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Old 04-30-2013, 03:50 AM   #1
aquarianx
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.orb ebook format

Hi,
I have some technical books in the .orb format. These are fairly new books so it is not an old format. There is a fairly crappy reader for windows which requires flash player to be pre-installed to work.
I use Mac and I've not come across this format before. Any help with opening / converting would be welcome. Thanks.
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Old 04-30-2013, 02:41 PM   #2
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aquarianx View Post
Hi,
I have some technical books in the .orb format. These are fairly new books so it is not an old format. There is a fairly crappy reader for windows which requires flash player to be pre-installed to work.
I use Mac and I've not come across this format before. Any help with opening / converting would be welcome. Thanks.
aqx
what is the name of the supplied application that is used to read this format? Our wiki article on flash player might help. The format used by flash is SWF as described in the wiki.

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Old 04-30-2013, 09:32 PM   #3
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Thanks for the reply.

The reader is called original book reader. I doubt it is openly available.

I have changed extension to swf, but no luck.
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Old 05-01-2013, 11:11 AM   #4
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Thanks for the reply.

The reader is called original book reader. I doubt it is openly available.

I have changed extension to swf, but no luck.
Ah, it is very likely DRM protected in addition to a unique form. Orb obviously stands for original book reader. I would suggest the only way to change the format of this book is screen captures of pages. However, if the book is copyrighted you may be breaking laws in doing this for too many pages or for the wrong reasons. Is this a rented book or a text book? We at mobile read do not support or condone breaking copyright laws.

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Old 05-06-2013, 02:18 PM   #5
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Change the .orb extension to the .zip then extract it. There will be files with the extension gau or whatever. Change them to .swf I could find only these. I couldn't find a way to convert flash files to pdf or image files.
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Old 05-13-2013, 05:59 AM   #6
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Thank you very much. I can at least open them on my mac os now.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ellyzeyn View Post
Change the .orb extension to the .zip then extract it. There will be files with the extension gau or whatever. Change them to .swf I could find only these. I couldn't find a way to convert flash files to pdf or image files.
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Old 05-20-2013, 06:49 AM   #7
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Any news on a proper reader for these files on mac OS? Really desperate for a proper working solution. Thanks.
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Old 05-25-2013, 05:30 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aquarianx View Post
Any news on a proper reader for these files on mac OS? Really desperate for a proper working solution. Thanks.
Not even mention some app for iPad o iPhone....
Really need some kind of software for this file extension on Apple devices...

Thanks...

Last edited by flapit2004; 06-28-2013 at 11:36 PM.
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Old 05-26-2013, 11:00 AM   #9
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This guys .orb format smelt fishy so i did some research on it.
He is trying to monopolize this ebook format to maximize profit ad minimize sharing.

LWW has not made a .orb format at all. He has hired someone to create a reader based on his request as can be seen from this web page

http://www.freelancer.com/projects/S...ok-Reader.html

Hopefully someone can reverse the pdf>swf conversion which i think he hs done via the swf tools
Adobe acrobat is able to combine individual swf files into one pdf file, however, each page has to be done individually and is very slow.
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Old 06-09-2013, 04:41 AM   #10
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steps to convert.orb

Hi, same here i got some books with .orb format.
I follow the steps ellyzeyn mention:
Quote:
ellyzeyn:
Change the .orb extension to the .zip then extract it. There will be files with the extension gau or whatever. Change them to .swf I could find only these. I couldn't find a way to convert flash files to pdf or image files.
and then i use Kurst SWF Renderer to convert the .swf files to .png files.
After i have multiple .png files correspond to the swf files.
Open the .png files with preview in mac and export to PDF.
Use automator to combine the multiple PDF files into single PDF file.
Use any OCR software to OCR the PDF file.
The finished PDF file size would increase 5-10 times or more depending on the image content and content scale in .swf conversion.
I hope this help in any way.
thank you.
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Old 06-09-2013, 04:35 PM   #11
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Thank you for that.

The conversion from swf to png using Kurst SWF renderer results in very low quality files, especially for text. Are there any tweaks?
aqx


Quote:
Originally Posted by mobius_one View Post
Hi, same here i got some books with .orb format.
I follow the steps ellyzeyn mention:


and then i use Kurst SWF Renderer to convert the .swf files to .png files.
After i have multiple .png files correspond to the swf files.
Open the .png files with preview in mac and export to PDF.
Use automator to combine the multiple PDF files into single PDF file.
Use any OCR software to OCR the PDF file.
The finished PDF file size would increase 5-10 times or more depending on the image content and content scale in .swf conversion.
I hope this help in any way.
thank you.
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Old 06-10-2013, 05:12 AM   #12
aquarianx
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I seem to have a working set-up for macosx.

Step 1: Rename the .orb file to .zip

Step 2: Extract files to single folder. This yields a folder with .swf files in numerical order.

Step 3: Change the extension of all the files to .swf. I used A better finder rename for this.

Step 4: Using Kurst swf renderer, batch convert all the swf files to png.
a) Open swf renderer.
b) Click "select swf" and select all the png files
c) click "select folder" and choose a folder to save the converted files
d) Change content scale to 2
e) Set background to transparent
f) Change "stop exporting" setting to "when last frame is reached" and uncheck "export swfs to sub folders"
g) Click "Start Capture". All swf files are converted into png files in one folder.

Step 5: Select all the png files and open with preview. cmd + a to select all the files in the side frame. Print into pdf as single pdf file.

A 20mb orb file becomes a 160mb pdf file, but I suppose this would depend on factors such as number of images. Text heavy files don't inflate too much in size. Hope this helps someone.

Last edited by aquarianx; 06-10-2013 at 05:15 AM. Reason: punctuation
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Old 06-10-2013, 07:36 AM   #13
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Converting .orb ebook is not perfect but better than nothing

Thank you, aquarianx for describing the steps better.
I use 2x to 3x scaling for good result.
If anyone have other ways to convert .orb ebook files please share.
I believe this is not the only way.

Thank you again.
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Old 06-10-2013, 07:56 AM   #14
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Quicker options to convert swf to pdf / jpg / png would be welcome.
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Old 06-10-2013, 10:41 PM   #15
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I followed the steps above but the Kurst SWF Renderer won't convert the SWF into PNG one by one. Instead it converts the first SWF filw into multiple PNG (1560 times to be exact, which is the number of pages in the book), then starts converting 2.SWF into multiple PNG files, etc etc.

Anyone please tell me what I've done wrong?
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