Reading Epub's without converting possible?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by lumpynose

Although if you convert a book later on, the global settings are overridden by any settings you may have used for the individual books. For example, if you later change the global settings.

https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/con...for-conversion

Every so often when I make changes in the global conversion settings (or maybe I'm feeling bored...), I will select all the ebooks in a library and then use Edit metadata in bulk with the option to Remove stored conversion settings for the selected books to clear any stored conversion settings.

[lumpynose]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Every so often when I make changes in the global conversion settings (or maybe I'm feeling bored...), I will select all the ebooks in a library and then use Edit metadata in bulk with the option to Remove stored conversion settings for the selected books to clear any stored conversion settings.

Nice tip; thanks.

[rashkae]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I would agree with all but the last item. I've had too many ebooks with all the text in a single file which calibre will happily split. I may have to do some editing to correct some splitting errors (most often where the book title and author both have header tags) but easier in most cases to let calibre do the heavy lifting.

If I'm converting a book that is not properly split, of course, I will let calibre do the guesswork. However, more often, I encounter books with a graphic at the top of the page on chapter breaks, or a subheading, and Calibre with default settings will butcher those into many unnecessary page breaks.

If coverting between e-book formats, (and the ASSumption here is that most books are already correctly split,), then it's more sensible to *not* let calibre add breaks by default, unless you know they are needed.

Edit: It's worth noting that if a book is *not* split, it can always be done later with another conversion. However, if Calibre is allowed to insert spurious splits, that book will stay that way unless fixed by hand. I can assure you from much experience, that gets tedious in books with over 100 chapters.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by rashkae

If I'm converting a book that is not properly split, of course, I will let calibre do the guesswork. However, more often, I encounter books with a graphic at the top of the page on chapter breaks, or a subheading, and Calibre with default settings will butcher those into many unnecessary page breaks.

If coverting between e-book formats, (and the ASSumption here is that most books are already correctly split,), then it's more sensible to *not* let calibre add breaks by default, unless you know they are needed.

Edit: It's worth noting that if a book is *not* split, it can always be done later with another conversion. However, if Calibre is allowed to insert spurious splits, that book will stay that way unless fixed by hand. I can assure you from much experience, that gets tedious in books with over 100 chapters.

My preference for converting books from Amazon is to use KindleUnpack. Open the book in Sigil (calibre's editor will work as well) and if only one text file, do an epub to epub conversion in calibre to split the files. Generally, Sigil will whine about errors in the file when only a single text file is present. For the most part those errors are triggered by using name= as if it was the same as id= giving a mass of TOC entries pointing to non-existent IDs.

[BookCat]

Don't frighten the OP with all this technical Calibre stuff. I don't understand what you're talking about yet I've been using Calibre regularly for years.