Calibre is free ebook management software that can convert any ebook format to any other ebook format. It was made not by a corporation but by a community of voracious readers and librarian-sorts, and it doesn't care at all what Amazon or Barnes & Noble would prefer you do with the ebooks you bought and paid for. It eats bullshit for breakfast. Let's get it set up.

Important note: these instructions are for people who have a Sony PRS-505 ereader, because I bought a big stack of them off eBay and have been distributing them to my friends, but the information in here is broadly applicable to most ereaders.

Default Windows and Mac behaviour is to hide filename extensions, so that book.epub and book.pdf and book.doc and book.exe and book.horriblevirus all look the same. Damn near every how-to-do-a-thing-on-your-computer guide will begin with how to fix this nonsense, and this guide is no exception, so here we go:

Launch File Explorer (windows key + E), then click on the “View” tab and check the “File Name Extensions” box.

Launch File Explorer (windows key + E), then click View > Show > File Name Extensions.

Open Finder, choose Finder > Settings, then click Advanced. Select “Show all filename extensions.”

You don't have to do anything, but try not to be smug about it, Mister Smuggy Smugsson

Leave your ereader disconnected for now, and go to calibre-ebook.com, hit Download, and download Calibre.

On Windows this will be a .msi file. Double-click it once downloaded, and the Calibre installation dialogue appears.

If you're on Linux, heed the instruction not to use your built-in package manager (no really, heed it), and follow the instructions for Linux.

Once installation has started, the GNU public license appears. Click “I accept the terms in the license agreement.” Read it if you want or skip it, whatever, I'm not your boss. Click on Install, there's no need to click Advanced.

If Windows pops up a thingy asking if you meant to do that thing that you just did, tell it Yes.

Installation will happen pretty quick. Click Finish, and Calibre launches.

Calibre's first-time setup (Welcome, Wizard!) asks for your language and where you want it to keep its library data. Choose an empty folder on your hard drive, or leave the option at default (this'll be something like “Calibre Library” in your home folder). Click on Next.

Beware: if you already have a folder full of ebooks, don't tell Calibre where it is. This is not what Calibre is asking for, here. Choose an empty folder. Calibre is going to make copies of your ebooks, inside this folder, and fiddle with them. If you already have a collection of ebooks, you don't want Calibre fiddling with it!

When Calibre asks you to choose your e-book device, choose SONY from the left, and on the right, choose “All other SONY devices.” Click on Next.

Calibre rewards you with a hearty message of congratulations for pressing two buttons, and invites you to click Finish. Click Finish.

Calibre opens up! But we're not done yet. We're gonna install a plugin to shrink those enormous cover files down to a more sensible size.

Click on Preferences. A new dialogue appears. Towards the bottom left, under “Advanced,” you'll find Plugins. Click that.

A new dialogue appears. At the bottom left, click “Get new plugins.” Using the “Filter by name” text input in the top right, find and install “Bulk Image Resizer Plugin” by Artur Kupiec. Just start typing “Bulk im” and it'll probably pop straight up. Install it by clicking on its list entry and pressing Install, and then pressing Yes in the following warning dialogue.

Now it's time to restart Calibre (just X out the program and then open it again from the Start menu).

After Calibre has restarted, our cover resizer is installed. Now we'll give ourselves big easy-to-hit buttons for each step of the ebook conversion process, so that we can do all this without having to think too much, such as we might do at midnight when we're tired and need things to be Simple Damn It.

Go to Preferences, then “Toolbars & Menus” (top of the list towards the middle, under “Interface,” icon is a magic wand). You'll see a drop-down saying “Click to choose toolbar or menu to customize.” Click there, then choose “The main toolbar.”

Two lists appear - on the right is a vertically-sorted representation of the current collections of massive buttons running across the top of Calibre, and on the left is a huge and intimidating list of every damn thing that Calibre can do, but fortunately we don't have to worry about that.

Clicking the green rightward-facing arrow moves a button from the massive intimidating feature list into our current toolbar. Clicking the blue leftward-facing arrow removes the toolbar button and places it back in the massive intimidating list. In the list on the left, scroll down until you see “Polish Books.” Click on it to highlight it, and then click the green rightward-facing arrow. Over on the right, you'll now be seeing the tail-end of the toolbar list, with “Polish Books” at the end.

You should already have “Resize Cover” in your toolbar, but if you don't, then you can add it with the same process.

Go all the way back to the drop-down list at the top of this window, where you selected the toolbar you wanted to change, which now says “The main toolbar.” Click on that, and choose “The main toolbar when a device is connected.” And just like before, find “Polish books” in the list on the left, and use the green right-facing arrow to add the Polish Books button to the toolbar, and check to see if “Resize Cover” is already there and add it if necessary.

Click Apply and we're done and you can close the Preferences window.

The “Resize Cover” plugin needs to be told how big our PRS-505 screen is. There's a small downward-facing arrow just to the right of the big Resize Cover button on the top toolbar. Click that, and then in the dropdown menu select “Customize Plugin.”

Our PRS-505 has a screen that's 600 pixels wide by 800 tall - but there's a little bar at the bottom of each screen that shows your reading position, and for the absolute best results we want to account for the pixels used up by that little bar. So we will tell the Resize Cover plugin that we want our covers to measure 600 pixels wide, by 768 tall. Double-click on the numbers below Width and Height and set Width to 600 and Height to 768. “Keep aspect ratio” and “Only shrink larger images” should both be checked. Hit OK to save these settings.

The cover page isn't the only enormous image you'll find in an ebook file. I was putting some Goosebumps books on my kid's ereader, and noticed that they were like twelve megabytes each and it took ages to turn pages. An .epub that's just text should be like 100 or 200kb for a kid-length story, and these books aren't illustrated, so what the hell?

Turns out, it was because each chapter heading was an image containing the chapter number in a spooky font, and each one of those images was so enormous that you could print it out as a poster and hang it on your wall. If we make those images the same width as the ereader's screen, then not only do we save a massive amount of space on the memory card, we save the ereader the work of loading a too-big image and then resizing it to fit the screen as we read the book, so that saves a lot of battery life too.

Calibre already knows how big the PRS-505's screen is, we just need to tell it to resize images to fit the screen. So, we'll go into Preferences again, and then under the “Conversion” heading, find “Output options.” On the left, we'll see a load of output file types like EPUB, KEPUB, DOCX and so on, but we're just concerned with EPUB, which should be at the top and already selected - click on it if it isn't. On the right, we see some checkboxes. “Preserve cover aspect ratio” should be checked, everything else should be unchecked. Leave “Split files larger than:” at 260 KB, and where it says “Shrink images larger than:” you want to enter:

profile

just like that, lowercase p. That's what tells Calibre you want your images all shrunk down to a size that's perfect for your screen.

Proceed to the next bit, Decrapify and Send.