books

Free, online file converter tool

Although I’m a big fan of Calibre and use it to manage the bulk of my e-book collection, occasionally, I just want to quickly convert individual documents or ebooks. And for this purpose, I’ve come across a helpful free, online book converter tool – cunningly called “Online Converter Tool” – and you can access it here.

Just saying it’s an ebook converter tool is a little misleading though because it can do a lot more than that. It can convert to most of the main ebook and document formats – including ePub, mobi (for Kindles) and PDFs – but it will also convert audio files into different formats too, including to AAC, MP3, OGG, WAV and WMA (among others). 

Similarly, there are video converters – think AVI, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and WMV – as well as device-specific settings for iPhone, iPads, Android devices and others. And there are also free online converter tools for images (BMP, EPS, GIF, JPG, PNG, etc.), documents (DOC, DOCX, HTML, PDF, RTF, TXT, etc.) and even archive converters (7Z, ZIP, etc. – but no RAR). 

Considering it’s a completely free resource, the few files I’ve thrown at it were dealt with quickly and produced flawless PDFs from ePubs, with no watermarking or other additions to my document. So it’s earned a place in my bookmarks and will no doubt be a tool I continue to use in the future.

Daryl Gregory books

Don’t you just love it when you stumble across a book that’s just… well written, enjoyable and you struggle to put it down? Well I do, which is why I wasn’t pleasantly surprised by The Devil’s Alphabet by Daryl Gregory. It’s a contemporary fantasy story that could appeal to people who don’t normally appreciate the genre. As I was reading it, I could easily imagine it being a cinematic blockbuster… if only someone would take a risk and make a film like this.

I had the paper back version, but it’s also available on the Kindle too (HERE).

Read more

If you like books by Harlan Coben

Once you find a good author, one that you’re happy with… you like their style and the way they build a good story, then you often want to read more of the same, or find other authors who write in the same genre and at a similar level. But knowing where to find these similar authors isn’t always easy. So, here’s a quick guide to some similar authors to Harlan Coben.

Read more

Books on Chester

Chester Eastgate clockThis ‘Books on Chester’ page brings together a collection of books and information about the historical city of Chester, Cheshire, England (UK).

There are a growing number of books about Chester now available, but it’s not always easy finding them as searching can throw up all sorts of results with authors called Chester too… so I thought it’d be easy and helpful to put this little resource together and collate the various links to Books on Chester.

I’ve added in some other helpful links too, all to do with Chester.

Read more