Latest Ebooks Automator For Mac
This is a MAC only post but next week Brian will author a post for PC users I saw a post the other day about using Hazel + Calibre to automatically import your Kindle files into Calibre. While the user did this to automatically strip the DRM from the books, the tutorial is smart for any one who wants to create an ongoing catalog of their purchases. It was the first time I had heard about Hazel, a low priced software that serves as a macro utility. A macro utility essentially records a number of repetitive steps to complete a task. In the future, rather than executing each step individually, you simply run the macro. But MAC Operating Systems have a macro utility built right in.
It’s called ““. I’ve just started researching Automator and I’m blown away at what it can be set up to do for you.
These types of programs really are harnessing the power of your computer and making the device work for you. I’ve set up Automator to “watch” the folders where I download my ebooks – either in epub, pdf, or Kindle – and move them into a separate folder. From there, every time a book is added to that folder, Calibre knows to add it into my Calibre library, will delete the book (to avoid duplicates) and if it is DRM free, Calibre will convert it into my preferred format. The only thing I do to set this Rube Goldberg-esque sequence into motion is to download a new book using either Adobe Digital Editions or Kindle for Mac. The rest of it happens automatically.
Onto the Tutorial. Click for larger image We don’t want to select everything in the folder, only files that are actually ebooks. In the Reader or Adobe Digital Editions folder, you want to copy files that end with epub or pdf.
If you are doing Kindle, you would want to move only those files that contain azw. It’s important that your middle column is “contains” or “begins with” and not “is”.
“Is” requires an exact match. Sometimes AZW files are azw3 or azw4. A command that says “file extension is azw” would ignore files that have azw3 or azw4. “Get Folder Contents”. Click for larger image This last step copies the filtered file items to another folder.
How To Use Mac Automator
I’ve created another folder (“autoadbooks”) that I have set Calibre to watch. Now save the automator script and close the program. Toptan sat keybord for mac. You are done with Automator.
Set Calibre to Auto Add books Under preferences – Add, Calibre has an option to autoadd books to the program. Once Calibre auto adds a book, it will delete the book file. This is why you use the copy feature in Step 7 instead of the move feature. Click for larger image Note that you only check the boxes under “ignore files with the following extensions when automatically adding” when you want to exclude the files. I stupidly checked epub/pdf/azw without paying attention to the instructions and wondered for hours why Calibre’s autoadd didn’t work. Thankfully I figured it out before I posted a panicked message at MobileReads. Restart Calibre and start enjoying your automatic goodness.
Other interesting uses of Hazel and books. Hazel + Dropbox + Calibre to convert epubs to mobis automatically. s about using Hazel + Automator to get articles from Instapaper to his Kindle.
Okay, I ran into another annoying Automator problem. Lion has also automatically removed items from “Library” from its spotlighting/indexing facility, and apparently Automator’s Filter files bit relies on filtering things through the index. (I think if you upgraded to Lion, you might not have this problem–it’s only the computers that came with it native that do this.) So if your version of OS X is as broken as mine is, the filter suggested returns no results. I ended up using automator to run a shell script instead: /bin/cp /Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content/.azw. /Users/katniss/Documents/autoadd /bin/cp /Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content/.mobi. /Users/katniss/Documents/autoadd And that did it for me.
Jane, out of curiosity, is it possible to set parameters so it only takes action if a book is downloaded FROM a certain place, in addition to being downloaded TO a certain folder? I am wondering b/c about 90% of what I read comes via email from authors/publishers for review. So I download it from gmail into a downloads folder. I also download other stuff that comes in to that same folder (via mac mail for work, etc).
Latest Ebooks Automator For Mac Download
Just wondering if there was a way to control it so it only looked for pdfs downloaded from gmail for example. Otherwise it means some weeding out of stuff that isn’t books but is still a pdf. I still think in the long run it is faster to automate it even if I have to pull out things that aren’t actually books periodically. Just curious though if it could be fine tuned to that degree. @: Then I really don’t know what it was! All I know is that it worked on my desktop (not native Lion) but not on my laptop (is native Lion), so I assumed that was it. Maybe there’s some other setting that needs to be toggled to make it all work out, and I just don’t know what that is.
Whatever it is, if I left the filtration settings blank, it would capture the contents of my kindle folder–but if I added a filter (and I checked the settings 100 times) with any kind of filter in it (for instance “size 3 KB”) it would shoot back no results. So weird and frustrating. I’m going to add one thing. Using my shell script above has the added negative that it copies all files, all the time, and that confuses Calibre when it adds them, and plus, slows down my computer.
So, not a good idea. I disrecommend that as an option.
The easy fix to the above is not all my rigmarole with the finder and the cp, but if for some reason spotlight isn’t indexing the folder because it’s in the hidden systems library (as mine was), just go into Kindle Preferences and change your content folder to some visible place on your hard drive. I also had to swap steps 5 and 6 above–put “Get Folder Contents” before “Filter Finder Items” to make it work. From doing a bit of searching, what I can tell is that the finder search in Mac OS is kind of broken, and generates weird errors–so I’m including this in case someone wants to make it work and their computer is acting like mine. Thanks, Jane–having an autoarchive is a huge relief for me.