Thank goodness for eBook Readers

I have a  reputation (well-deserved) for untidiness. Piles of books and papers seem to accumulate wherever I work, – or even sit for any length of time.

The “paperless office” has been no help. Like most people I find reading from a monitor screen uncomfortable. So I will usually print off material for later reading. But I have difficulty throwing things away – even knowing that I have instantly lost them by placing them in one of my piles.

This has been a drawback for me of the Readability add-on I recently discussed (see A nice little tool for printing blog posts). It’s been great – but if anything I am even more untidy. I am now hoping that I can overcome this problem with the help of my eBook Reader (see The joys of eBook readers – the Sony PRS-650 Touch).

And the little add-on dotEPUB which makes it  possible to download any web page as an e-Book.

This works a bit like Readability. You install a bookmark in the toolbar (available for Firefox and Chrome but not yet for Internet explorer).

The video  below describes installation of dotEPUB.

Clicking on the bookmark will convert the current web page or blog to an eBook. Really a short ePub file. This will be opened in whatever ePub programme you have installed (I am using epubreader – a Firefox add-on).  Then it’s just one click to save the file  on to my PC.

At the end of the day I copy all the save ePub files (together with any eBooks I have downloaded)  on to my eBoook Reader. DotEPUB.com uses the Readability script (© by arc90) in the cleanup process so the saved material is a joy to read.

When I have read the material I can easily delete it, or save it in a collection for later reference. (Yes I know, I will probably lose it but being only electrons who else is to know?).

So give it a few months and I be interested to hear what my family says about my tidiness.

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What about Kindle?

You can choose to include links or not when installing the bookmark. Currently the ePub file will not contain images or videos (but will present links to them). In the few cases where I wished to include images I did this by editing the file in Sigil*. With some difficult web pages the output is messy. You can easily check this before saving. And I have found that I can clean up at least some of the files like this by putting through the Calibre* programme.

Apparently there are plans to include image capture and production of Kindle eBooks in future versions of  dotEPUB.

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* Sigil and Calibre if you are serious

At least for anyone serious about eBooks.

Caibre will convert different formats. (This solves my problem of finding a particular eBook at Amazon, but only in the Kindle format. Now easily converted). It will also produce an eBook file from text documents and pdfs and functions as a library

Sigil is an ePub editing programme. I use to clean up converted files, correcting image placement, adjusting tables of content, etc.

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