The Kobo ARC is the latest entry into the highly competitive tablet space. Many customers want to know how they can load their own ebooks right onto the device. Being an Android tablet, the procedure is a bit different then the Kobo Touch or Kobo Glo. Today, you will learn what you have to do on your PC to copy ebooks over and then what you need to do on the ARC.
There are two main methods to copy ebooks easily to your device, Calibre and Windows Explorer. Calibre is a free download and one of the best management tools for your device. You can easily change the cover art, author’s name, book title, and many more important elements. In most cases, if you download a book from the internet, the person who uploaded the book may have interjected their own name into the title. Other books don’t have cover art at all and make your device appear cluttered. It is important to note that Calibre only lets you copy over books not purchased from other bookstores.
Download Calibre is your first step and then make sure your ARC is connected via the USB Cable. When Calibre is installed you will get a prompt to authorize your device. You can then browse your PC for EPUB ebooks with NO DRM and import them into your main stage. Once your books are in Calibre, simply right click on the books and click “Send to Device.” These books will be copied over to your ARC, and then it is easy to follow the picture instructions below.
The internal directory structure of Android is very different than dedicated e-ink based readers. By default, all Kobo purchases are stored in a directory called Kobo/EPUB/. This directory houses all the books you have purchased from the company or downloaded samples. The one thing you should be aware of is that all the books are numerically titled, so it’s not very easy to find a particular book. I recommend creating a directory called “ebooks” in the main root folder. There is also directories for music, pictures, and video. If you want to copy over content, go for it! I would recommend using other media players than the stock one though. Check out Google Play or the Good e-Reader App Store.
When you copy over books with Calibre, Windows Explorer, or any other program, there is another step involved. You have to fire up the “Library” app. This screen is your bookshelf, where all the books from Kobo are kept. In the top right hand corner you will find a large semicolon. If you click on that it will prompt you to IMPORT your books from an SD Card. Now, in this tutorial we simply copied them to the device’s main memory and not an SD Card. If you select to scan, it will scan the entire device and give you a list of the books you copied over. Click OK and then they will be added to your main Kobo bookshelf.
One of the cool things about the Kobo Android App is that you can highlight, make notes and annotations, and look up words in the dictionary. As long as its an EPUB book, you have full control over line spaces, fonts, margins, and more!
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Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
