What formats should I use with PB360 and FBreader?

[Kameli]

I use PB360, FBreader and Calibre.

1. I get books in different formats. Which formats I should I get when I have choice?

2. I use Calibre. For best reading results should I let it to convert books in certain format? (fb2, epub?) or should I rather use original format as long as FBreader supports it?

3. What format should I covert to when I have to? For example I had one book as pdf. While 360 supports it I love FBreader so much that I rather converted it to format that FBreader supported. Which format should I pick?


So far I haven't had any problems. I have converted some .lit, .html and .pdf to fb2 and epub with Calibre. I am just wondering which would be the best way to handle this stuff.

[IndecisiveMe]

I don't have a lot of books, most things I read on my PB360 are HTML files, so I'm not sure how much help I'm going to be. Having said that, if I didn't need to convert files, I wouldn't. If I there was a choice, I'd definitely get books that were in a format the Pocketbook supports, EPUB being the most common, I guess.

For the few LIT books I do have, I converted them using Calibre into FB2 and they look lovely. I wouldn't even bother converting your HTML files to FB2 because in my experience the PB360 handles HTML very, very well.

I do have some PDFs that I've tried to convert and I still haven't had much luck getting them how I want them.

If you're going to convert them anyway, I'd definitely use FB2.

[Guns4Hire]

I convert everything to epub. Even some PDF's. Though some just don't convert well and aren't worth the time and hassle to turn them into epubs. So for the most part out of the 307 ebooks I have 3/4 that are PDF's and the rest are epubs. Doh I am lying. I just remembered I have two ebooks that are in html. I tried to convert them using Calibre and all hell broke lose. So I just kept them as html.

I know absolutely nothing about fb2 ebooks. I have never seen one. What advantages to fb2 are there over epub (if any)? Anyone?

[kacir]

Originally Posted by IndecisiveMe

I do have some PDFs that I've tried to convert and I still haven't had much luck getting them how I want them.

Those few pdf files that I am interested enough in to go through the conversion hassle, I convert using an OCR program. It works surprisingly well.

I just open pdf file in an OCR program - an OEM version of ReadIRIS that came bundled to a muntifunction device we got for our office. Abbyy FineReader works too with pdf files.
If you do own an OCR program that can not handle pdf files directly, you can convert pdf file to series of bitmaps. Just ask if you are interested to know how.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Guns4Hire

I know absolutely nothing about fb2 ebooks. I have never seen one. What advantages to fb2 are there over epub (if any)? Anyone?

see this post
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...4&postcount=10

[Bookster]

Re: OCR, I use Abbyy's PDF Transformer, and it's brilliant; works with every language (even Latin) with a a 99% accuracy, from what I could experience. Works very well also to convert the notes from PB's notes into doc/txt/rtf, with a bit of workaround.

[fjtorres]

These days I convert everything to epub *and* prc/mobi.
(Plus I archive the original, of course. )

When I eventually get organized for real, in a year or ten, I'll add lit to the mix. I'm not sure its really dead.

I'm not ready to buy into the eub-only bandwagon just yet; the way epub is trending, with warring DRMs, I expect to see other "universal" formats appear before long.

[Yar-PocketBooker]

I love FB2...)))

[Logseman]

One of the advantages of PB360 is that it swallows everything you want to feed it, even extraneous formats like CHM and DJVU. And FBReader, particularly the third party enhancement, opens everything save for PDF's and files with DRM. Thus, the need for converting files is not very important, in my opinion.