I am thinking of buying an ebook reader but my problem is that I have half my books on Kindle and half on Epub. Also, a bunch on PDF, Mobi(which plays on Kindle). Is there any ereader that can handle all the different formats or do I have to get a Kindle and a Nook?
Also, is it possible to take a book in one format and somehow convert it to another?
Calibre is your friend here. It will convert between just about every ebook format known to man. And it’s free.
I know there are apps for tablets that allow reading Kindle format books. And a quick look at the Google Play Store lists many readers for ePub. So I’d say get an Android tablet in a size you like.
Android tablet is the answer. I have several different ereader formats on mine. Plus a bigger screen and not limited to just reading books. Actually I find myself using my Samsung Note phone more and more as my ereader.
Kindle does not do PDFs very well. No zooming AFAIR.
PDF files look good on my Note 3 and better on my tablet.
I know of no dedicated ereader that handles all formats, and specifically none that handle both EPUB and MOBI/AZW3. But as said, Calibre is your friend. It can convert virtually anything to anything.
A few caveats…
The Kindle app is free for tablets and you can buy or probably download for free various EPUB readers, so a tablet will do all formats plus handle PDF pretty well. The caveat is that you may not want to use a tablet to do a lot of reading. I did for a while, but now I much, much prefer the Kindle for that (I use the illuminated Paperwhite) – the e-ink is much easier on the eyes and it’s small and very light. I still use the tablet for reading books with color illustrations and for PDFs.
The other caveat is that if there’s a good clean way of converting complex PDFs to any ebook format with consistently good results I have yet to find it. Neither Calibre nor any other tool can do it, AFAIK, without completely screwing up the formatting, sometimes beyond recognition! The whole page-oriented design center of PDF technology is fundamentally different from that of ebook formats. So I mostly read PDFs on my tablet, where there are more display options.
Please consider this over a tablet for reading. E-readers are designed so that reading for extended periods of time is not tiring for the eyes (as compared with tablets, which are back-lit).
Using Calibre is very simple, although you do need to do the conversions on a computer of some sort, then download them into your e-reader.
Note that AFAIK Calibre will not convert books protected by DRM unless you strip it from them - it cannot do so directly, but can with the assistance of various plugins.
A tablet is the easiest option, if you don’t mind (or prefer) the backlighting - you can install the Kindle app, the Nook app, PDF reading apps (FWIW I agree that PDFs don’t work well on Kindles), comic book reading apps, etc.
Although one thing with the Calibre plugins is that is that at least the last time I looked into it, it was a lot easier to convert a DRM-protected EPUB into a Kindle-compatible file than it was to convert an Amazon DRM-protected Kindle file into an EPUB. As much as I’d loathe to reward them for having the more draconian DRM scheme, if I were in the market for an e-reader I’d probably get a Kindle just for that reason alone.
PDFs work just fine on my Kindle Fire.
The Fire is a tablet, not a dedicated ebook reader.
My Kindle knows how to zoom - please note that it is a Kindle Fire, not all Kindles can zoom.
And yeah, the Fire is sort of a tablet, but it’s one geared very much towards being an e-reader. If you want a table with full versatility get something other than a Fire.
I disagree—and so, I think, does Amazon, since they’ve stopped using the name “Kindle” for their line of Fire devices and now only use it for eink ereaders.
Most relevant to this thread, the experience of reading a book on a (Kindle) Fire is the experience of reading a book on a tablet and not that of reading one on an eink ereader, which is important for reasons like those wolfpup mentioned.
If the Fire is “very much geared towards” anything, it’s geared toward using Amazon-provided content: their movies, their music, their books, their audiobooks (through Audible.com), apps from their app store… The higher-end Fires have among the best screen quality/resolution (and maybe among the best speakers) of currently available tablets, so they’re not just for books.
I’ve actually found the opposite to be true. Cracking my kindle books is no particular trouble–not that that’s so useful to me since I don’t really have a dedicated Epub reader that can’t handle Kindle format.
Converting an epub from Kobo into Kindle format takes more hoops, for me. So YMMV.
I have a Nook wifi and a Nook HD+. Once I figured out calibre, I have no problem converting MOBI files into EPUB files. I decided against a Kindle because I didn’t want to be too tethered to Amazon.
The problem is (or at least was) that the way the Calibre plugin works for Kindle books is that you put in your Amazon account credentials and then the plugin pretends to be your Kindle in order to unlock the book. That means in order for it to work you need to actually own a Kindle.
My situation is that I had a couple of books I’d bought through the Amazon store that I read with the app, but wanted to read on my non-Kindle eInk reader. At least back when I last attempted it a couple years back it wouldn’t work. Maybe they’ve figured a way around it now. In contrast the plugin that unlocked the B&N epubs just worked. I never did a Kobo epub, though.
Ahh, right. The plugin I used would either grab credentials from the Kindle PC reader, if you’ve got that installed, or you could punch in a device ID from a Kindle.
Ah, okay, that might be a recent development then. Before there wasn’t the ability to get it off the PC reader. You had to have a Kindle device ID that was associated with your account. So if there wasn’t actually a Kindle attached to your account it wouldn’t work.