One of the great things about Carina Press titles is that they’re DMR-free, which means you can read them on the device of your choice. And maybe you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad and want to buy directly from the site because they have great prices and often super-great coupon codes, but you’re not sure how to get them onto the iThing you read on.
Calibre is one of the best things to ever happen to digital reading. It’s a fabulous ebook management system and conversion tool. My Calibre library is stored in my Dropbox account (another service I couldn’t live my life without). I pull up the Dropbox folder on my iPhone, navigate to the ePub book I want and open it in iBooks. Done.
But what if you don’t have Calibre or Dropbox and you’re sitting there saying “ohmigod, Shan, I have no idea what you’re talking about!“? If you have an iGadget, you have iTunes, so here’s how to get your Carina Press books from the Carina Press site to your iPhone or iPod Touch or iPad without knowing what I’m talking about…
(If you don’t already have the iBooks app on your device, grab it from the app store. It’s free.)
1) Once you’ve completed the transaction on the Carina Press site, you can click on the big “downloads” button. There you’ll find your books and you can save them to your computer.
2) Open iTunes. Under the File tab, choose “Add to Library”. Navigate to where you saved your ebooks (I always download mine right to my desktop) and click to add.
3) The next time you sync your iThing, go to the device’s sync screen, then choose “books”. (On the device’s sync screen, not from the main menu down the left.) Check “sync books” and you can either sync all the books or you can choose “sync selected books” and check the ones you want in iBooks on your device.”
4) Sync. After you’ve disconnected and open the iBooks app, your Carina Press titles should be displayed on that pretty iBookshelf, like mine in the photo. That’s it!
ETA: As Fiona Lowe pointed out in the comments, after you save your book to your computer, you can just attach it to an email to yourself. Open the email on your iGadget and open the attached epub file in iBooks. I tend to buy books in binges and don’t read them right away, but that’s definitely another easy option!
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I am in LOVE with Calibre to the point of donating money to them so they can continue their fabulous work. Just the other day I converted a PDF (DRM free)book to Kindle MOBI and it’s now a breeze to read.
I am not quite sure I can read on an itouch or iphone but my boys do.
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Oh and PS, you can email the Carina Press book to your Idevice and when you click on the attachment it says, open in iBooks? and you do, and it does
You can totally bypass the computer although you would want to sync later I guess so you didn’t lose them
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I read on my iPhone constantly. Love it! If I’m having some dedicated reading time or I’m reading a longer book, nothing beats my Kindle, but my iPhone’s always at my side, so it’s always there when I can sneak a few minutes with a book.
And you’re totally right about emailing it to yourself. While I can access my Calibre library through Dropbox now, I never did that because I tend to buy books in binges, several or more at a time. I’d upload them to Calibre, but I never put them on my device when I bought them.
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I’ve donated to Calibre, too. Must have program. And the support is fantastic!
I have an Android phone… and use FBReader, and can even let it read to me in the car or while exercising.
And a Kindle with Special Offers that’s less than an hour old. I killed my previous Kindle while I was preparing dinner this evening. RIP
Incidently, I’m the tweeter who tolja the other day I’m in love with Kevin K.
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I’m glad you love Kevin. I really love him, too.
And I have the Kindle with Special Offers! Kindles are so very easy to use and have such nice screens.
I bounce back and forth between the Kindle and the Kindle app on my iPhone a LOT. With some nook app and iBooks app thrown in for variety.
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I email books to my iPad all the time. I used Bluefire Reader, though. Bluefire reader saves a copy of the book when I read with it. So then I’ve got a copy on my coputer and one on my iPad. Easy Peasy.
On my to do list this fall is to spend a day setting up Callibre and Dropbox. I really want to be able to catalog my digital library and I think Callibre is the way to get that done. But first… my younger daughter decided she wants to be an ostrich rider and I volunteered to make the costume. What was I thinking?
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Carin, I find blue fire reader glitches all the time. How do you find it? Perhaps I should delete and start again.