Stanza, our favorite iPhone e-reader application, has not yet been updated for the iPad. Maybe it’s coming soon and will be awesome, or maybe the current owner, Amazon, has killed it to reduce competition for its money-making Kindle app.
Either way, unless you want to read your e-book collection on a blocky, pixel-doubled screen, you’ll have to switch readers.
But what about all the books you already have in your Stanza library? Here we show you how to extract you books from Stanza, pretty them up and put them into iBooks on your iPad.
Getting books into Stanza is easy. You can beam them across your Wi-Fi network using the companion desktop application or with the clunky but powerful e-book manager Calibre. You can buy them from within the application itself, or you can add online repositories of varying legitimacy.
Once the books are on there, though, they’re stuck. You can jailbreak your iPhone and go fishing around in the file system, looking for the books. Or you can download a Java app that will churn through the iPhone backups on your computer and sift out the books within.
Download the app, called “Stanza Book Restore Tool”, from Lexcycle, the developers of Stanza. Point it at your backup folder (on the Mac you’ll find it in Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup), choose a destination and hit “Recover Books”. All the books will be copied to your computer.
But what then? Now you have a bunch of EPUB files littering your desktop. You could drag them straight into iTunes, where they’ll be imported into your book collection, but the lovely cover artwork you enjoyed in Stanza will be gone, replaced by text on a generic, plain book cover. What you need is the aforementioned Calibre, previously seen on Gadget Lab in the service of adding Instapaper and other newspapers to your Kindle.
Download the free Calibre app for Mac or Windows, drag in the EPUB files and then go to work. Your books’ title and author data should be cleanly filled out already, but if you right-click on a book (or hit the e key) you can edit the metadata. The easiest way is to let Calibre pull the info down from the internet.
Once this is done, click the “Download cover” button to do just that. Calibre gets it right 99 percent of the time. If you don’t like the cover, you can add your own from an image file.
The next step is essential if you want to import all the new keywords and cover art along with the books into iTunes. You need to convert the books to EPUB.
But wait. They’re already EPUB files, right? Yes, but right now the newly added metadata isn’t baked into the files. Running an export won’t create new files, but it will replace the old one with the newly enriched versions.
Do this as a bulk action and go make a coffee. If you’re using a Mac, don’t get too scared when its fans start to spin like a leaf-blower.
Next, you need to separate out all the EPUB files and just drag them into iTunes. The problem is that they’re stuck inside subfolders. On a Mac, the best way is to run a spotlight search on the Calibre catalog folder, choosing “file extension=epub” as your search term. Drag those files onto the iTunes icon and wait.
Once the import is done, you’ll see a beautiful library of e=books ready to sync to iBooks on the iPad.
Restoring Stanza books from iTunes backup [Lexcycle]
Calibre [Calibre-ebook]
Stanza [Lexcycle]
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