I love to read. In particular I love reading books.
When I find a meaningful passage in a book I love to save it for future reference. When I read paper books I would underline, highlight or transcribe meaningful sentences or paragraphs. Now that I primarily read digital books highlighting and annotating on the page are possible, but I prefer to copy and paste my notes into documents.
I read Kindle books, Nook books and iBooks and several digital book formats. I have found that maintaining a digital library is easiest for me using a wonderful app called Calibre. Calibre serves most of my needs very capably. Unfortunately, despite all Calibre’s best efforts there are some books it can neither open nor convert. The books have been formatted and encrypted in seemingly “unopenable” ways.
Recently, I was fed up.
I really wanted better access to some of my books.
While looking for a solution I happened upon Epubor’s Ultimate. Ultimate is available for Windows (Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8) and Macs running Mac OS X 10.6 and later, including 10.10 Yosemite. I downloaded a trial version of Ultimate.
I then downloaded ten books of various formats that I knew I had never been able open and read in Calibre. First I tried to see if Calibre could convert and open the freshly downloaded books. Nope.
I deleted the books and redownloaded them to make sure the test of Epubor’s Ultimate was a legitimate one.
The input formats Ultimate will convert are AZW, AZW1, AZW3, AZW4, EPUB, HTML, HTMLZ, MOBI, PDF, PRC, Topaz, TPZ and TXT.
In this test I needed to open AZW, AZW3, HTMLZ and MOBI formatted books.
Epubor’s Ultimate offers two ebook input options:
1. Drag books from an input window within Ultimate.
2. Drag books from a local folder.
I chose to drag and drop my seemingly unopenable ebooks from a folder on my computer.
Once I dragged them into Ultimate they decrypted.
Ultimate will output to EPUB, MOBI and PDF (either the common font A4 size or the large font default size) formats. I chose EPUB as my output format.
Within a minute the ten books I could not open in Calibre I could now open in Calibre, read, copy and paste out of. I could also continue to read each book in their original app if I chose to do so.
I converted 16130 pages.
All the images were clear.
All links worked.
Every page of the AZW, AZW3 and MOBI books were converted perfectly; 100%.
Seventeen pages of the only HTMLZ formatted book I tested were legible but not copy and paste-able. One page was illegible.
Overall the books that had been unusable were now 99.89% perfect and all but one (!) of the 16,130 pages were clear and readable.
As the Epubor web site states, “Epubor Ultimate Converter helps you one-click to decrypt and convert eBooks purchased from Kindle, Nook, Sony, Kobo and Google online eBook stores in batch. This fantastic and award-winning software is a “must-have” tool for all eBook lovers. It’s the most easy-to-use eBook format conversion software ever, and it’s 100% safe with no adware, spyware, or viruses.”
That was certainly my experience. I found the program simple and easy to use.
I recommend Epubor’s Ultimate for all readers who would like to freely use their own books.