MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - can freeread books be converted to epub editions

dwig · 12-26-2010, 09:00 AM

Yes, its not difficult if you use Calibre for the conversion. There are certainly many, many other routes for conversion.

The basic steps with Calibre are:
1. Save the FreeRead HTML file to disk. You can either display the page and Save from your browser or, with most browsers, Right-click on the PG/AU link as "Save linked content" (or whatever phrase your browser uses).
2. Install and launch Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/)
3. Add the HTML from step #1 to Calibre's library
4. Convert to ePub (or whatever desired format) being sure to check the "Preprocess input file ..." option. The default Line-unwrap of 0.40 worked fine for my quick test just now.

The FreeRead HTML pages are simply text files with fixed line wraps wrapped in a set of <PRE> tages, given a header and footer, and then given the appropriate HTML <HEAD> and <BODY> tags. The header and footer need to be stripped and the line wraps need to be "healed" to create a decent ebook presentation. Calibre will do this if you check the "Preprocess..." option, though you may have to tweak the Line-unwrap value with some books. If you go with another conversion route (e.g. add the HTML from Step #1 to a new ePub document in a program like Sigil) you'll need to manually perform the cleanup tasks.

12-26-2010, 09:00 AM	#2
dwig Wizard Posts: 1,613 Karma: 6718479 Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Paradise (Key West, FL) Device: Current:Surface Go & Kindle 3 - Retired: DellV8p, Clie UX50, ...	Yes, its not difficult if you use Calibre for the conversion. There are certainly many, many other routes for conversion. The basic steps with Calibre are: 1. Save the FreeRead HTML file to disk. You can either display the page and Save from your browser or, with most browsers, Right-click on the PG/AU link as "Save linked content" (or whatever phrase your browser uses). 2. Install and launch Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) 3. Add the HTML from step #1 to Calibre's library 4. Convert to ePub (or whatever desired format) being sure to check the "Preprocess input file ..." option. The default Line-unwrap of 0.40 worked fine for my quick test just now. The FreeRead HTML pages are simply text files with fixed line wraps wrapped in a set of <PRE> tages, given a header and footer, and then given the appropriate HTML <HEAD> and <BODY> tags. The header and footer need to be stripped and the line wraps need to be "healed" to create a decent ebook presentation. Calibre will do this if you check the "Preprocess..." option, though you may have to tweak the Line-unwrap value with some books. If you go with another conversion route (e.g. add the HTML from Step #1 to a new ePub document in a program like Sigil) you'll need to manually perform the cleanup tasks. Last edited by dwig; 12-26-2010 at 09:07 AM.