Viewing books on the iPad using the iBook app is an absolute joy.  So much so, that I’m currently on a quest to convert the 20 or so programming books I own from PDF to ePub. Major kudos to Andy & Dave over at The Pragmatic Bookshelf for supporting ePub (and .mobi) from the get go.  I was able to download ePub versions of my books in about 5 minutes. Unfortunately, things didn’t go nearly as smoothly when it came to the ebooks purchased through O’Reilly and Apress.  O’Reilly claims to support ePub, but of the half dozen O’Reilly books I own, only one of the books has this listed as an option.  Apress takes things one step further in the wrong direction by password protecting all their ebooks (boo!). What I’ve tried thus far: Calibre: it worked, but it took up over 100% CPU just to launch the app (?!) and the ePub I got out of it contained no images and the formatting was rubbish. Epub2Go: was able to convert a PDF containing < 20 pages just fine.  All book conversions failed.  Currently offline probably because it’s getting as much traffic as apple.com at the moment. Dear Intarweb, can you help a guy out?
Pop-upView Separately

Viewing books on the iPad using the iBook app is an absolute joy.  So much so, that I’m currently on a quest to convert the 20 or so programming books I own from PDF to ePub.

Major kudos to Andy & Dave over at The Pragmatic Bookshelf for supporting ePub (and .mobi) from the get go.  I was able to download ePub versions of my books in about 5 minutes.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go nearly as smoothly when it came to the ebooks purchased through O’Reilly and Apress.  O’Reilly claims to support ePub, but of the half dozen O’Reilly books I own, only one of the books has this listed as an option.  Apress takes things one step further in the wrong direction by password protecting all their ebooks (boo!).

What I’ve tried thus far:

  • Calibre: it worked, but it took up over 100% CPU just to launch the app (?!) and the ePub I got out of it contained no images and the formatting was rubbish.
  • Epub2Go: was able to convert a PDF containing < 20 pages just fine.  All book conversions failed.  Currently offline probably because it’s getting as much traffic as apple.com at the moment.

Dear Intarweb, can you help a guy out?