Creating eBooks for Handhelds

This page describes how you can create your own eBooks and store them on your iPhone, iTouch, Android, Blackberry, etc. There are free eBook converters and eBook readers available to do this. You should only create and load eBooks that you legally own. Do not convert copywritten documents belonging to others. It is illegal, and you can get sued.

Reading Documents on Handhelds

One of the things that I have frequently done with my handhelds has been reading books and other documents. There are many readers available, and many of them come with a library where you can select books to download. You can obtain commercial eBooks, but you can also get a large collection of free books, such as those which are in the public domain. You can also create your own eBooks from any text document or web page, which you can then load on your handheld and read.

There are text readers that will allow you to read text files. Usually these readers don't support font changes Bold, Italics, Chapters, etc. that are available with other types of documents.

There are packages that will allow you to read Microsoft Office documents on your handheld. You can create Word or Power Point documents, as well as spreadsheets with your own content and then install them on your handheld. Some packages allow you to make changes and sync with a desktop application.

There are several PDF readers that you can install on your handheld. The advantage of PDF documents is that you can have nice looking documents, but usually you cannot make any changes to these documents.

If you have a Palm based handheld, or can install a Palm reader for your handheld, you can take advantage of all the Palm Pilot documents that are available. A great place to find these documents is Memoware.

There are also eBook readers available for most handhelds. Many come with a library that allows you to select books to download to your handheld. Some will also let you download your own eBooks to your handheld. That is the type of reader you need if you want to install your own content. Like PDF readers, you can have nice looking documents, but you usually can't make any changes to the content on the handheld, but you can make changes at the source and regenerate the document. (I will frequently do this when I find typos in an eBook.)

Creating eBooks

If you want to install eBooks on your handheld, you need to get a program that creates eBooks. The program that I use is Calibre, which runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Calibre can convert HTML (web pages) as well as text files to eBooks. I find that the easiest way to get a good eBook is to convert a web page.

When you first install Calibre, click on the "Preferences" option and select a location where you will store the eBooks. The steps you should take to create an eBook are:

Display the web page and make sure that it is formatted correctly
Save the web page as an HTML page to your hard drive
Click "Add Books" and select the HTML file that you just created.
Click on "Edit Meta Information", make sure the title is correct, and fill in the Author and Author Sort
Click on "Convert E-books" and click on the OK button
The eBook will be found in the directory Author/Title, where Author and Title are the values from the Meta Information. I suggest you rename the eBook to something short and easy to type.

Downloading eBooks

The next thing you want to do is to find an eBook reader that will let you download your own eBooks, sometimes called your own content. The reader that I use for my iPod Touch is Stanza by Lexcycle.

Stanza comes with several libraries containing commercial and free eBooks, but you can also download a specific eBook, which is how I download my own content to my iTouch. I have Xampp, which is a web server that you can install on your own computer. What this gives you is a web site that you can access over your home WiFi network. There are several choices on how to set up a web server on your computer. I chose xampp because I do web development and need a heavy-duty web server. You might only need a basic server.

Assuming you have a web server running on your computer, you need to determine its IP address. Since I usually have a Command window open, I simply run the "ipconfig" command. It will probably be something like 192.168.x.y. You also will want to create a directory on your web server for the eBooks you want to download. I have a subdirectory stanza on my web server.

I can then use my browser and type the address: http://Addr/stanza/. This should display a web page displaying the files in that directory. (I have an index.html page in the /stanza/ directory with links to the various files that I want to download, so that is what I see. If you don't create a web page, you will probably just see a list of files.)

If your browser displays something other than an error message, then your handheld can see your local web server. Next you want to store whatever eBooks you wish to install in that directory. Within Stanza, select Get Books, and then click on Downloads buttons at the top of the page. Click on the Plus Button, and you will be prompted to enter a URL. You want to enter: http://Addr/stanza/Ebook, where Ebook is the name of the eBook file. I am going to upload several eBooks, I usually select all and then copy the URL so I can paste it for the other books. When you click on the Download button, Stanza should download your eBook into its local library. Repeat this process for each eBook you have placed in your /stanza/ directory.

Finding Text Documents for eBooks

There are many places where you can find the text of books and other documents for creating eBooks. Probably the biggest and best source is Project Gutenberg, which has a huge collection of public domain documents in various formats. Originally the collection had only text files, but now you can find HTML versions as well as eBooks. (I didn't care for the eBooks they had, and instead created my own eBooks.) If you can find a good HTML file, that is probably the best file to use for creating eBooks.

Another possible source for document texts is to use Google. What I will often do is to type the book title followed by the word "text". I might also include the author's name if I get too many false hits. Again, if you can find an HTML page with the text you want, download that; if you can only file text (.txt) files, then you can still use them.