In Which We Discuss Moving EBooks Around

I bought my Kobo Mini 3-4 years ago.  I was broke at the time, but it was a great purchase.  When I started working again in mid 2013 I upgraded to a Kindle Paperwhite.

Though I love my Kobo Mini, and it was a good friend to me, I've gravitated more and more to reading books on the Kindle Paperwhite, especially since the Kobo will no longer hold a reasonable charge.  In essence, I no longer use the Kobo at all any more.  Which is a shame, because I have some great books on there.

While I can still use the Kobo App on my phone, or use both the Kobo and Kindle apps on my Android Tablet or PC, I'm not likely to do that.  I'm not in the habit of reading books on my PC or laptop, and we actually sold the Android Tablet, which was a gift I rarely used.  Though it was briefly useful for reading Kindle graphic novels.

In short, this has been a barrier to finishing the six unread books I still have on my Kobo.  So I've spent the last few hours transferring them onto my Kindle, as well as converting them into a handy PDF format.

This has involved a great deal of frustrated googling.

It turns out the Kobo desktop app does not create a save file on your PC, so it cannot be used to manipulate books by opening the files in Calibre or transferring them.  What you actually need to do is follow the directions here.  In short, you download Adobe Digital Editions, create a log-in, then download your books from kobo.com.  This then creates a folder called 'my digital editions' which contains the actual save files for your books.  These you can upload into calibre and do kinky things to.

After converting the files to PDF or another format that Kindle can open, simply plug your Kindle into your PC and drag the files from the Calibre folder to the Kindle folder.  I just dragged the entire folder which was labelled with the books name rather than individual files, and that seems to work.

Edit:

My Kindle claimed it was too full for me to read beyond a certain point of a PDF.  It's also had a 'ghost' copy of Peony in Love on it for a while - by 'ghost' I mean I deleted it from the Kindle, but it's still there and refuses to be deleted again.  I also noticed a load of what appeared to be junk files when I plugged it into the PC.

So I've performed a factory reset after noting down the titles I had downloaded.  This time, I moved the PDF files from Calibre alone, without all of the other files that go with them, and it worked just fine.

In Which We Discuss eBooks

I've never really understood the romanticism of physical books. I've heard people go on about the pleasure of cracking a spine, or the smell and feel of the pages, and it just doesn't really do anything for me.

I put off getting an ereader because...well, I don't know why.  The cost, partly.  The fact that I'd have to buy all new books for it, and couldn't just magically import my huge collection (in the thousands).  I was a little squicked out by reading that you don't really own ebooks, and they can be edited at the publisher's discretion.  I like owning things, and having them in my control.  I also like sorting them.  I like being able to put an author's books together on a shelf, and to make piles of unread books, and so on.

I bought my Kobo (her name is Opal) last December.  I went away for Christmas, to work in a homeless shelter as I do every year.  In 2011, I took a bunch of point horrors.  I was able to finish one a day (actually, I can easily finish three point horrors in a day, but working in the shelter limited my time) so I had to take a lot.   It was a nightmare carrying that giant bag down to London (on a train, obviously, I didn't walk), and I worried about running out of books.  I think I also read Lorna Doone on my phone that week, but don't quote me on that.

Anyway, a week or so before I went, I was walking past a WHSmiths and saw that they had a sale on Kobos.  I don't think I'd ever heard of a Kobo before, but I went in and played around, and saw that the mini-Kobos were only £50, which was the cheapest price I'd ever seen for an eReader.  So I bought one, on a whim.

I love her.  I love that she fits in my pocket.  I like how she looks and feels.  I love the menu screen, which lets me indulge my love of organising things.  My brain doesn't work when things aren't organised, and a cluttered or badly designed menu screen would really put me off and ruin my enjoyment.  I like the Kobo Awards (post about that coming soon) though it annoys me that they're not as supported as they should be.  I like the Kobo website.  I absolutely adore the way that I can see exactly how many pages are left in a chapter; it splits books into little popcorn sized pieces, something I do with physical books by working out which percentage I'm at, and how long to the next third/quarter etc.  I like that I can put any kind of file on there (though it won't show the page count properly, so I prefer to read Kobo Epubs).

I'm planning to get a Kindle Paperwhite once I start work.  On that note, new job are now saying June.  This is my life right now.

...so I'll read a book, or maybe two or three, I'll add a few new paintings to my gallery, I'll play guitar and knit and cook and basically just wonder, when will my life begin?

The appeal of the Kindle Paperwhite is as follows; it has a bigger screen than Opal Kobo, and I think I'll like that, having a tiny eReader for ease of transport, and a bigger one so books seems like they have less pages.  It lights up, so I can read in the dark.  It works out how long it will take me to finish a chapter, and my brain likes the idea of this new data.  It'll show the page numbers in Kindle books properly.  And the menu seems less brain-irritating than in the normal Kindle (which I bought and returned; could not get on with that menu screen).  At some point I do intend to write a full review of the Kobo, so I might wait till I have both and compare. 

 This then gave me the incentive to start getting rid of my books.  That hurt at first.  I used to hoard books.  I'd read them once then keep them just in case I ever wanted to read them again.  When I moved here, I had something like twenty-five boxes of books.  It was a nightmare. 

From now on, I only want one bookcase of physical books, and that's mostly books that look pretty as a set, like the sci-fi fantasy masterworks and Series of Unfortunate Events, and books which are simply not available as eBooks.

As I said, decluttering hurt at first, but once I'd got rid of a few, it got easier.  I eventually reduced my books by two thirds.  Of those I kept, as you saw in a previous post, a good two hundred were unread.  I have my one bookcase, and the rest I intend to buy eBook versions of as soon as possible.  I don't ever want to have to carry around piles of books again.

I also intend to keep my unread piles more manageable in future.  I'm thinking something like only ten to fifteen unread books on any system (not combined, that's crazy talk).

On another note, I'd love to get a copy of Kim Newman's Life's Lottery.  It's a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story, essentially, but with a few interesting twists.  It's also aimed at adults, as opposed to the actual Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series for children, or the gamebooks, of which I have several (the latter, not the former).  I've borrowed it from the library several times.  Thinking about that book prompted this post; I was wondering if it would be possible for that sort of book to be on an eReader.  It might be, but I think this is one of the few books that I really prefer as a physical object.  I have a bad habit of folding pages over and marking choices with pencil just to make sure I don't miss anything.