I’m a Harry Potter fan. No, I don’t dress up in robes and glasses and spout pseudo-Latin while waving a plastic wand, nor did I stand in line when the books or movies came out. I did however read every book in the series and (with the exception of Order of the Phoenix) enjoyed every last one. My brother (the true Potter fan in our house, who owns first edition British versions of all the books) brought to my attention an exceptionally well-written fan series based on Harry Potter’s son and set immediately after the last proper Potter book.
The series is called James Potter and has 3 books so far. They can all be downloaded for free here. I downloaded the first book, James Potter and the Hall of Elders Crossing, with the intention of plopping it on my nook. Here’s where things got interesting.
PDF viewing on the nook sucks. You have basically no options other than to display every page as an image. There’s no reflow capability, not even so much as a zoom. The Kindle allows zoom, but unless you want to arrow-navigate your way around the page (since none of the zooms fit the screen with a readable size text) you’re better off converting the file.
The PDF files have lots of Potter-esque formatting and illustrations, which is cool and looks very nice when viewed on a computer. However the text suffers from a strange malady when converted to other formats than PDF. I used Calibre to translate the PDF into an ePUB document and plopped it on my nook. All was well until I encountered a sentence like this one.
You see, for whatever reason, the PDF translation software in Calibre is unable to deal with certain types of ligatures. I had to look it up too, don’t feel bad. The PDF for James Potter uses ligatures whenever a word has a double L in it, such as “actually,” “usually,” or even just “all.” When these get run through Calibre, the resulting text is totally devoid of LLs. They instead become a single L and a space. You have words like “specifical y” and “al ” interspersed within. It’s annoying.
The problem has been reported on the Calibre bug tracker and I’ve yet to see any other tools that can successfully convert PDFs to usable ePUBs without this limitation. Some suggest saving to a different format using Adobe Acrobat, but I can’t see myself paying between $150-450USD for something I’ll use once or twice to convert a FREE book.
I plan on trolling around The Grotto Keep, the official forum for the books to see if anyone else has had more luck. There are a few threads regarding ePUB and file conversion. I’ll post back should I find anything interesting.
UPDATE - Several weeks later, and still no ebook love for these books. It's a shame, because they're quite well-written. At this point the only option is to read them on the computer, or the nearest iPad, since iBooks handles PDFs pretty well.
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