I was very frustrated because I had purchased the Harry Potter Kindle books and the first HP audio book from Audible in Spanish, but I was unable to import them into LingQ.
Somebody somewhere mentioned a company called Epubor, so I checked it out. It appears to be a legitimate company in China (hence the lack of concern for copy protection). They have several programs with the most interesting to me being “Epubor Ultimate” which de-protects ebooks from a number of publishers (but not iBooks) . It can also convert to unprotected .mobi, .epub, .pdf, and .txt files.
Of course one can plug their phone into a PC and record an audiobook to Audacity, but that’s a lot of work “Epubor Audible Converter” to the rescue. Although, to get the chapters of the audio to match the ebook still requires loading the audio into Audacity and figuring out where to split the file.
Epubor Ultimate $25/year license or $50 lifetime
Audible Converter $23/year or $30 lifetime
This comes up a lot, but I don’t see any real advantage of having the audio for a book imported into LingQ. If you import the text, and listen along to the book on the audible app on a phone or tablet, you can pause and stop and rewind as needed, plus you can adjust playback speed in 10% increments +/-, AND you can stop and walk away in the middle of a lesson and it will remember exactly where you left off.
But if you wanna import the audio, it will take you a lot of hassle to break down an audiobook to be able to match it to your LingQ lessons, and all you would get in return is reduced functionality. Technically you will also have LingQ keep track of your listening stats, but it’s super easy manually update the those stats – a hell of a lot easier than breaking down an audiobook. (And on top of this, I feel that listening stats are really not as important or consequential as reading stats, given how much listening to you end up doing outside of LingQ once you get up to the intermediate levels, with podcasts, etc.)
Frankly, I agree with you regarding the audio. I only did it as a trial and I knew others were asking about it. It’s quite painful trying to get the time codes correct and as you say, it’s easier to just listen on the phone while reading on the iPad.
I have to change my opinion t_harangi. After some more trials, I see that it is VERY beneficial to have the audio for the book chapter uploaded. If you’re using a phone or tablet, you can play the audio of the lesson while reading along in the chapter. That way you have direct control over the audio as you’re reading. You can back it up 5 seconds, pause it, or change speeds all while staying in th app.
So, you can read a book (in both sentence mode and page mode) while listening to the audio book while using just one device without having to swap back and forth between apps.
Also, the Audible converter has the option of automatically separating the audiobook into MP3 files of each chapter. So as long as you have each chapter in it’s own lesson, you don’t have to manually cut up the audio files. I placed the full chapter of the ebook into a lesson by opening the MOBI file in a reader, then copying the text of the chapter into Word to get the gaps between paragraphs (which is done automatically when importing an ebook) and then copy and paste the chapter into the lesson.
You can import the whole ebook at one time, but it won’t split based on chapter.
What you will find is that the “chapters” in an audiobook are often just ways to break up the audio file into smaller chunks and may or may not line up with any of the actual chapter breaks in the book text itself.
Even in cases where they do, you’d then have to upload the book chapter by chapter, as opposed to just doing just one upload and having LingQ break it down into lessons of 2,000 words, so it’s just more work.
And then, if you’re reading, and decide to stop halfway through a LingQ lesson, LingQ will remember your reading position, but it will not remember your listening position, so, the next time you open up the lesson, your audio for the lesson will have to reload and you have to find your position where you left off.
It’s just hard because I’ve gone through so many books reading on LingQ and listening on the Audible app and found so many shortcuts and ways to optimize it – using “car mode,” using keyboard shortcuts, customizing playback speed, customizing rewind intervals, etc, etc. It’s really just a better way of doing it, once you play with it a little.
I’ve decided to keep my Macbook Pro for now so I can do this kind of activity as well. I had a look at Epubor Ultimate but apparently is not possible to crack Kindle books with the last Catalina update. But they have the other tool KFC converter, I think, that should do the trick with the online Amazon reader.
Have you had any problem with your books so far? Can you use Epubor Ultimate easily with other ebook platform like Google? I don’t really care about where to buy them.
I also think I’ll try to understand Calibre first. Have you tried this software?
Epubor has a link to download the Kindle app for PC previous to Catalina, so it’s not a problem.
I’ve had no trouble unlocking my Kindle books.
I’ve used Calibre a while ago, but I was never successful decrypting Kindle books with it. Using it as a reader/organizer is what I’m going to explore if I ever have free time again.
I like having the breaks at the end of the chapter, so for me it’s worth it to copy and paste one chapter at a time. Even though I need to go via MS Word to keep the paragraph spacing.
Apparently I read in their website that it’s not possibile to use previous Kindle versions on Catalina. So they created a new software for that reader online but thanks for sharing your findings. I’ll dig more on it as soon as I have more time.
Epubor now has an app that will de-protect a Kindle book via the Chrome web browser and the Amazon Kindle Reader plugin. It’s only $15/year or $30 permanent. A pretty good deal!
yes, exactly. It’s the one I was mentioning you before.
I tried Calibre today but couldn’t do all the process. I need to install another plugin to make it work with the last ebooks. I’ll test it again in the next weeks.
Epubor’s KCR converter no longer de-protects Kindle books. This notice appears at the top of the page you linked to:
Note: We’re sorry to tell you that Amazon has further upgraded Kindle Cloud Reader in August 2020 for security reasons, which has finally made it impossible to download books from Kindle Cloud Reader. As a result, Epubor KCR Converter can’t help you convert the Kindle books from now on.
NOTE: See Mycroft’s note below saying Epubor Ultimate still works. Thanks to Mycroft for that info.
Yes, KCR is gone, but Epubor Ultimate still works. Just follow the instructions on their site to install the older version of the Kindle App on Windows and it will decrypt Kindle books. You can try the trial version before paying for it.
I have been able to download and decrypt kindle books as .azw files. Now what? What type of conversion do i do, epub, mobi, azw3, pdf, txt? And then how do i break it up into chapters and import into LingQ? sorry if this is basic?