Just want to convert my books

[brad the noob]

Hi,

I was very excited when I found Calibre. I need to convert a pile of PDF books for my mothers new kindle. I am converting them to mobi.

My first problem is my ignorance I suppose. The second problem is most of the books are PDF files,some DOCs and RTF files. Most of these are named Author-Title.extension

All I really want to do is convert the library using Bulk convert to the mobi format. The file names should not change except for the extension. Is there any way to do that?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by brad the noob

Hi,

I was very excited when I found Calibre. I need to convert a pile of PDF books for my mothers new kindle. I am converting them to mobi.

My first problem is my ignorance I suppose. The second problem is most of the books are PDF files,some DOCs and RTF files. Most of these are named Author-Title.extension

All I really want to do is convert the library using Bulk convert to the mobi format. The file names should not change except for the extension. Is there any way to do that?

Then use the Command line tools (see the Help page for usage syntax) from a batch file.
BTW you will be missing out on a lot of management features of Calibre. The K could care less about the name of the file, it uses metadata.

[brad the noob]

Thanks for your reply. I can use batch files, I am and old dos guy. I tried to convert one file from a dos box.

ebook-convert carrie.pdf carrie.mobi

but when I ran the command from the directory that the file was in I got this message

- Cannot read from Y:\Calibre Library\Mom Kindle\Stephen King\carrie.pdf

I am not sure how to solve this.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by brad the noob

Thanks for your reply. I can use batch files, I am and old dos guy. I tried to convert one file from a dos box.

ebook-convert carrie.pdf carrie.mobi

but when I ran the command from the directory that the file was in I got this message

- Cannot read from Y:\Calibre Library\Mom Kindle\Stephen King\carrie.pdf

I am not sure how to solve this.

Try using the Full path
"Y:\Calibre Library\Mom Kindle\Stephen King\carrie.pdf"
(in quotes because of spaces in the names)

[brad the noob]

I made a directory on c: and ran the program again with the no results

C:\_test>ebook-convert c:\_test\carrie.pdf c:\_test\carrie.mobi
Cannot read from c:\_test\carrie.pdf

I tried running it C:\_test>ebook-convert carrie.pdf carrie.mobi
Cannot read from C:\_test\carrie.pdf

[brad the noob]

Figured it out. I had a mispelling in the file name. I need to stop trying to do things with a hangover.

Thanks for your help

[theducks]

Originally Posted by brad the noob

Figured it out. I had a mispelling in the file name. I need to stop trying to do things with a hangover.

Thanks for your help

[brad the noob]

I made a batch file and ran it. it just converted the first book. Batch files stop execution after the first line when running ebook-convertexe. I found that this is a known bug. Some helpful people posted that adding Start and /Wait may work but they did not.

I am using XP but I found a post that said batch files work in windows 7. So I installed calibre to my windows 7 computer and the batch files did not work there either.

I am not a programmer, I have no desire to learn a scripting language to solve this problem.

The main reason I started with the command line is because calibre screws up my filenames and then dumps them in their own directories. I find that the documentation for calibre is not easy to understand.

Perhaps if someone could tell me how to add books that start with author-title.extension and not get screwed up when added into the database I could work with that.

Thank you for your help

Brad