Dear Aunt TUAW: How can I convert my pdfs to ePub?

OK, I think you need a PDF to iPad/iPhone/Sony Reader, kindle ePub Converter.

iPad Converter PDF to ePub step by step:

http://www.dvdipadconverter.org/pdf_to_ipad_epub_converter__-22-software.html

Works perfect!

PDF to ePub is not a straightforward process as they're a bit different formats from each other. ePub is (put very simply) a structured XHTML zip archive. the HTML supported by ePub is much smaller than the full specification, and there's little to no CSS control. conversion from PDF to HTML is already imperfect at best, so it is with ePub.

ePub may be well suited to publish books of fiction and non-fiction, but for more technical documents that require the use of graphs and equations it requires a great deal of hand-tuning. in addition there is no standard for how equations should be displayed in ePub documents.

ideally a good ePub reader should handle both ePub and PDF well, providing consistently similar functionality for both formats (search, bookmarking, etc.) and full support of the ePub format (SVG, @font-face).

Dear Aunt TUAW,

I am having trouble and hope you can help. Two days ago, I downloaded the new upgrade for OSX as well as iTunes 9.1 and a host of other updates that Software Update said I need. The problem is that half way through the downloads, it was interrupted. The next day, I resumed downloading the files and installing them. Unfortunately, it stalled. I have tried several times to install the files and it always stalls. Is there any way to delete the downloaded files and re-download them?

Thank you from your favorite nephew.

Calibre rocks; I started using this way back in the day with an old Sony eBook Reader.

It also organizes books and can sync to most of the eBook readers. I use it for my roommate's Kindle 2 and for my B&N Nook- and soon for my iPad!

BTW; lightly used B&N Nook for sale on eBay soon... :)

I write eBooks that are STUFFED with embedded rollover/click images, many layer thick images, movie files, auto running animations, sound files, hyperlinks and document jumps.

The question is, these already populate my .pdf files, but can all that easily translate to ePub, without having to re-format it all?

Check out MyPDFs for iPad. Copy your PDFs over from your desktop using iTunes.

I use calibre for my Sony Reader and it's great. However, it is only useful for converting PDFs that contain re-flowable text. In other words, if you have a novel and want to convert it you won't do much better. But if you have a text book - with graphics and columns, etc or a PDF that contains scanned pages - you'll end up with a bit of a jumble at best and a complete mess at worst.

I really hope the iPad has decent native support for PDFs because I already have a few I've been holding off on reading until I get my iPad (I know, I know...) I don't care if it's in the iBooks app or not, but I do need basic bookmarking a fairly quick load times on ~80mb image heavy PDFs.

I suggest you just forget converting altogether, and use GoodReader. This is a great app for viewing all sorts of documents including PDFs. It might not be as "pretty" as the iBook reader but it has lots of great features and handles large PDFs with ease.The iPad version is currently on sale for $0.99.

The desktop version of Stanza will convert a pdf to a ton of different formats (epub included).

The iPhone/iPad OS may handle pdf files just fine, but that doesn't mean the device itself will. I've gone the DrobBox route for my iPod Touch and found pdfs painfully slow to deal with. If it's more than a couple of pages, or has a lot of detail, I generally give up. Part of that may be a DropBox issue, because I do seem to find things a little zippier when accessing pdfs from other aps, but still not so zippy that I actually enjoy accessing pdfs on the iPod.

But then I have a 1st Gen Touch, and the iPad has significantly more computing power. If pdfs are not painfully slow on the iPad, then I'd leave them in that format, especially if they are image-heavy. And also it seems not every pdf will export well into a text format. I believe it depends on how the pdf was created.

But if the pdf is largely text-based and converts easily, there are advantages to a text format aside from speed of access, so those I'd consider converting. I would say the majority of pdfs I have need of would not convert easily to epub, but for those that do, they can be easier to deal with.