calibre

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.

Use Windows Task Scheduler to send news to Kindle with Calibre

Amazon Kindle 3GFollowing on from my earlier post about “Automated free news for Kindle using Calibre” (link HERE), nickredding over at Mobileread.com suggested a much simpler approach. Rather than using a separate wake up timer application to wake my PC up, ready to run Calibre – I should use the one built into Windows.

Windows Task Scheduler allows you to schedule your PC to wake up and run a specific application at a specific time.

Calibre will have to be set up the same, in terms of scheduling the download of news from specific sites at specific times, so as to coincide with the task scheduler, but it just means you don’t have to download the separate wake timer.

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Kindle ebook news server using Calibre

Amazon Kindle 3GI’ve been reading around the topic and I’m still struggling to understand just how to install Calibre on my web server. I want to be able to run Calibre 24/7 on my server so that I can serve up news according to my pre-determined schedule, as opposed to using the process described in my other post: Automated free news for Kindle using Calibre.

However, I have come across three resources that I think might help.

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Automated free news for Kindle using Calibre

Amazon Kindle 3GThe Amazon Kindle is a fantastic piece of kit, with lots of great features and an immense and growing library of available resources. Check out my other post HERE to read more about the Kindle and find links to some great resources.

However, one of the things that I’m not overwhelmed with is the selection and quality of news sources that are available for subscription through Amazon. Not only are they quite pricey which, for a digitally delivered item, seems to be exploiting the new device and the growing market of people with ebook readers. But there is a solution, if you want to take a little time and effort to set it up properly. That solution is CALIBRE – download available HERE.

I’ve read around various sources and have outlined a relatively simple process for setting up Calibre to automatically fetch and send news to your Kindle. (If you’ve not got a Kindle yet, you can click HERE to buy yours now)

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