These are very niche Mac OSX programs, but I thought I would spread the word about them as they’ve been pretty helpful to me. Even if some of them do nothing more than give my desktop some more eye candy. You might know of some of them, in which case great – the others I hope come in handy! So, in no particular order here they are.

Ecto - Download

A very small and lightweight app that lets you post to any blogging system you might be using. I use WordPress and this app fit my needs perfectly. Of course theres always MarsEdit as an alternative that WordPress announces on their site but I liked the very straight-forwardness of Ecto. To each his own. (Ecto is also cheaper)

These apps have found their way onto my Mac and have proven themselves worthy for my uses, I hope they do for you as well! If you have any suggestions for what apps should be in Part Two of my “Handy Mac OSX Programs” let me know in the comments!

Do you buy Amazon Kindle books a lot? I love them, not only do they have a great price usually but its the instant gratification of knowing you’ll be reading it within seconds of buying it wherever you are. Many of you might have a Kindle Device but what if you also got an iPad for reading?

If you have an iPad, I’m 99.9% sure you most likely already downloaded the Kindle app and iBooks app for it by now. It was great at first, until I started to realize one small ever-growing problem. That I will eventually have TWO sets of digital book libraries on my iPad. Not good! So how to resolve this problem?

First, I had to decide which app I was more comfortable reading in. For mainly aesthetic reasons I chose iBooks over the Kindle app because of the fancy page turning graphics as well as the built-in store behind it if I ever did want to buy a book on the spot. (As opposed to going to a browser from the Kindle app) The *only* thing I would like to see iBooks do that Kindle does is the ability to choose a black background for night reading. Although the lowest brightness setting within iBooks does just fine for me.

So, my journey began like all journeys now’a days – with Google. Searching and reading up on how I can get my books from the Kindle app to my iBooks app. There were a lot of different helpful websites but none really had all the information I needed in one place, hence this blogpost for you.

For now I will be focusing on iPad users, and how to get the Kindle books from the Kindle app to your iBooks, and NOT Kindle Device users specifically (however with a little know-how you can use this same guide anyway without much changes to the later instructions)

Formats

First let’s start out with what you need to know – iBooks uses a format called .ePub which is basically a text document that can have re-flowable content (which means you can make text larger/smaller, etc) has embedded metadata, inline raster and vector images along with CSS and XML functionality. And yes, it also unfortunately supports DRM.

Another format you need to be aware of is .PRC which is a format that the Kindle devices and Palm eReaders are familiar with. For those Kindle device/Palm users out there you might also recognize this format as .MOBI, it is the same exact thing.

One last format to note is the .AZW format which is a Amazon Kindle specific format for the ebook. Note that all of these formats can be converted assuming that they do NOT have DRM on them. There ARE ways around the DRM but that is NOT what I will be discussing on this post. You will have to find out how to do that yourself.

Software You’ll Need to Convert:

Thankfully, this is a post I don’t have to spend too much time talking about the programs you’ll need for various Operating Systems. “Calibre” is a multi-platform program that allows you to convert many ebook and text documents to another format with a few clicks of a button. You can download it here.

METHOD 1:

With your jailbroken iPad (or iPhone/iPad – whatever your using for the Kindle app) your going to need to sFTP into it and locate the Kindle folder within the Applications folder. Usually, its not named “Kindle” but rather a long string of numbers. My Kindle folder is located in

/private/var/mobile/Applications/

If you don’t feel like sitting there and going through every single folder to find out which one holds the Kindle.app, a quick workaround is to delete the app from the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch and then go to the AppStore and re-download it. This way, when you go back to your FTP program you can sort the Applications folder by “Modified Date” and the newest modified folder should be the Kindle.app folder. (You might need to open the Kindle app first)

Once the Kindle folder is found, you will want to navigate to:

/Documents/eBooks/

In this folder you will see a bunch of paired files with the same name twice, for now your only interested in the .PRC and .AZW files. Go ahead and copy them to your desktop (or wherever you want on your computer) and you can close out the FTP program once finished.

Method 2:
But what if you don’t have a jailbroken iPad/iPhone/iPod touch to do this? Well, where there’s a will theres a way. Basically your going to need to extract the contents of your back-up’s from iTunes. To do this you’ll need special software:

Windows users can use – Reincubate Download Here
Mac OSX users can use – iPhone Backup Extractor Download here

Once you’ve extracted the Kindle folder to your desktop look for the eBooks folder with your .PRC, and .AZW files inside. From here you can continue to the instructions below using Calibre.

Converting the Files

Now that you have the PRC and AZW files, you’ll want to open up Calibre. If you need some help configuring Calibre you can watch the below YouTube video the developer made which helps guide you through the process.

Simply drag the PRC files into Calibre and select the ones you wish to convert. Select “Convert e-Books” at the top panel and you will be able to edit the Metadata if you desire.

Make sure the output format on the top right is set to “EPUB”. If all the settings are set to how you wish (I chose the default setup) click on “OK” in the bottom right.

It shouldn’t take very long and after Calibre finishes, it will place the new EPUB version of the eBook in the folder you specified Calibre save them to. Now, its time to open up iTunes and drag n’ drop that ePub file into the “Books” section of iTunes.

You are now ready to sync those books up and they will “magically” appear on your iPad iBooks app!

One last note: There are .PRC and .AZW files out there that have DRM locking it down, making Calibre unable to convert it. There are ways around this but that is not what this post is about. If you really truly want to get that nasty DRM off, I will say that Google, is your best friend as always.

Enjoy reading your books!