Today's post is about e-books - more specifically, getting them from my Mac into my iPhone to be read with Stanza. Here is how:
Download e-books from the Internet. If you like books in Russian, check out WebReading. Please note that books there are in a format called fb2 - these need to be converted into epub - a format recognized by many e-book readers, including iPhone's Stanza.
To organize the books on your Mac I suggest the popular Calibre - a free and open source e-book library management application. The interface is a bit unorthodox, but it does the job nicely. Calibre is capable of converting an e-book into a variety of formats, including PDF for reading right on your computer. For my purposes, I converted my e-books to epub.
Next, I wanted to store my e-book collection online so that I can access and download them into Stanza app on my iPhone. I found a free Java-based application that makes that very easy - calibre2opds. This utility scans the Calibre library and generates a catalog that Stanza requires. Resulting files are saved into the same directory as the Calibre library. All that is left to do is to upload the entire directory to a webserver.
Get Stanza app here.
Once your e-book library is online, launch Stanza on your iPhone, click on "Get Books" at the bottom, then "Shared" at the top and finally "Edit." Click "Add Book Source" and use the following URL format: http://www.your-web-server.com/your-calibre-library-directory/_catalog/catalog.xml
Enjoy your e-book collection on your iPhone!
