Time to get your carpenter on: Evenfall Studios (www.evenfallstudios.com) has a collection of 175 old public domain woodworking books, mostly scanned via Google’s book scanning project, that cover everything from carving, to upholstery, to using hand and machine tools. Most are rather old and might be more interesting as historical records, but here are three from the military that were published recently:

Carpentry I (PDF)
Carpentry II (PDF)
Use and Care of Hand Tools and Measuring Tools (PDF)

All of the books are in either HTML and PDF, so you might have to convert some of them before they’re readable on your Kindle. Check out our Formats page for help on which formats work natively. If you do want to convert them to a Kindle-friendly format, as always I suggest Calibre, the free software that lets you manage non-Amazon ebooks using an iTunes-like interface.

“Woodworks Library” [Evenfall Studios via OpenMaterials.org via MAKE]

I am always up for a challenge, at least until I grow bored or frustrated, so today I tried to figure out a solution. What I finally came up with is a bit convoluted, but hopefully it lays the groundwork for others to figure out more elegant solutions in the future.

First, I just played around with sending pdf, html, and txt files to Amazon to let them convert it to see what happened. The results were not good. I did a search online for advice on conversions and saw someone mention using FinalDraft–something about how you can set up the style guide with that program and export a correctly formatted document that can then be used by the Kindle.

Well I’m not paying $$$ for FinalDraft obviously. Instead, I remembered an open-source and free-as-in-beer alternative, Celtx. I figured I’d try that. It’s available for Windows, Apple, and Linux platforms.

Next, I went to a website that has html versions of screenplays and downloaded a sample script. (Note that I didn’t try any pdf documents–someone else will have to try that, as I’ve exhausted my curiosity for this problem today.)

Finally, I relied on Calibre, another free software, that manages ebooks for a variety of devices. It also handles conversions.

Once I had all the raw materials–html version of screenplay, Celtx screenplay formatting software, and Calibre ebook software–I started experimenting.

My Solution

Summary for the technically inclined: Import in Celtx, export as html, replace CSS code in exported doc with this code (modify as per your tastes), import into Calibre, convert to MOBI, send to device.

1. In Celtx
   1. import html version of a screenplay
   2. export it as html

   Why? Because by doing this, you get Celtx to replace whatever formatting the original document used with a consistent set of CSS mark-up tags, which is important to have in order to get the Kindle to display the formatting properly.

2. Open the newly exported html file in a simple text editor, e.g. WordPad on Windows XP, or in a real HTML editing application (note that fancier editors like Microsoft Word may hide the html code from you, and really really simple editors like Notepad may do the same)
   1. delete ALL the current CSS style code — everything between <style type=”text/css”> and </style> — from the top of the document (make sure you don’t actually delete the “style” tags as well)
   2. paste this CSS code instead
   3. save the file
3. In Calibre
   1. Import this new html file (or drag and drop it into your list of documents and it will be copied over automatically
   2. Highlight the file in the Calibre list by clicking on it once
   3. Click the big “Convert E-books” button at top of screen
   4. Click “Page Setup” and change Destination profile to Kindle
   5. Hit Okay
   6. Wait for hourglass in the bottom right corner to stop spinning
   7. Right click the file name in the Calibre list
   8. Select “Send to device”

That’s it! It probably looks more complicated than it is, because I’m trying to include enough detail here for beginners to use these instructions.

I experimented with the CSS style code for a while until I got something that worked for me, but I noticed a couple of weird issues with it:

• The Kindle seems to ignore right-side margins
• Although I used percentages in the CSS style code, hoping it would scale appropriately when different text sizes are used, it doesn’t seem to work that way. The CSS I settled on looks good when the text display size on the Kindle is at one of the smallest two settings, but on the bigger settings the left-side margins start to get really obnoxious. It’s a puzzle to me.

And finally, here are two things I noticed that you should be aware of:

• The final version will only be as good as the original screenplay you export from Celtx. If the formatting isn’t correct there, clean it up there and make sure everything’s standardized before exporting it. Otherwise, the CSS markup tags won’t be used correctly throughout the document.
• You can change that CSS code to whatever you want. If you don’t like the margins I chose, simply play around with the CSS code before you import the file into Calibre for conversion. The primary three areas you’ll want to play with are marked p.character, p.parenthetical, and p.dialog. Also, I stripped out a lot of other CSS code to make this simpler; it’s possible you can customize the code to include far more elaborate mark-up rules, so long as you always reference the tags that Celtx uses.

(Photo: Vikki Heartbreak)

Notes: These instructions are for the Kindle 1. Amazon hid the necessary folder for this on the Kindle 2. If you have a Kindle 2, this is the only option I know of.

For Kindle 1 owners, this process is completely reversible–however, as long as you have custom screens on your Kindle, the default screen images won’t appear. You can follow these instructions to revert back to the default screens.

Remember, DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK. This works for me and for others, but I make no guarantees, obviously.

• Short version
• Long (detailed) version

1. Create a new directory on the top level of your Kindle and name it pictures, and within that directory create another directory name anything you want (e.g., “pictures/My Pictures”)
2. Add images to that directory, then unmount the Kindle.
3. Go to Home Screen and press ALT+Z to create a new book out of “My Pictures.” Note that it will appear at the END of your list of books, for some reason.
4. Open book, then press F to go into full-screen mode.
5. For each image you want to turn into a screensaver, press ALT+SHIFT+0 (zero).
6. You can delete the “My Pictures” book and directory when finished–it won’t affect the screensaver images.

Part 1: Putting new images in your Kindle’s memory

1. Connect your Kindle to your computer via the included USB cable.
2. On your computer, navigate to your Kindle (it should appear as a USB-mounted drive on your desktop in OS X, and it should appear as a mounted drive in your “My Computer” window on Windows XP).
3. Double-click on the Kindle drive listing (or icon) to open it.
4. Now that you’re in the top level directory of Kindle, create a new folder and name it “pictures” (without the quotation marks).
5. Go into that folder by double clicking on it.
6. Now that you’re in “pictures,” create a new folder named “My Pictures” (again, no quotation marks).
7. This folder is where you’ll add all the screensaver images you want to appear on your Kindle. Just copy them directly into the “My Pictures” folder.
8. Now that you’re done with surgery, you can close up the patient–unmount or eject your Kindle from your computer, then disconnect it from the USB cable when it’s safe to do so.

Part 2: Telling the Kindle to use the new images for screensavers

1. On the Kindle, press the Home button to return to the main menu.
2. Press ALT+Z — this will force the Kindle to scan the “pictures” folder you added and create a new “book” out of the “My Pictures” folder you added. The book will be named “My Pictures.” Note that it will appear at the END of your list of books, for some reason.
3. Open the book. The first image in your “My Pictures” folder will appear as the first “page” of the book.
4. Press F on the keyboard–this will make the image full screen.  (Make sure “Search” isn’t turned on–if it is, hit the Search button to turn it off and then press F.)
5. Take a look–do you like the image? Want it for a screen saver? Press ALT+SHIFT+0 (the number zero)–after  few seconds, the Kindle will alert you that it has made a screensaver out of the image.
6. Turn the page to see the next image in your folder and repeat.

Note: When you’re done adding images to the screensaver collection, you can go into “Manage my Content” on your Kindle and remove the “My Pictures” book if you like. It won’t affect the screensaver images. (It also won’t actually delete the “My Pictures” folder, so if you want it back you can repeat Step 2 in Part 2 above.)

Note 2: Did you get to step 5 and nothing is happening? Make sure you’re pressing the real Shift key!