Essential Tools for Jetbooks (JB & JBL)

[Ken Maltby]

I am thinking that a listing of the software tools that come in handy when
working with these devices might be a good idea. Here are some of the
ones I find useful, maybe others can add ones that they like to the thread.

1. Calibre, of course. (Or other good ebook format converter.)
2. SyncToy, free from Microsoft. Lets you sync a folder on your PC with
your SD card(s).
3. Oscar's Renamer, free from Mediachance. See the link:
http://www.mediachance.com/free/renamer.htm
It makes it easy to find and replace "()[]" or other bad characters in the
file names of eBooks.
4. A set of DRM disinfecting tools.
5. Gimp2 or another good image editor, for scaling images and converting to
B&W Grayscale better suited to the Jetbook. (Gimp2 is free)
6. A collection of the various eBook reading programs for the sites that you
download books from.
7. "A good archive decompresser like 7Zip can extract the content of several
ebook formats to the basic files (epub -> html). [steven522]" I use WinRAR.

Any others?

Luck;
Ken

[greenapple]

Thanks. I've been looking for a tool like Synctoy for a long time.

For renamers, I have a suggestion: bulk rename utility.
http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php
It's really easy to use, and more visual than other renamers I've come across.

[steven522]

Since I try to convert everything I can to text, a good text editor with a robust search/replace is a must.
I was using MS Office for everything but now use the Notepad2 program recommended by another forum member. The more I use it, the more I like it. It has a very good regular expression search feature that can be replaced on. It also handles search and replace for end-of-line characters, tabs, etc. to get badly formatted text under control.

Also a good archive decompresser like 7Zip can extract the content of several ebook formats to the basic files (epub -> html).

[Ken Maltby]

Originally Posted by steven522

Since I try to convert everything I can to text, a good text editor with a robust search/replace is a must.
I was using MS Office for everything but now use the Notepad2 program recommended by another forum member. The more I use it, the more I like it. It has a very good regular expression search feature that can be replaced on. It also handles search and replace for end-of-line characters, tabs, etc. to get badly formatted text under control.

Also a good archive decompresser like 7Zip can extract the content of several ebook formats to the basic files (epub -> html).

That Notepad2 sounds interesting.

I added your unzipper suggestion to the list, in quotes, with your posting
name in brackets. I hope you don't mind, the idea being to try and make
a consolidated list in that first post. (Sorta like a sticky)

Luck;
Ken

[GhostHawk]

I'd have to agree that a good set of stand alone conversion tools would be a good thing.

Personally I have had nothing but bad experiences with Caliber. It took forever to add books, and it made a total hash of my folder where I had been storing my library.

Personally I use Amber Lit converter to convert .lit files (normally to .rtf)
And Zilla PDF converter to do the same for pdf files.

Also the Foxit pdf reader for the PC is in my opinion a huge improvement over adobe reader for previewing books on the PC. Plus it gives you options for selecting text or images out of a pdf where they can be inserted into another document. Not to mention it loads much faster, with fewer system resources than adobe's reader.

[artifact]

Personally I have had nothing but bad experiences with Caliber. It took forever to add books, and it made a total hash of my folder where I had been storing my library.

Ditto for that. I'm on a Mac and keep all my books on a NAS -- Calibre won't connect to the remote drive and even if it did it copies the books to its own space rather than using my existing archive. Plus its really, really slow.

For me on a Mac:
Stanza to convert formats.
Hidden Cleaner for Mac -- freeware that cleanly unmounts the device. The jetBook loves to leave trash folders behind :P.
The Unarchiver for uncompressing things.
TextWrangler, Bean or NeoOffice for text cleanup.
A multi-disk mirrored or striped NAS for redundant long term archiving.
Memeo Backup -- automatically copies files up to the NAS.

I've yet to find a sync tool for the Mac/Linux I'm happy with .

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by GhostHawk

...Personally I have had nothing but bad experiences with Caliber. It took forever to add books, and it made a total hash of my folder where I had been storing my library...

Part of the reason for your first sentence may be in your second sentence. It sounds like you were trying to use your source folder for your calibre library(per the developer, calibre is spelled with a lower case c). Calibre doesn't oraganize files, it organizes books. Most people use the old, traditional folder, filename tree structure for organization which isn't always the most efficient way to organize things, especially when there is more than one way to organize things. Calibre uses metadata (tags), kept a separate file, for organization and sorting. In the initial process of setting up your library, calibre reads files from a source folder, processes them as necessary, then stores them in it's own library, leaving the original files untouched. If you try to defeat calibre's system, such as directing calibre to use your source folder as the calibre library, you will wonk up your original system. People have a hard time accepting that calibre's way of organizing with metadata instead of folder and file structure is more efficient because it is radically different than the way most people are used to. To get around that unease, many people, including myself, retain their original files in a folder in addition to the folder the library calibre uses although it's not really needed. Storage space on HDDs is cheap nowadays so just think of it as planned redundancy (fancy term for back-up).

I personally find calibre to be much better than anything I've tried, free or otherwise. The current version is much better that it was when I started using it earlier this year and it keeps getting better. It also has a very avtive user forum one can go to for help, including from the developer. There may be programs that will convert files from one format to another faster than others, but for overall organization, conversion, and loading of books into devices, calibre can't be beat (it even has its own reader although you can use another one by changing the filetype asscociation). If you know something better, please let me know. So far every one I tried wasn't as good as calibre.

[tonhou]

I guess it all depends how you use the Jetbook and the computer operating system you use.
I use Linux, and don't connect the JB to the computer at all. I have an 8G SD card which I put my books on. I convert all to pdf as I find the performance superior. My books then usually go through these stages: <some format> to epub (using Calibre) to pdf (using one of the epub2pdf converters - I favour Jelby's off this site).
Jelby's epub2pdf produces very smart books formatted nicely. It can be found here:
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=89689
but is for Linux only users. There is another here:
http://epub2pdf.com/
Perhaps there are other Linux users who would find these things useful.

--Tony

[Jack Tingle]

Interesting viewpoint. I don't use anything beyond a text editor. I've never had to format shift on the jetBook. That's one of its biggest virtues. I occasionally have to fix a bad html file, but I tend to use Notepad for that[1].

Regards,
Jack Tingle

[1] Technically, I use a text editor named "TextPad", but Notepad works just fine for this, it's just that TextPad is my default text editor for other purposes.

[jlg432]

Thanks for pointing out synctoy! I knew I read about it somewhere.

I use Renamewiz which allows all kinds of file name editing abilities. You can even run it in "Sample Mode" if you do not trust your edits. This shows you what the output would look like but makes no permanent changes.

John

[bill_mchale]

Well, I got the Jetbook almost two years ago when it didn't really support any proper ebook formats other than .fb2. It did support pdfs and txt files though. Epub was pretty new back then, so most of the time, I downloaded .lit books (non-drm'd ones, I have never bought a book with drm) and then converted them to html files and finally used a command line utility to convert them to pdfs (I forget which one right now).

I had also developed a little perl script to reformat PG .txt files since I prefer indentation in my books to indicate new paragraphs. Jetbook later handled this automatically

These days, with the Jetbook, I never really feel the need to do much. I just keep my books organized in a file tree organized by genre --> author --> individual books, and then I can just copy the whole tree over to the SD card or do an rsync on it.

--
Bill

[GhostHawk]

Thought this might be handy to someone.

http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_conversion