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Converting Kindle Books To PDF
Converting Kindle Books To PDF
Overview
This document shows the steps I'm using to export books from my Kindle (books that I bought
through Amazon) to PDF format. Why am I doing this? Well, for technical manuals anyway, I
prefer PDF format because they're easier for me to annotate and the page layout is usually more
friendly to screenshots and code samples. And also, I want to be able to search my tech library
from my computer, and Kindle books aren't searchable from outside Kindle. I want Mac Spotlight
(and all applications that use Spotlight, like Alfred, DevonThink, Tembo, HoudahSpot, etc.) to be
able to index and examine the contents of my tech books. I want to be able to search once and
find results in any and all of my web archives, notes, Curio documents and tech books.
If I bought the books through a DRM-free seller like O'Reilly, I already have PDF files. If I bought
books through the Apple bookstore, I think I'm hosed (their DRM is very difficult to strip out) ... so I
don't. But I buy a lot of tech books through Amazon, so this is how to work with them (for entirely
legal purposes, thank you).
All of this uses software that I found as of September 2012, which means (a) this is the stuff I
found, not necessarily all the stuff that's out there; and (b) everything could change tomorrow. Aint
technology grand.
Page 1
Start in Kindle for Mac: the book in question must be stored locally.
Here's a snapshot of my Kindle for Mac home screen. (Yes, I have a lot of copies of Emily Goes
Overboard ... there's a whole story there, for another time.) In the picture I've highlighted some of
my tech books.
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1. If the book in question hasn't been downloaded to the computer yet (maybe it's only on the
iPad), you'll need to go get it. In Kindle for Mac, click the Archived Items button. This shows
everything that's been purchased but isn't stored locally.
2. Find the book you want, right-click on it and choose Add to Home. This will download the book
(if it's a big book, it might take a little while).
Page 3
Find the local file for the book ... it'll be in Documents > My Kindle
Content
Here's where Kindle for Mac stores your books. The file you want is going to be an AZW file.
Unfortunately, many (though not all) Kindle file names are darned cryptic. How can you tell which
book is which? Trial and error is one way ... just keep processing books using the steps that follow
until you get the right one. Maybe there's a better way, but I haven't found it yet.
Page 4
If you just downloaded the book in question from the archive, or maybe you just purchased it, it'll
be the most recently added item in the folder. So one trick is to tell the Finder to arrange the
contents of the folder by Date Added. That's what I'm doing here, since I just downloaded this
book. The item at the top of the list is probably the book I want.
Page 5
Use a DRM-stripping utility ... I'm using DeDRM from Apprentice Alf.
I found this online and it works swell. Here's where I got it:
http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/dedrm-applescript-for-mac-os-x-10-5-10-6/
I downloaded a zip archive that extracts to this tools_v5.1 folder. (And okay, this is embarrassing,
I never investigated that Calibre_Plugins folder there ... so my steps recorded here don't make
use of that. Setting the plugins up looks a bit daunting to me, so for now I'm fine without using
them.)
The main tool I use from here is a Python droplet that you'll find in the DeDRM_Applcations
folder. Following the instructions in the ReadMe, I copied the droplet to my Applications folder and
put it in the dock.
Drag the AZW file from My Kindle Content onto the droplet.
The droplet doesn't have to be in the dock for this, of course ... it's a droplet, no matter where it's
stored. But that's how I'm doing it.
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This success message should appear. Just click Thanks to make it go away.
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If you want to see details and/or configure the droplet, double-click on it to open it. This is the
window that appears.
You can select an ebook using the button here (instead of dropping it). You can set the
configuration with the Configure button. Configuration includes a lot of settings relating to
identifiers for Kindle, iPad, Nook, etc. and also a setting for where the de-drm file will be saved.
The default is to save it in the same directory as the original. I've changed mine to save to the
desktop.
Note: If you click the Configure button, you get asked for serial numbers and such and there's no
obvious way out of the dialog window. Just keep clicking "None" as it asks you about one type of
identification number after another, and finally you'll get to the screen that lets you set the
destination folder for your drm-free books.
Page 8
Here's what my book file looks like. The title has been expanded to something more useful than a
bunch of cryptic junk, and also it has _nodrm appended to its end. It's still a MOBI file, though. (At
this point, I can tell for absolutely certain that I chose the correct book to work with -- this is the
tech book I need to convert to PDF.)
Page 9
Launch Calibre.
Here's the Calibre main window. (And yes, it's ugly ... oh well.)
