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Convert O’reilly Stand-Alone iPhone Books to epub Format

O’reilly are a great publisher of books related to technology/programming. They offer their books in a few formats besides the classic print. PDF, epub, or as a standalone iPhone App.
The great thing about the standalone option, is that it much cheaper than the epub or PDF version (why?). Still, you don’t want your iPhone screen full of book icons scattered everywhere (especially if you have a large number of books).
The trick is to buy the book @ AppStore as a standalone app, unpack it, pack it again as epub, and upload to any eReader (e.g. Stanza). Now you’ll have all your books centralized in one location, and you’ll keep free space on your screen for other applications.

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Unpack (from O’Reilly’s website)

1. Once you’ve downloaded the app, select Applications in iTunes, right-click the app that you want to extract, and select Show in Finder/Explorer. The file you want is selected automatically when the window opens.
2. Copy (that’s copy, not move) the file to a different location, for example, your desktop.
3. Change the file extension of the copied file from .ipa to .zip using whatever method is most familiar to you.
4. Unzip the file using whatever archiving utility you prefer.
5. There are a few files, but the directory you are interested in should be named Payload.
6. This step varies, depending on platform:
* If you are on a PC, simply go into the Payload/.app directory.
* If you are on a Mac, go into the Payload directory, right-click the file within, and select Show Package Contents.
7. Again, there are lots of files and directories here, but the EPUB content is found in book/OEBPS.

Now that you’ve found the files, you are free to read (and copy and paste from) them in your web browser.

Now that you have the whole book as HTML, you can read it through a web browser. You can also pack it as a epub file:

Step 2: Repack
Go to “Payload/.app/book/” inside the unpacked app directory.
Now, run these commands (Work in Linux. Maybe there is some analogous commands for other OSes):

zip -q0X my_book.epub mimetype
zip -qXr9D my_book.epub *

credits: bobdc.blog

Step 3: Upload to Stanza
There are a few methods. All of them are over WiFi (i.e. you need to have you iPhone connected to the same Wireless network as your compute). They are listed here

Of course, if you have many books, you might save time by recruiting a script to do most of the work instead of doing it manually

Credits for collecting the pieces together: Sanders Kleinfeld at getsatisfication.

Have fun

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Tags: Ebooks, iPhone, Oreilly, TIps