But how do I organize it all?

[vickyblueeyez.livejournal.com]

 Hello everyone. I'm new to this comm, ebooks and ereaders, not fanfic though.  A few months ago I went into a fanfic panic because I heard delicious was shutting down. I backed up what I could to diggo and was ok. It wasn't until I was tagging and adding descriptions to some old fic in delicious that I realized some of the fic was gone. The journal was either deleted or purged, friends only, etc. That's when I got the idea of saving all of my favorite fics. I liked the idea of having my fic library anywhere I go. Instead of buying a Nook, Kindle, or Sony ereader, I purchased an iPad. At first, I looked for a program that would save and convert webpages into PDFs in a huge batch. Nope. It looks like I have to convert all my fic manually (all 400+) of it. FanfictionDownloader saved me a lot of time. ArchieveofOurOwn allows downloads of their fanfiction as well. So does ksarchive (kirk/spock fanfiction archive) and kmarchive (kirk/mccoy fanfiction archive).

Now I have all these PDFs all over the place. I manually added ratings, my own custom genre/category tag (by ships: kirk/spock, sylar/peter, etc). That was the only way I could keep my ships separate in iTunes. Then someone told me to download calibre. With that, I changed titles, authors, added tags, etc. The downside is that when I sent fic from there to my iTunes, it sent it by author. I group things by fandom, ship, trope, other so sorting by author did not help. Due to that, I haven't bothered syncing any more calibre info to my iTunes and went back to doing it the old way with my genre/categories.

I get ready for iPad and it tells me to download iBooks to read my PDFs. I hate this program only because it's not organized the way I want it. I can't organize or search by tag, descriptions don't show up or ratings. You get category, author and title. You can make collections (such as by ship) but you still only get titles, authors and category. Useless if you have over 400 titles and can't remember story content. I tried stanza and even though it synced with my calibre, it still will not download the content from the web to my iPad.

So my question is, is there some app or program that I can use on my iPad to organize my pdfs (by rating, tag, see descriptions, genre, etc) and read them?

Comments

[josieb1.livejournal.com]

I think Stanza is still your best bet but you would do better converting your pdfs to epubs using Calibre first and then loading them into itunes, and then syncing your ipad. Collections is probably the best you can hope for tbh.

[vickyblueeyez.livejournal.com]

every time I use it the fail to import pop up comes up. It won't let me DL my content so I really can't use it.

[josieb1.livejournal.com]

If I remember correctly with Stanza you don't load anything in iTunes, you put the stories in a folder on your pc and then when your iPad is connected you go to the Apps page for your iPad, scroll down, past the apps, then you get to a box which says 'these apps will allow you to load items onto the ipad' or something like that. Select Stanza, which should be listed, this is on the left, then in the blank box on the right you select something which allows you to navigate to your folder, you select your stories, and you can load tons at the same time, and they pop onto that box. It's something like this (it is 1am here, I am in bed and writing from memory)

Is that what you are doing to import your books into Stansa?

[vickyblueeyez.livejournal.com]

nope. I plug in ipad to the comp, go to apps (search, categories, top rated) and didn't find that button you were talking about. I also went into settings and didn't find it.

[vickyblueeyez.livejournal.com]

nvm found it in itunes in the app section and when I tried to add a book, it froze my itunes. I'll try again

for some odd reason

[vickyblueeyez.livejournal.com]

I tell in itunes under the app file sharing thing, to add pdf to stanza. it will show up in the list and then disappear. when I go back to try to add it, i select the file and it doesn't show up in the list

Re: for some odd reason

[josieb1.livejournal.com]

I have Stanza on my iPhone, it's been ages since I loaded anything, let me have a go and I'll pm you.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it can do exactly what you want, but you might want to try Bluefire Reader. It's good at reading PDFs and it's supposedly got some sort of sorting function to let you organize stuff.

[ladyjestyr.livejournal.com]

When it comes to generating PDFs: If you have access to a Mac running a recent version of the operating system (ie 10.4 or later; I'm not sure if earlier versions could do it), you can generate PDFs automatically from the Print dialog box, which makes it super easy to get fic into PDF form.

When it comes to reading PDFs: I use GoodReader to read PDFs, rather than iBooks, because GoodReader allows you to set up hierarchical folders, so I've got my fic sorted by fandom, and titled with "[FA] Author - Title" where FA = Fandom Abbreviation (ie HP, SGA, etc).

Unfortunately I don't know of anything that will let you tag files and then sort them on the iPad by tag, because as far as I know the intrinsic metadata of a PDF doesn't include tags, or categories for the things you want to sort by. That is, a specific app might let you add tags, but I'm willing to bet that those tags wouldn't then be readable by a different app, so you'd need to find something you were really happy with before you tagged everything.

[vickyblueeyez.livejournal.com]

I have no access to a mac and I use windows. I found an app for google books and google mobile. I didn't see anything about the organizing in google books

oops, auto complete

[vickyblueeyez.livejournal.com]

my brain did auto complete and I saw google reads vs good

Re: oops, auto complete

[josieb1.livejournal.com]

I have Goodreader on my iPhone as well, that does take PDFs, they load in the same way as I described for Stanza. My PDFs in Goodreader aren't fanfiction though.

[amalc.livejournal.com]

Hi,

I came across your query and I have to add my vote for Goodreader. I don't have a Mac either but you can download the Goodreader app for your iPad. I do have a very sizeable collection of fanfiction on my iPad. You can organize everything by folders and it can download either directly from the internet (just add a g to the address you are currently reading from) or it also takes PDF, txt and word files which you can access through Google Documents or Dropbox or just by emailing them to yourself. I'm not sure if it organizes tags because I don't use them but I have found I can divide up my collection by fandoms, authors, genres, etc. - in fact, any file system using folders (and lots of sub-folders) you care to set up. I think it's the best app out there for reading (and saving) stuff offline. It also organizes the folders in alphabetical order so that's a huge help.

As to downloading the stuff, have you come across FLAG? Granted it only works for some websites (fanfiction.net, fictionpress.com, twilighted.net, adifferentforest.com, thewriterscoffeeshop.com, twiwrite.net, ficwad.com, adultfanfiction.net, fictionalley.org, harrypotterfanfiction, mediaminer.org) and they are working on more. It supports the following formats: EPUB, MobiPocket, PDF, HTML


Link is here:
http://www.flagfic.com/sites.com

Hope this helps!

PS - As a matter of curiosity, how do you download stories from the Ksarchive? If I want to save a story, I either save the page in Goodreader or copy/past the text. Is there another way to download stories that I haven't heard about?

[vickyblueeyez.livejournal.com]

To DL fic from KS archive, you first find a free PDF printer from the web. You go to the site or any other site (I also save fic on LJ as a pdf file which looks like a print screen) by clicking print, picking the pdf printer from the printer drop down and having that make me a file.

Does the goodreader app work for organizing fic or just fic you have downloaded by using it?

[amalc.livejournal.com]

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I'm not sure I understand your question? Do you mean does it organize things automatically?

Thanks for the hint on downloading from the KS archive. I'd never thought of making it a PDF file. I usually either copy the text of the story only and then save it in a word file (a laborious process at best) or just use the "Page Save As" feature in Internet Explorer. I'll have to try the PDF file method.

I'm glad I found this community. I've joined it!