Pages

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

How to Use Caliber to Convert Bookshare Books Into ePub


Caliber is a free eBook conversion software that can convert Bookshare books into ePub format. ePub is the format used by most eReader. There are other methods of converting Bookshare books such as Don Johnston's Daisy to ePub software. (Click Here for article about Daisy to ePub)  Caliber is a free program for Mac and PC. Caliber can input and output many different book formats which makes it more versatile than Daisy to ePub. Converting a book using Daisy to ePub is easier then using Caliber.  The benefit of Caliber is that it is free and Daisy to ePub costs $99. When using Caliber you must first convert your Bookshare book into a PDF by copying the text and images of the book into word document and saving the document as a PDF. This step is necessary because PDF is one of the supported Caliber formats. The next step is to add the PDF into your Caliber library and convert it to ePub format. Once the book is in ePub you can put it on your iPad or other eReader. If you put your book onto the iPad you can use VoiceOver to listen to the book. Caliber is not perfect, sometimes the spacing and original formatting is not left intact. Even with its flaws Caliber is still a great tool for converting Bookshare books into ePubs. Watch the video above for step by step instructions.

4 comments:

  1. It is actually easier than this by one step. Instead of creating a PDF, simply save the file from your browser, changing the file extension from .xml to .html in the save dialog box. Be sure to leave the default option of the file format as "web page, complete."

    Then simply open it in Calibre and convert to your preferred format.

    ReplyDelete
  2. +1 to converting from HTML. I tried to use Caliber for plain DAISY book and got runtime error. I followed the recommendation of Anonymous and did the following:
    1) extract files from zip archive
    2) open .xml file in browser (I used Firefox)
    3) save document as HTML file
    4) open HTML book in Caliber and successfully convert it to EPUB format
    The book did not loose formatting and is finely opened with my Pocketbook360.

    ReplyDelete
  3. converting text to epub is very simple, but can Calibre convert daisy files to text or epub or mobi?

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete