iPhone 101: iPhone+Stanza+Calibre (the almost-perfect solution)

[thankyou]

My goodness, I was scratching my head over this and could not figure out how to get my EPUB books onto Stanza on my iPod touch. After finding your guide, it took me less than a minute to get everything in working order. In fact, the step that took the longest was typing the URL into Stanza.

Your post has been a huge help. I'd normally just take the info and move on, but I had to take the time to register just to thank you... hence the name.

Edit: Did not want to reinstall iTunes. No, I don't copy any new music onto the iPod. Yes, I can listen to the same piece over and over, because I hear something new each time. Yes, I have listened to music this way for decades.

[Chrysanthemum]

Originally Posted by BarnettR

I would just like to add that besides Stanza I've had very good reading experiences with...

I wanted to add that after using Stanza for some time now with Calibre, I have changed to using Bluefire for my ePub books. It is a free app available in the App store, and I have found it easier to move files onto it than Stanza. It also can read purchased ePubs that are registered with Adobe Digital Editions which Stanza cannot do. SO I can have my ePubs I created in Calibre as well as my purchased ones all in one application. Very tidy. My only gripe it that there is only two background colours: white and black. But you can lower the brightness of the white.

While I knew how to connect Stanza to Calibre wirelessly, it often lagged and sometimes took up to 5 minutes to connect with the Calibre library. In contrast, I can connect my iPhone to my computer via USB, then drag and drop the ePubs I want right into the Bluefire file in iTunes, sync and disconnect, all in less than 30 seconds.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by Chrysanthemum

While I knew how to connect Stanza to Calibre wirelessly, it often lagged and sometimes took up to 5 minutes to connect with the Calibre library. In contrast, I can connect my iPhone to my computer via USB, then drag and drop the ePubs I want right into the Bluefire file in iTunes, sync and disconnect, all in less than 30 seconds.

You can sync books to Stanza via iTunes as well. Personally, I dislike that functionality because I almost never connect my iPhone to iTunes. Therefore the ability to get books on the device wirelessly is imperative, and why I currently prefer Stanza.

Bluefire is not bad, but it's early in development. The developers of BF have done a lot of ADE-related work for Adobe, including a lot of the UI work for the Digital Editions desktop app, but their current focus is more on DRM and library functionality than the core reader experience. Generic OPDS support and more formatting control settings are apparently on their radar, but there's no timeline when to expect them. Oh, and they still have a very nasty jailbreak-related hang that needs to be sorted out.

Until Bluefire gets at least OPDS support so I can pull books from Calibre, it's just a curiosity for me. At least they do have a non-itunes way of putting books on the device (navigate to bluefirereader://nav/transfer in Safari and follow the on-screen instructions). It's better than nothing, but not a satisfactory OPDS replacement.

[ZorroAIK]

I have a question:

When converting a PFD to an epub document, is it possible to get it nicely parsed? And what determines it? I tried converting a PDF to an epub doc using a converter found at http://www.pdf-epub-converter.com, but it only saved every page as a JPG and thus the result was no different than reading a standard PDF.

Any tips on good PDF -> epub conversion programs would be greatly appreciated.

I'm trying out stanza now and it works beautifully with my (original) epub files, now I just need to be able to convert my PDF-files to a readable format and then I'm all set!

[toddos]

There are no "good" PDF conversion tools, because PDF is a terrible, terrible format. The best luck I've had is with Calibre, and it requires tweaking settings for each and every PDF I convert (line-unwrapping factor, header and footer regular expressions, chapter detection, etc) and half the time I still have to manually edit the output in an epub editor like Sigil in order to get chapters sorted out correctly.

Stay away from PDF "ebooks" unless you have no other alternative.

[ZorroAIK]

thanks for the reply Toddos.

Yeah I agree, PDF is a lousy format. Sometimes though, you just have no choice. For example with PDF's that are scanned books. (Just images).

[Flub]

I've been storing my Calibre library in Dropbox for a while now. I tend to only keep the books I have on my devices in Calibre so it doesn't get out of hand. Dropbox turns out to be quite handy at getting new books into Stanza.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by ZorroAIK

thanks for the reply Toddos.

Yeah I agree, PDF is a lousy format. Sometimes though, you just have no choice. For example with PDF's that are scanned books. (Just images).

PDFs that consist of scanned images are the worst of the worst. Sometimes there's no other alternative (scans of historical books or documents that have not been converted by Gutenberg and would never successfully pass through OCR), but otherwise just say no.

And just for the record (even though it's obvious), if your PDF consists of nothing but images, you're not really going to be able to successfully convert it to any other format.

[caoyuan]

Hi, my first post, great to be here and thanks for the forum.

I find PDFs pretty ok to read on the iphone4 since the display is quite resolute.

Only problem now is that I have a 0.5 cm black border on each side of the page which makes the page smaller than it already is. (Enlarging the page wich two fingers is not compensated in terms of resolution.) I'm not sure if the border comes from stanza (I set the border to 0 cm in the settings before converting several times), converting PDF to EPUB. In stanza itself there doesn't seem to be a setting for borders, right?

And by the way I couldn't search for this problem since there seems to be a ebook reader named borders...

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

[ParoM]

hi Chris.

i placed a link to this page form my squidoo blog, i hope you dont mind (i gave credit where credit was due)

and i love Calibre!

-amps

http://www.squidoo.com/transfer-books-from-pc-to-ipod

[Unreed]

Hey there, I have some issues and I see the creator is here sometimes so I may get some help.

1) do I understand correctly that there is no chance to upload books direct to the device without iTunes as was possible in previous versions of whatever (stanza, iTunes, iOS, calibre) ?

2) is the problem of the library that its not accessible from internet that I don't have public IP? Is there a way to edit it on-line? On Mac?

3) I'm Czech, and I'm not able to make some of the characters show up correctly when I convert rtf and txt to ePub, what do I do wrong? Works great with the Pages.

4) Also when I create the book in Pages, the metadata & cover is included in the ePub file is there a way to set it up that way in Calibre?

5) In the folder name in library there is a number "author - book (3)" for ex. how do I get rid of that? Seems to me that it says the order how the books were added to the library

6) I have some books with more authors than one, Rama - Clarke, Lee, when I separate them with "&" symbol it works in Calibre but does not work in Stanza, shows only Lee what do I do wrong?

I tried to read this whole topic, FAQs, Calibre help etc so if there was answer and I did miss it I'm sorry to bother

thx

[iMace]

I can't vouch for all your issues but I can lay to rest the fear you cannot add books to iPhone without iTunes. Dropbox, etc. are explained well previously.

1) using a Mac and iPhone 4 on same wifi network OS 10.6.7 and Calibre 0.7.57
2) Books loaded into Calibre and converted to epub format
3) Calibre start content server
4) iPhone start Stanza, /Get Books/ tab on bottom; /Shared/ tab on top. my laptop with Calibre shows up in 'Computers Sharing Books' (Note: it does not show up if you are on separate networks i.e. LAN so keep that ethernet cable disconnected to be sure)
5) click on computer name and add as many or as few as you like. (Note: iPhone cannot go to sleep during transfer or it will lose wifi connection and kick into 3G)

I'll look at your other issues if no one with better know how pipes up.

M