1. At the center of the window is the Calibre library, which is all of the ebooks that you've imported
into Calibre already. Note that Calibre stores copies of its books in its own library folder, rather
than just trying to auto-detect what's on your system.
2. The right pane of the window shows details about whatever book is selected in the list, or if
none is selected the first book in the list.
3. The buttons across the top of the screen are how we'll do things. (We'll only be using Add
books and Convert books.)
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Press the Add book button to add the new non-drm MOBI book.
Pressing the button will open a dialog box to locate your book. Locate it, choose it, and continue.
Page 11
The convert window opens ... it's a big window with lots to do.
First, make sure that the input format is MOBI and the output format is PDF (2). You'll need to be
in the Metadata section (1) to do this. You'll see when you're choosing your output format how
many possible formats Calibre gives you.
Note: I'm skipping past all sorts of options and information that (a) isn't needed for what I'm doing
right here, or (b) I haven't tried out.
Page 12
Here's the look and feel section. Clearly there's a lot you can do here (including custom CSS!), but
I've only tried a few things.
1. When I selected Disable font size rescaling, I created a mess ... so don't. It's deselected by
default; just leave it that way.
2. For readability under possibly sub-optimal conditions, a little extra leading can be a great help.
The default here is 120%. I like pushing it up to 130%.
3. Another aid to readability is setting text to Left align. Especially with my tech books, code-heavy
text is all but unreadable if the alignment gets goofed up or is badly justified.
I don't know why, but choosing the PDF output format doesn't automatically set this profile. As the
description here shows, the Default Output Profile creates a really nice, readable letter-sized PDF
document, good for reading on a computer.
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Also in the Page Setup section, set the input profile and margins.
1. I don't really know if setting the input profile to Kindle is necessary, but I figure it can't hurt.
2. The default margins are 5 points wide, which is almost like no margin at all. I like at least 30
points here.
As the description suggests, this section will be different if you're choosing other than PDF to
export to.
Page 14
The OK button can get lost in all the clutter, but it's right there at the lower right corner.
Page 15
It can take several minutes to convert a big book. Pretty much the only clue you get from the
Calibre interface as to what's happening is the little spinning activity indicator and the job counter.
If you're processing one book, it'll say 1. When the book is finished, it'll say 0. (This is all in the
lower right corner of the main Calibre window.)
Calibre sends out Growl notifications, so if you have Growl you'll see them. This is the notification I
get when the conversion process starts.
Jobs: 0 means the conversion is done. (You may also get a Growl notification.) Note that the
activity indicator doesn't go away (it just stops spinning).
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This one took me a while to figure out ... it doesn't exactly jump right out at you. When the
conversion process is done, no new book appears in the library list. But the book that you
converted is now in the library in its new format. So if you select that book and examine the book
information pane (on the right-hand side of the window), you'll see multiple formats listed.
Page 17
As the blue color indicates, each of these format acronyms is a link. Click the PDF link to view that
format.
Page 18
Here's a page from my newly converted tech book. The margins are a decent size, the font is
uniformly sized in a nice, easy-to-read Helvetica, left-aligned for maximum readability.
Note: If you don't like the result you get, you can always do it again. Just close the PDF viewer
window, click the Convert books button again, and go through the options for export,
experimenting with some different choices. Calibre will overwrite the old PDF with the new one it
generates.
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Calibre stores its files in Home > Calibre Library. To find the PDF file you just made, you can
browse there in the Finder. Or you can ask Calibre to browse there fore you. Just click the Path:
Click to open link.
Here's my new PDF. You can open this PDF in Preview or Acrobat or any program you prefer.
You can copy it into DevonThink or just make sure DT indexes the Calibre Library folder if you
want to search the book from there. If you're using Spotlight-based searches, the PDF will be
indexed and searched automatically.
Page 20
Here I've performed a search (using Tembo, a Spotlight front-end) for the phrase preventing
memory leaks -- something I might want to look up if I'm stuck on a programming problem. From
the results shown, we can see that (1) my new PDF contains that phrase. Also another tech book I
PDF-ized, the iOS 5 Developer's Cookbook, also contains the phrase. A tech book I bought from
O'Reilly that came in drm-free PDF format, iPhone App Development the Missing Manual, also got
results (2). Note that the results for Documents (which is where MOBI files would appear, were
they searchable) doesn't include any of my MOBI or AZW files.
Note: The reference under Documents to the iOS 5 Developer's Cookbook (3) is actually pointing
to RTF and HTML exports I tried from my MOBI file, using the tools I got from Apprentice Alf -those two exports aren't very attractive or readable, though as you can see, they are searchable.
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