[NTLK] Calibre - multi-platform ebook converter

[Nic Malone]

I was asked how I make books for my MP2000. There are some good sources on the Net that go into the nitty gritty of formatting pictures in Newton Press, using NewtScape, and using Bookmaker. Here are some tips I had from Dan on the list:
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NEWTON PRESS 
Allows you to make books using the full screen for the different models and in
portrait or landscape mode [see prefs for choosing Newt model and orientation].  
Press does have bugs on occasion - don't do a lot of text editing it in, use the actual text
files [in Word etc]  This way if your press file (the book source file) should become
corrupt you can just dump it back into press easily with minimal editing
(if any).  

If you still have problems with press, then you will need to
change your encoding.  But the problem you are seeing is the "Smart
Quotes" or "curly quotes".  The ways to remove this vary with the word
processor, but there is usually a preference setting.  And under worse
case do a search and replace for all quotes, should only take a few
seconds.  And actually changing the quotes in the source file might be
easier than the encoding.  That is what I do when I import text into works.

Also note that Press won't make a automatic table of contents.  But
search still works inside books on the newt.  So you can just search for
 say "chapter 1"  If the source text file does not name chapters, you
might consider adding them (or something unique to search for to
separate areas if you don't want to take the time to actually create a
table of contents).

One warning, Press does not work on 64 bit windows.  The only way around
this is to run a virtual machine using say Virtual PC and install
another OS to it.  Windows 98, windows 2000, or XP.  For this I would
suggest windows 2000 or XP as windows 98 is slower when run under
Virtual PC.  However windows 98 works better with Newton Connection
Utilities because of this.  If you are doing serial/cable transfers of
your books you may wish to use windows 98, that is what I use.  The
slight sluggishness of the windows 98 VM will also likely be fine for
Press as well if you are not doing a lot of editing inside of Press
itself.  But if you want/need more speed with Press use windows 2000 or
XP VM.

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Dan also has an excellent guide to Newton book making on UNNA http://www.unna.org/unna/windows/NewtonBookmaking101/bookmaking%20tutorial.txt

My own set up is to run WinXP on the Boot Camp partition on my Mac Mini. This lets me run Newton Press. We have a Kindle and there is a way to convert Kindle books to Newton pkg. If you want to do this you should read the instructions at:
http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/ebooks-formats-drm-and-you-%E2%80%94-a-guide-for-the-perplexed

The tools you'll need to remove the DRM are at:
http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/hello-world/

It also covers DRM removal from Nooks and other other sources.

CREATING THE NEWTON BOOK
In Calibre, highlight your desired book (whether it be DRM-stripped Kindle book, ePub, PDF, Mobi or whatever) and click on the convert button in the menu bar. Choose RTF as the output format. 
Once the RTF file is created, click on the 'Open location' link on the right hand side on the Calibre window (where it lists all the different formats you have your book in). This opens a Finder/Explorer window containng your RTF file. Drag the RTF into Newton Press, trim out out any surplus text you don't want, and create your Newton PKG file from the RTF. Easy!  There are settings in Calibre to fiddle with punctution conversion but I find the default settings to work fine (only epsilons ... are a problem, they get converted to an infinity symbol)
In my experience, Newton Press can't handle RTFs much over 1MB (hence the need for trimming), so you may have to split the RTF into 2 or more parts and convert each into a pkg.

BOOKMAKER
You can get this alternative to Newton Press software for this from UNNA, or there is this website http://misato.chuma.org/paperback/ for online conversion, though I never had any luck with it. 

Apologies for the long message, especially for those Newton Press aficionados. 

Nic