EBOOK DOWNLOAD TUTORIAL

First: you’re going to want to download your file. PLAN where you want it to go. Windows often wants to send an ebook to a folder called MY EBOOKS in your MY DOCUMENTS folder. Whatever you choose, be consistent: these are big files, and having them scattered at random all through your directory is not a Good Thing. One of the most common problems is e-book scatter: a big file, and once unzipped, a lot of little files, all over the place. I recommend storing your megafile on DVD, and getting it off your disk. But first—select your chosen useful file formats, and place those neatly in something like a MY EBOOKS folder, maybe under the author’s name, as you build your library. [I suggest that folder be in your MY DOCUMENTS folder, as that is the way Windows likes to do things—and at least it narrows the possibilities.]

So—now you’re organized, and ready to read.

For Calibre: ideally, you have Calibre on your machine; you double-click on the .epub version and that should make Calibre  load with your chosen e-pub book into the ‘BOOK TITLE Display Area’. The trick is, you must highlight that book title. THEN with it highlighted you click VIEW on the overhead menu, and it loads your file into the reader.

IF: no Book Title is in the Book Title Display Area, you can go get your file. Just click ADD BOOK, and a SELECT BOOKS window will come up, offering you the usual Windows choices of Recent Documents, Desktop, My Documents, and Network Places. Remember where we determined WHERE your books are going to be? Go to that place, select your .epub version as in any Windows operation, and click on it. It should load into that “Display Area” so you can highlight it and then choose VIEW, the thing with the magnifying glass.

The most common problem with e-books is flatly not knowing where on your disk the darn thing went. For example, should you convert e-books using Calibre, it will have its own idea about where to put your e-books,controllable in a line up at the top of the ‘Conversion’ utility: be sure to target that where YOU want it to go, or you’ll spend the next half hour trying to find where it put it.

For the Mobireader software: less complicated: click on the .prc file, and you should have the reader come up WITH your book already loaded. Read and Enjoy.

For Adobe Reader: again, click on the .pdf version, and you should have Adobe Reader come up with your book ready to read.

For Microsoft Reader: click on the .lit version, and if you have MSReader on your machine, it should come up and display your book.

13 Comments

  1. armouredgideon

    I have read several C.J. books up until now, and am enjoying this greatly.I am looking forward to loading several new books down from the web in future.

  2. Busifer

    I just want to post some help for people who want to use their iPhones as readers; you can’t use iTunes (or, at least I couldn’t) to get the files to the phone. Instead use something like iPhone Explorer, with Stanza as the reader App.
    iPhone Explorer goes on your desktop and is used for the transfer – Stanza on the phone for reading.
    Lexcycle.com, has a good FAQ listing the procedure step by step. They also list alternative ways to do this.

    Stanza uses ePub, btw.

  3. purplejulian

    now I know you have and several other people have explained this, but I can’t find it, so, please can you give some advice on how to upload a book in a word file onto a kindle (my friend’s first draft and I want to read it in comfort)

  4. CJ

    TO TAKE A WORD PROCESSOR FILE TO KINDLE
    do an html conversion, (a button-push with the word processor) then go to http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/productdetailscreator.asp
    What you want is mobipocket creator. It’s a good software, easy to do, especially with no cover or facing pages involved. It will convert the html file to a mobi file for your kindle. Then you just link the kindle to your computer and bring it up as a flash drive, move your file over, and you’re good.
    TO TAKE A WORD PROCESSOR FILE TO NOOK
    Go one step further than mobipocket—create the mobi file. Go to http://calibre-ebook.com/download_windows and install calibre. In calibre, bring up your mobi file and ask the program to convert it to an epub file. THEN move it to your Nook.
    What we do creating an actual ebook takes more than two weeks, but this should get you a readable file. If you have a kindle with qwerty keys you can mark mistakes with an XX or actually type the correction in, but remember it will be in .mobi. It’s easier to prop the kindle by your laptop and search the kindle for XX, then input the change in your word processing file via laptop.

  5. purplejulian

    thank you so much! I changed to to an htm file, but could get no further …

  6. purplejulian

    well, kindles seem to be rather tricky; I downloaded mobi and made the book, and transferred it via usb – nothing!!!! – well, the pc said it was on my kindle, but I couldn’t find it there. so I sent it via email – which costs – but not a huge amount as it’s only a 1mb file – both as an ebook, and as a pdf. the pdf won’t enlarge properly, but the ebook is fine … so that’s my experience with this so far!

    • tulrose

      Did you put it in the proper directory on your kindle? I’ve gone to using CaLibre to manage my ebooks.

  7. CJ

    Well, I tell you, Jane is the one that is the expert at Kindle transfers: go over to her blog and ask her on making the kindle cough it up. When I have trouble on that—I ask her.

  8. Jane

    I think tulrose has it right. You probably just need to put it in the directory with all your other books.

    Also…The mobi created by either program from the htm(l) should work…and I think if the original file is in Word you can just import it directly into either Mobi or Calibre. The problem with that is all word processors put in lots of printing junque and Word is the absolute worst. Getting the extraneous codes out is a . . . really hard. 😀

    There is a process described up on smashwords, but I’ve never tried it. (I need to in order to get the books up on Smash…why he can’t do it via an html file is beyond me…)

    And if you have an older version of Word that doesn’t have the convert to html option, there are various word or ASCII to html converters online that will do it for free.

    If you’re just doing it to read and take notes, you shouldn’t even need to do anything to the html file. . . . just don’t freak at weird formatting problems that didn’t show in the original file. Or weird characters in the text. Those are artifacts that will need to be cleaned up eventually, but are extraneous to the important part of the story.

    Hope that helps!

    I regularly turn my file into an html and convert to mobi for editing on the kindle (love the notetaking function!) It lets me read it like a book rather than like a computer file, which is a very different mindset.

  9. purplejulian

    I moved it into what I thought was the right directory, after I had made it into an ebook, and mobi had uploaded it, but it still didn’t show!
    only after amazon had sent it to me via email did it show up. so it’s there now.
    I’ll try calibre too, I have that on my macbook.
    thanks for all the help guys!

  10. Jane

    Discovered a new convenience. Calibre really can do it all, esp for a quick conversion/load up. If you attach your Kindle via the USB, Calibre finds it and puts a “device” icon up on its tool bar along with a page icon with an arrow on it.

    You do your html conversion (from as clean a file as you can make it), bring the html (or word) file into Calibre, go into convert, and I think it automatically converts it to mobi. (I’d already done that, so I’m not sure.) When it’s done with the conversion, you just click the little arrow icon and it loads it onto your device! Pretty cool.

  11. purplejulian

    oooh, hooray, calibre it will be next time! I hope for a cleaned up and fuller version of the first draft before too long (although my friend’s life makes this difficult – an ex wife with brain damage – this is vurry complicated – and 16 year-old daughter to care for. their lives were turned upside down 2 years ago by a car accident). there are plans for a trilogy …. 😀

  12. cbrummer

    I bought a couple ebooks (Alliance series) on here years ago but since have gotten both a new Kindle and iPad. How can I download the books again? I’m very glad to see you are written some more books in the Alliance series, I enjoyed the Foreigner series but Alliance is my favorite and Cyteen is my all time favorite book.

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