I bought the Kobo Clara HD thinking that I could side-load ePubs on it without converting them. While that is true, when you read a normal ePub—with at least some of them I have tried—you cannot change the font, margins, or line spacing. That is very frustrating.

I learned that Kobo has its own format, kepub, which is basically ePub with some extra stuff added to it. Kepub files work exactly how you would expect e-books to work. This means that I am back to using Calibre to converting my ePubs to a different format to read them on my e-reader.

This isn’t the end of the world. Calibre is an amazing piece of software, and it does just about everything you would ever need an e-book library manager and converter to do. Unfortunately, it is also the jankiest piece of software on my Mac. It is ugly (which doesn’t really bother me), it crashes regularly, and one time this week it froze so badly I had to do a hard-reboot to get rid of it.

Luckily, I don’t plan to use Calibre very often. That’s because I can also convert ePubs to kepubs with a command-line tool called Kepubify. It works great! (There is a web-based version of Kepubify, too, but I couldn’t get it to work.)