Today I have received an email from one of my customers (Thanks a lot Bill 
) who bought “Cisco ASA Firewall Fundamentals” ebook and he told me about an easy way to convert the PDF format ebook to Kindle-ready format. I did some more research and discovered 3 possible ways to convert the PDF ebooks into a Mobile device format. Ofcourse there are numerous ways to achieve this but I will describe the options I have found to be the most popular.
Update:
I got an email from another customer of mine and he told me that he has used “PDF Reader Pro” to view “Cisco ASA Firewall Fundamentals” ebook on his iPad and worked really well. So this is another option in addition to the following.
1. Send the PDF file to Amazon to convert it for you
This is the way suggested by Bill. I haven’t tried that (I don’t have a Kindle device) but from what I have read, when you register your Kindle device you are assigned an email address. What you need to do is to send the PDF file as attachment to the free Kindle address ([name]@free.kindle.com). You must put the word CONVERT in the subject line of the email.
The document will be converted to Kindle format (.azw) and Amazon will deliver your converted document to the e-mail address associated with the Amazon account to which the device is registered. You can use the e-mail to download the file to your computer and transfer it to your Kindle device using a USB connection. Also, if you have WiFi on your Kindle device then you can download the file directly.
2. Use Mobipocket Creator Publisher Edition
Mobipocket publisher edition is free and you can use it to convert a PDF file to HTML or .PRC format which can be read on Kindle devices or other ebook readers.
- Download Mobipocket publisher from HERE.
- Install the software and then Import the PDF file.
- This will create an HTML Format of the document which you can use on mobile devices.
- If you click “Build” it will also create a .PRC file which can be viewed on ebook readers.
3. Use Calibre to Convert PDF to MOBI or AZW3
Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) is another free popular ebook management tool which can convert between various formats. Just “Add” the PDF ebooks and click on “Convert ebooks”. Select the Output Format to be either “MOBI” or “AZW3” (for Kindle devices) and click OK.
After the job is finished you can view the new converted formats on the right. I must admit that Calibre does not do a very good job in converting. You can use however a command line tool called K2PDFOPT (http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/download/) which optimizes the PDF file for better conversion on Calibre.
Check out the following link for more information if you want:
http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx1Z7LVXB2S805O
I convert using your first tip but this site has a online conversion to mobi too : http://ebook.online-convert.com/convert-to-mobi .
But the conversion using Amazon is amazing. I test on my kindle and it’s very good
Hi,
The cleanest option would be if you would be able to save a .mobi or .epub version of your book yourself! There is always the risk (or likelyhood, really) that the book just won’t convert right when using a third party converter, and after all, PDF wasn’t made to be converted (despite its name, portable document format
You have the source. You can create any output with it that you like!
~rL
Robin,
You are absolutely right. PDF is maybe the worst format to convert to mobile reader. I agree that if you have the source file (Word for example) you have better options for conversion. However the article was meant to help people that have the PDF books and want to view them on Kindle etc.