I have a bunch of book length text files I'd really like to read on my EPUB reader (as it happens FBReaderJ). What would be the best route to convert them?
I have access to Mac OS X and Linux (Ubuntu). Probably happiest with a command line, but would setting for a GUI for batch conversion.
My criteria for success are really based upon the shortfalls I have found with Calibre
- must do the whole book
- at least a guess of what the title/author may be. Minimum the source filename for the title.
- hygienic with files it uses - tidies up after itself (this is less important)
- doesn't try to be an all-in-one library manager (again, less important).
- is lenient in parsing special characters (e.g. < and & characters).
9 Answers
Happened upon this thread many moons later.
Just liked to point out there is a command line tool Calibre uses to convert. It's called (surprise, surprise) ebook-convert. See 'ebook-convert -h' or 'ebook-convert dummy.html .epub -h' to see conversion options for converting html to epub.
Haven't explored it though. I am most curious about --list-recipes (and if it works), it looks as somethings interesting.
2I'd say, Calibre is for you. It works on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
3Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC**, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TXT
Output Formats: EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, TXT
For the Mac OS X and Windows, I have had success with Stanza for Desktop.
This supports a good range of export formats.
More importantly, it copes very well with
- detecting chapters in large text files.
- unicode, including "significant" characters like < and &.
There are online tools to convert to epub files.
Example of such a website here.
2If you have a MacOS X 10.6 machine, try this:
It relies on Automator
You may want to try ODFToEPub. This is an OpenOffice extension that lets you export a document to ePub.
Best way to convert to epub is with Calibre, it's free and really easy to do. I just had to do this with a bunch of documents for our sales team to take into the field with the iPad. Here's the guide I used:
Free download, quick conversions, doesn't get much better.
Well, it's been a while, so FWIW, FBReader now has very decent support for reading pure .txt files.
Nowadays libreoffice natively exports to epub. It's not perfect (e.g. Table Of Contents only take Heading1 into account), but I find libreoffice/openoffice the most easiest way to produce a good enough ePub. If you want to format plain texts I recommend the libreoffice plugin alternative searching.
