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jimad · 01-01-2010, 04:32 PM

>I have a 636 page pdf google book that I added to the calibre library, and now am trying to add to my Kindle, converted to mobi. The job seems to be stuck, but I'm not sure how long the conversion should take. I'm not sure whether to stop the process and start over, or whether I've done something wrong.

The original google pdf book consists of 636 bit map scanned pages of the original book -- that is what you are looking at if you open the PDF in Adobe Reader, for example. The file also contains OCR attempted conversions of the words on the page in order that you can attempt to search on the contents of that book. If you ask calibre to convert this google pdf to a mobi file format calibre tries to convert it ALL -- meaning that it has 636 huge bitmap images of pages to convert to 636 huge bit map images in the MOBI file. Is this really what you intended to try to do? The other option, which may be more sensible, depending on your needs, is instead of downloading the google PDF version of the book, download the google EPUB version of the book -- which just contains the google OCR results. This calibre can quickly and easily convert to MOBI. However if the OCR contains scan errors -- which it will -- the results may be usable for your needs, or not. Recently I've found the google OCR efforts to be pretty good. I have a Kindle DX, so I can read the google PDF files directly, looking at the original bitmap page scans, or I can use calibre to convert the EPUB format to MOBI and read that. For my purposes, both approaches work pretty well, and both had their advantages and disadvantages. Reading the PDF retains nuances of the original text -- including the occassional scanners thumb and decades of student's scribble marks, but the scan process tends to render text a little on the heavy and blurry side . Converting the EPUB results in a "real" e-book, where the fonts are clear, can be resized, reflowed, etc -- but now contains some scannos which one must "read around". Also, if you were successful in converting those 636 bitmap page images to MOBI file format, if you read on a smaller Kindle such as the International, you may find the pages have shrunk to a size small enough to make reading uncomfortable -- depending on the strength of your eyes and/or your reading glasses. Cheers!

01-01-2010, 04:32 PM	#258
jimad Connoisseur Posts: 53 Karma: 52 Join Date: Apr 2008 Device: Kindle	Google Book PDF to MOBI >I have a 636 page pdf google book that I added to the calibre library, and now am trying to add to my Kindle, converted to mobi. The job seems to be stuck, but I'm not sure how long the conversion should take. I'm not sure whether to stop the process and start over, or whether I've done something wrong. The original google pdf book consists of 636 bit map scanned pages of the original book -- that is what you are looking at if you open the PDF in Adobe Reader, for example. The file also contains OCR attempted conversions of the words on the page in order that you can attempt to search on the contents of that book. If you ask calibre to convert this google pdf to a mobi file format calibre tries to convert it ALL -- meaning that it has 636 huge bitmap images of pages to convert to 636 huge bit map images in the MOBI file. Is this really what you intended to try to do? The other option, which may be more sensible, depending on your needs, is instead of downloading the google PDF version of the book, download the google EPUB version of the book -- which just contains the google OCR results. This calibre can quickly and easily convert to MOBI. However if the OCR contains scan errors -- which it will -- the results may be usable for your needs, or not. Recently I've found the google OCR efforts to be pretty good. I have a Kindle DX, so I can read the google PDF files directly, looking at the original bitmap page scans, or I can use calibre to convert the EPUB format to MOBI and read that. For my purposes, both approaches work pretty well, and both had their advantages and disadvantages. Reading the PDF retains nuances of the original text -- including the occassional scanners thumb and decades of student's scribble marks, but the scan process tends to render text a little on the heavy and blurry side . Converting the EPUB results in a "real" e-book, where the fonts are clear, can be resized, reflowed, etc -- but now contains some scannos which one must "read around". Also, if you were successful in converting those 636 bitmap page images to MOBI file format, if you read on a smaller Kindle such as the International, you may find the pages have shrunk to a size small enough to make reading uncomfortable -- depending on the strength of your eyes and/or your reading glasses. Cheers!