Hi, based off my other question I realised what I am interested in is reading Harry Potter on Lingq…I have read in other forum topics that people are reading the Spanish versions on Lingq and I was wondering where people are buying the ebooks? Because I assume that different places sell them and I want to be sure the one I buy will work with Lingq. I know that is is important to be interested in what you are reading, so that is why I ask. Thanks.
Search Harry Potter (Whatever Spanish one) pdf on google
You’d have to upload your own copy (and keep it private)- otherwise LingQ would be breaking copyright law.
Go for it 
Yes I know. I said that I would be buying it. I know other people read it here so I was wondering if there is any compatibility issues because some ebooks don’t copy any paste…I understand I have to keep it private. I’m bored with the pre-made content so I wanted something that allowed me to keep using Lingq since I like the method.
Yeah I did that, but I’m interested in buying it not just downloading it. I didn’t want to spend the money on a book that may have compatibility issues such as not having the ability to copy and paste, so I was asking if people knew of a place they know their books work on Lingq.
It actually does not matter what format it is in as there is an amazing tool for converting ebooks into other formats. Google for Calibre and you should be fine.
On Amazon I recently purchased the Portuguese translation of the first Harry Potter book (Harry Potter e a pedra filosofal). Unfortunately it is copy-protected and I wasn’t able to convert it to text format using Calibre. You CAN, however, copy and paste it to the LingQ import screen from the Kindle application on your computer - I have a Mac - but it has to be done page by page. You can make a separate lesson for each chapter and, of course, make it private for your use only so as to not violate copyright laws.
I’m updating this post: The easier way to get the Potter books into LingQ is - as was stated above - is to buy them from pottermore.com. Once you buy one, you are prompted to either transfer the purchase to your Amazon account to be able to read them with the Kindle reader or to download the book as an ePub file. Don’t put it into Amazon or it will be copy protected. Instead download the ebook into your computer as an ePub file and you will be able to convert the file to txt using the free Calibre software. Then select all the text in the resultant text file and use the LingQ import feature to add it to LingQ as a private file. Hope this helps someone.
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Convert your file to txt. As already explained, the free tool “Calibre” can do that for you and there are also online conversion tools. Once you have a txt file copy-paste it into lingq and that’s all there is to it.
That means that you can buy the ebook mostly anywhere. Calibre will convert most formats. The only issue is that some selling sites protect their digital books, so that it’s not possible to copy the content. Breaking such protections is illegal but technically possible (for example, there’s a Calibre extension designed to break the commonly-used DRM protection).
It seems that Rowling’s official online bookstore (Pottermore) sells the ebooks without DRM protection. They’re available in a lot of languages, including Spanish, and you can also buy audio versions:
Linк to the Spanish ebooks:
https://eur.shop.pottermore.com/collections/ebooks/spanish
Related to this topic…
The Harry Potter wiki might be in your target language… I have imported some pages from this site in my target language so I can refresh my memory about characters, plot summary, and other information.
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Very useful for me. There are a lot things to read on this website. Thank you.
Thanks so much! I will check it out.
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The Brazilian or the European Portuguese edition? I didn’t realise they were different until I ordered the paper book in the UK, and found it to be completely different from the audiobook. And I have subsequently discovered that it is just generally really difficult to get Brazilian as opposed to European Portuguese non-digital media in the UK. I even discovered that the Paulo Coelho book I ordered (O Alquimista) was a translation into European Portuguese of the Brazilian original.
“It seems that Rowling’s official online bookstore (Pottermore) sells the ebooks without DRM protection. They’re available in a lot of languages, including Spanish, and you can also buy audio versions”
Just checked that out. Audiobooks are only there in English, German and Japanese. Which is disappointing - I know there are official Dutch translations because I bought the CDs…
And the list of languages offered in ebooks is a lot smaller than the number of languages listed on the wikipedia page List of Harry Potter translations - Wikipedia .
Thanks Merralin for this very helpful post. I have heard from a few people that the Harry Potter books aren’t the best books to read in a foreign language, and I did read one or two of them in French and had a similar experience. There’s a lot of weird vocabulary and the names of people/places in French can be different (e.g. Hogwarts is Poudlard, Snape is Rogue etc). Formatting etc aside, what did you think of the actual reading content in Portuguese?
Importing and formatting of books continues to be a problem for me. I have a book in PDF form, and any copying of it or converting it that I try creates line breaks in the middle of sentences. This is frustrating because a) it looks bad on the screen and makes it less pleasant to read, and b) you cannot create multi-word LingQs across these line breaks. Removing the formatting doesn’t work because then when it gets pasted into LingQ, all line breaks are gone and this makes it impossible to read (especially given the way speech is rendered in Portuguese / romance languages).
Does anyone have any solutions?
EDIT: I found the same book in ePub format and this converts and imports perfectly. So my immediate problem is solved; we’ll see what happens in the future if I only have a PDF as the source file.
I wish I had a solution to this problem. The same thing happened to me with a Kindle novel I’d purchased from Amazon. Being copy-protected, Calibre couldn’t convert it. Since I only wanted to use it in LingQ for my own use, I finally decided to copy and paste the whole book page by page into LingQ from the Kindle app. Didn’t work because at some point the Kindle app tells you you’ve reached the limit of how much you can cut and paste from that e-book. Then I got a PDF file of the same book (I tend to be persistent), converted it to a txt file in Calibre, and then cut and pasted the txt file into LingQ. The result was an unreadable mess, with lots of spaces and lines where they didn’t appear in the original document. Finally I cut and pasted the entire PDF file into LingQ and that worked pretty well. Just had to do a little editing of the file. It’s very frustrating, don’t you think, when you purchase an e-book and cannot easily get it into LingQ to study it. I could have spent all that time actually studying.
You can use a DRM plugin for Calibre that allows it to convert Kindle files: https://www.howtogeek.com/162994/how-to-strip-the-drm-from-your-kindle-ebooks-for-cross-device-enjoyment-and-archiving/
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Thanks, I’ll try it!