Importing text into Books or Kindle for iOS

Tech Support
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I’m slowly getting into the works of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. All of his works are published in book form, but nearly none are published as e-books, sadly. When I say that, I mean in Danish, much of his work is published as e-books in English, Spanish and German - but I want to read them in Danish, which is my native language.

I much prefer to read on my 11’ iPad Pro 2018, and therefore I wanted to figure out how I could get his work onto my iPad.

Fortunately, the Kierkegaard scientific centre in Copenhagen has published all of his works including annotations to their website: http://sks.dk/forside/indhold.asp

What I have done is to make the site show all of the text. Then I have imported all of that text on the website into Instapaper through the share sheet on my iPad.

An example is the work “Enten-Eller” [“Either-Or”]. I have located the book on the website and then clicked “Vis al tekst” [Show all text], which displays the entire book on a single webpage and then I have imported it into Instapaper: http://sks.dk/EE1/txt.xml

Now I can read his works on Instapaper. But I would much prefer to read them in either Books or Kindle for iOS, as I find it to be a better reading environment for such long works.

Does anyone know, how I could take this further by importing the works into either Books or Kindle for iOS?

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Calibre creates ePub or Mobi out of many formats.

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Or run it through LaTeX to create a PDF.

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Tak @Lars

I only have an iPad Pro. I’m not sure I will be able to run it through Calibre then, right?

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That looks really amazing! How did you do that exactly? What are the steps? I’m not familiar with Latex at all…

Can I then import the PDF to Books or Kindle and read it on the iPad?

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OK…only on iPad. Calibre and LaTeX would mean using a Mac/PC. You can get TexPad for iOS, but learning LaTeX just for that is a waste of time. And I’m not sure all the packages will run on iOS.

AFAIK you can import PDFs into Books. I do it all the time, but from the Mac and then sync to the iPad. I am pretty sure it is possible on iOS, but never did it. Anyone?

We can make a deal: you pull the text from the homepage into an text editor and do some preparation:

  • remove crap (there are some | in the text)
  • add a blank line between paragraphs (LaTeX needs it)
  • chapters are named with \chapter{Forord}
  • send me that text file and I’ll run it through LaTeX with the template I used above. If you prepare the text as described above it might be done in 2 minutes
  • I am setting up a meeting with some Danish collegues, so you profit from their friendliness. :smiley:
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If you open the “show all text” page in Safari, select View > Show Reader to get the simplified “reader” version, then File > Print, there should be an “Add to Apple Books” option in the PDF section of the print dialog.

Or you could print to a PDF with a destination in iCloud drive, and on your iPad open it from the Files app in one of your preferred PDF readers.

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Possible. But doesn’t satisfy my fondness for typography.

But nice tip, never thought of that.

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I use this plugin in Chrome/Brave, which turns any web page into an epub:

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edit- if what you want to read shows up full text in safari- use the create to PDF style sheet than send that document to email

i would email the PDFS to my kindle address (check to see which one is ipad) and put convert in the subject line - instant kindle reading

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Thanks @Lars
Yes, I only own an iPad Pro. Yeah I can import PDFs into Books. But the reading experience is far from the same as reading a “real” book in Books. It’s basically like viewing a PDF document in the Documents folder. So that’s not really the way I want to go.

It sounds good with that arrangement! Which Text editor do you suggest that I use? Currently I use Bear for everything, but I also have Drafts installed on my iPad.

“remove crap (there are some | in the text)” I don’t want to remove these, because they are line breaks in the original text, which can be helpful when looking up the text in a physical book.

“chapters are named with \chapter{Forord}” is this just all of the “main” chapters or anything break in the text in bold?

Thank you for YOUR friendliness Lars. Your name is Danish, are you not Danish yourself and what is this about the colleagues? I don’t quite understand :grinning:

But I will go ahead and identify the books by Kierkegaard that I want to read. Then I will do the work on the texts and then send them to you. What is your email address?

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Thanks. I don’t really want to read them as PDFs. It’s clearly the easiest way, but the experience is not really that good and many features are missing. But thanks!

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Does that work on iOS iPad Pro?

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Yeah that might be a way to go actually also. As I said, I don’t really prefer to read them as PDFs. But the PDF reading-experience is much better in Kindle than in Books. I will consider this, but for now I will go with @Lars way :blush:

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Actually the name is Swedish. My father worked there before I was born and got the name as a “souvenir”. And I work in several international projects, including Denmark.

It does’nt matter which text editor…as long as it’s text. :smiley:

Let’s try to get one done. Copy the whole text into an editor, clean it up (if necessary) and add \chapter and \section, if necessary. It’s pretty simple, as in https://www.dickimaw-books.com/latex/novices/html/sectionunits.html or https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Document_Structure#Sectioning_commands Don’t worry about the rest, just chapters and sections. And remember: a blank linke between paragraphs.

Send it to email@controlchaos.club and let’s see what I can do with it.

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Thanks Lars. I will try and send you one soon and then we can see what it will be like.

I’m not actually completely keen on them being PDFs as that doesn’t allow for me to make and store notes and highlighting on the text in Apple Books (as far as I know).

Maybe I can use the Kindle app instead. Maybe that app allows for note-taking/highlighting and keeping.

Otherwise, I can subscribe to Instapaper premium and read them in Instapaper which also allows for note-taking and highlighting.

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Hi Lars. Hos would you suggest that I import the text into Calibre if I get access to a Mac?

I also tried to import the text into Kindle as a Doc and it looks really nice actually, while I can also do highlighting and note-taking.

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Great news, just tried something out: you can export from Pages as ePub to Books on the iPad. :slight_smile:

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Great! So I will try and get some books sorted and then send them to you and then re-import to Books via Pages

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Not necessary. You can just copy the text into Pages, format titles and export to Books by yourself.

The original question was “importing text into Books…”. and this solves it.

Feel free to send my a text, I think it will look very good via LaTeX. But ePub has an advantage: you can change font, font size while reading, which you can’t do with PDF. So, Safari->(Text Editor)->Pages->Books gives you a “real” eBook.

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