. It would for instance make sense to enable the caching of books, so that they do not have to be loaded again if they have been loaded before. Other desirable options are bookmarks to make it easier to continue reading a book that has been read at a previous session, and a better option to select a font from the list of available ones.

Guten Reader is a lightweight desktop reader for English Project Gutenberg ebooks. Guten Reader was tested on a Windows 7 Pro system with the latest JRE installed. It should work on all systems that Java can be installed on.

But for some the stumbling block comes when you’re trying to sync such a device with one or various operating systems. This can be a problem for anyone who uses anything but Windows. Fortunately where there is a demand, there is a supply. For those who have a Sony Reader you’re in luck. Thanks to one Kovid Goyal there is a wonderful interface to allow you to manage a book collection (including news feeds) for your Sony Reader. This interface is called Calibre. This tool can sync ebooks to the main memory of your device or to a memory card with ease. Calibre works in Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Calibre is supported in the following distributions:

• Ubuntu
• Exherbo
• Debian
• Foresight

I did get Calibre installed on Elive+Compiz without any problems. The only thing you need to make sure you have is xdg-utils installed before you issue the binary installation command. Once you have xdg-utils installed issue the following command:
sudo python -c "import urllib2; exec urllib2.urlopen('http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/download_linux_binary_installer').read(); main()"
This installation take a bit because it has to download the source. The good news is you do not have to intervene during the installation.

Main Window

Once the installation is complete you can run the software with the command calibre.

As you can see (in the image to the left) the user interface is very intuative. From this window you can manage books, edit meta information, manage news feeds, sync to your device, save to disk, and more.

But how do you add a book? Simple. Say you want to download and install Dracula by Bram Stoker. You can get this book for free from free-eBooks.net. Once you have the title downloaded you will want to click the Add Books button, navigate to where you have the book downloaded, select the book, and click Open.

Once the book has been added you will see it listed in the main window. You might have to adjust the details of the book. This will depend upon who did the original conversion of the book and if they entered the meta data correctly. Editing this data is simple: Highlight the book and click the Edit Meta Information button.

Adding News Feeds

Adding Newsfeed

Of course you will want to have your gHacks RSS feeds with you as you travel. To add a feed click on the drop-down arrow to the right of the Fetch News button and select Add A Custom News Source. The image to the right shows all of the information needed for adding a news feed. You can even set it up to auto-update feeds. Pretty slick.

Once you are satisfied with your library you can send your books and news to your device. To do this plug in your device and, once it is recognized, click the Send To Device button.

If you press the drop down to the right of the Send To Device button you can select to send your books to your device and then delete them from your local library, send the books to the devices main memory, send the books to the devices memory card, or send only specific formats to the device.

Final Thoughts

It’s about time someone wrote a reliable interface for ebook readers that is reliable, simple to use, and (best of all) cross platform. Now those of you using the Linux operating system do not have to wait around to purchase that Sony Reader!

Feedbooks is providing a similar service. The only difference is that they -only- convert the RSS Feed of a website into a pdf document that can be downloaded without costs from their website. The whole process is as simple as it can get, paste a feed into the form, hit submit and download the pdf document at the end.

Feedbook provides A4 pdf downloads, Cybook & Sony Reader, iLiad (whatever that is) and custom documents. I was not able to explore the custom option further because one has to signup to create those.

Feedbooks provides a button that webmasters can embed on their website. I have not tried it yet but I guess it would be possible to use one of the many feed combination services to combine many feeds into one and paste that url into Feedbooks to create a huge pdf document from multiple feeds.

Feedbooks offers more than just this RSS to PDF service. Users can download e-books as well that can be sorted in various ways. I encountered some error messages from time to time when I tried to convert some feeds.

The .lit file extension stands for literature and it seems to be rather common on Windows Mobile devices. Since I never have owned one it was completely unknown to me. Microsoft Reader is an old program, last updated in 2005, that is available for several languages and operating systems.

The PC version comes with an optional Text to Speech module which reads the texts out loud if so desired. It is possible to convert .lit files to open standard files by using a program called Convert Lit which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

That’s what the Book Beta Demo is trying to present. It looks pretty much like a book on a website. Readers can flip through the pages of the book, go to a specific page and even tear pages from it. Advanced features that you wont find in any real book are demonstrated as well.

Those features include transparency effects as well as a component called live Bitmapping which makes it possible to change animations on a page.

I’m not saying that this is a perfect adaption but the demonstration does come closer to the real experience than those pdf documents. I had some troubles concentrating on the contents of the book because my eyes did seem to be attracted to the page flipping mechanism.

The reason could be because it is a new way of reading or because there was not much content to read anyway in this demonstration.

The software eBook to Images supports all the eBook formats mentioned above and can be greatly customized to fit the exact screen size and display of your mp3 player. The options are manifold and will please every single user. The exact screen width, heights and image format can be selected so that every image fits perfectly on the screen of the mp3 player.

The advanced options are incredible. The font size and type can be changed to increase or decrease the font size. The text and background color can be defined and the images can be rotated 90° or 270° to fit on every mp3 player perfectly. Page numbers can be added to each image and colors can be inversed if needed.

It is furthermore possible to add a custom background picture and select the amount of pictures of each folder. The default is 100 pictures per folder.

Creating image files of an eBook was astonishingly fast. A conversion of a 2 Megabyte public eBook was completed in under a minute although I selected a different font, font size and colors. Oh, that 2 Megabyte PDF file converted to images with a total size of roughly 84 Megabytes.
via JK on the run

I originally stumbled on to this story on Lifehacker and found it worth your time because it eliminates the need to carry one more thing on the tram, metro or bus. Since I really despise carrying more than 0 things in my hands while on the go, this is something that will really come in handy for me.

The software behind the show, eBook to images is a freeware windows apps, and you guessed it, it converts eBook pages into pictures, so you can view them on you iPod. The beauty of it is that you can use it with any handheld device that supports picture browsing, those of you with iPod touch or iPhones will be scrolling along the pages with pleasure in no time.