Programming

epub and mobi Readers: Read EPUB or MOBI format ebooks

    Andrew Tetlaw
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    mobi-epub-featureTo celebrate the addition of EPUB and MOBI format versions of most of our books, SitePoint has launched a massive 5 for 1 sale. We then figured you might be seeking some advice on how to take advantage of these new formats. So I probed the brain cavity of our resident ebook expert, Kevin Yank, and extracted some squishy but tasty nuggets of useful knowledge.

    Ebook software has features that can enhance the way you consume books. Features like library management, bookmarking, note-taking, and searching are extremely helpful, especially for educational titles like the ones SitePoint produce. Here are a few ebook reader software options you may like to check out.

    Adobe Digital Editions is desktop ebook software available for Windows and Mac, and supports EPUB and PDF formats.

    Calibre is very capable ebook software available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It supports a wide variety of formats including PDF, EPUB, and MOBI; it can even convert one format to another.

    If you’re a Kindle user you’ll need to use the MOBI format. You can drop your MOBI format ebook onto your device via USB cable, which is really quite simple as I demonstrate in this quick screencast:

    There is another option, when you setup your Amazon Kindle account, you would have been assigned a special email address. You can email the ebook file to this email address and it’ll be transferred wirelessly to your Kindle over Whispernet. There will be a small Amazon fee for this service.

    The Kindle software is also available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and BlackBerry, with support for MOBI format ebooks.

    If you’re an iPhone user, we highly recommend Stanza. The iPhone version only supports the EPUB format. To put your EPUB files onto your phone, you’ll need to install Calibre (mentioned above) and share your library from your PC. From Stanza on your iPhone you can download it from you Calibre library. There are some instructions on the Calibre website.

    If you don’t like the look of Calibre, you can grab Stanza Desktop for Windows or Mac. It doesn’t do a great job of reading EPUB books, but any EPUB book you open in it will be shared over your wifi network to Stanza iPhone. Just follow the instructions on the Stanza website.

    Incidentally, it’s been predicted that iTunes 9.1 will be released with support for adding EPUB format ebooks to your iTunes library for transfer to iBooks on your iPad. Will you be able to iRead the iFiles on your iDesktop? We’ll all have to wait and see!

    Hope that was helpful, and happy ebooking everyone.

    If you enjoyed reading this post, you’ll love Learnable; the place to learn fresh skills and techniques from the masters. Members get instant access to all of SitePoint’s ebooks and interactive online courses, like Creating Killer Content.
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