Normally, I would prefer to read PDF format books, which I can use some note tools to take some memo. Sometimes, when you buy a book, it might be epub format. ex: if you are watching from O’REILLY. After doing some search, I notice that we can use Calibre to help converting epub to pdf easily.

Step:

$ brew install calibre
$ ebook-convert "input file name" "output file name" --[optional options]

DONE!

It is easy, right?

You can also download Calibre app from https://calibre-ebook.com. It also support downloading and converting functions.

Example

I plan to download some O’REILLY ebooks, which I find a nice git repo which can download its epub quite clean: https://github.com/lorenzodifuccia/safaribooks#usage

Here is how I did it:

$ python safaribooks.py --cred "Email:Pass" "bookID"

# make sure epub is cleaner format
$ ebook-convert ./Books/input_book.epub ./Books/output_book.epub

# convert epub to pdf
$ ebook-convert ./Books/output_book.epub ./Books/output_book.pdf

Open it in my iPad, DONE! 🎉

Reference

• https://github.com/lorenzodifuccia/safaribooks#usage
• https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert.html