What is calibre?
calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. It has a cornucopia of features divided into the following main categories:
- Library Managementcalibre manages your e-book collection for you. It is designed around the concept of the logical book, i.e., a single entry in your library that may correspond to actual e-book files in several formats.calibre can sort the books in your library by:
Title, Author, Date added, Date published, Size, Rating, Series, etc.In addition, it supports extra searchable metadata:Tags: A flexible system for categorizing your collection however you likeComments: A long form entry that you can use for book description, notes, reviews, etc.
You can easily search your book collection for a particular book. calibre supports searching any and all of the fields mentioned above. You can construct advanced search queries by clicking the helpful “Advanced search” button to the left of the search bar.
You can export arbitrary subsets of your collection to your hard disk arranged in a fully customizable folder structure.
Finally, calibre will even go out onto the internet to find book metadata based on existing title/author or ISBN information. It can download various types of metadata and covers for your books, automatically. The metadata system is written using plugins so that different types of metadata sources can be supported in the future.
- E-book conversioncalibre can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats. It supports all the major e-book formats. The full list of formats can be found here.The conversion engine has lots of powerful features. It can rescale all font sizes, ensuring the output e-book is readable no matter what font sizes the input document uses. It can automatically detect/create book structure, like chapters and Table of Contents. It can insert the book metadata into a “Book Jacket” at the start of the book.
- Syncing to e-book reader devicescalibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding support for different e-reader devices easy. At the moment, it has support for a large number of devices, the complete list of which is here. Syncing supports updating metadata on the device from metadata in the library and creation of collections on the device based on the tags defined in the library. If a book has more than one format available, calibre automatically chooses the best format when uploading to the device. If none of the formats is suitable, calibre will automatically convert the e-book to a format suitable for the device before sending it.
- Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book formcalibre can automatically fetch news from websites or RSS feeds, format the news into a ebook and upload to a connected device. The ebooks include the full versions of the articles, not just the summaries. Examples of supported news sites include:
- The New York Times
- The Wall Street Journal
- The Economist
- Time
- Newsweek
- The Guardian
- ESPN
- and many, many more
calibre has over three hundred news sources and the news system is plug-in based, allowing users to easily create and contribute new sources to calibre. As a result the collection of news sources keeps on growing!
If you are interested in adding support for a news site, read the User Manual. Once you have successfully created a new recipe, you can share it with other users by posting it in the calibre forum
or sending it to the calibre developers for inclusion in calibre. - Comprehensive e-book viewercalibre has a built-in ebook viewer that can display all the major ebook formats. It has full support for Table of Contents, bookmarks, CSS, a reference mode, printing, searching, copying, customizing the rendering via a user style sheet, embedded fonts, etc.
- Content server for online access to your book collectioncalibre has a built-in web server that allows you to access your ebook collection using a simple browser from any computer anywhere in the world. It can also email your books and downloaded news to you automatically. It has support for mobile devices, so you can browse your collection and download books from your smartphone, Kindle, etc.
New in calibre 0.7x
It has been nearly a year since calibre 0.6.0 was released and calibre has come a long way since then. calibre has always been amazingly flexible. 0.6 was all about bringing that flexibility to the conversion engine and device support. Today calibre supports conversion from/to dozens of formats and can connect to scores of devices. The focus of 0.7 is bringing that same flexibility to the calibre User Interface.
To that end, users now have the ability to freely resize all the major User Interface elements, add their own custom metadata to the book list, and add their own categories to the Tag Browser.
Another major area of improvement is performance. Various parts of calibre have seen optimization and caching improvements. Startup times and large library performance have been dramatically improved. With a library of ten thousand books, you will see an improvement of between 10 and a 100 times in the speed of startup and common operations like editing metadata.
When connecting to devices, calibre now caches the metadata it reads from the files on the device. This means that on subsequent connects calibre will build the list of books on the device very fast. If you like to keep large collections of books on your device, you will find this feature a godsend.
Click to watch the improved User Interface in action
Some of these improvements are described in more detail below.
- User Interface improvementsThe best way to see the user interface improvement is watch the video linked to above. For those of you that cannot, here’s a short description.You can now add your own columns to the book list, via Preferences->Interface (the plus button). You can add your own ratings, yes/no, tags, date, etc. columns and have them appear in the booklist. The contents of these columns can be edited just like a built-in column, by either double clicking on individual entries or using the Edit meta information button.You can freely resize the Tag Browser and Book Details pane and easily show/hide columns by right clicking on their headers. You can also re-arrange columns by dragging their headers.
You can show/hide categories in the Tag Browser by right clicking on them and add your own categories for quick access, by clicking the Manage user categories button. You can also edit entries in the Tag Browser by right clicking on them. This will change their value for all book. For example, if you change the name of an author, this change will appear in the metadata of all the books by that author.
You can Save you frequently used searches and bring them up with a single click in the Tag Browser. You can also use the saved searches to restrict what is shown in calibre. This will restrict the book list as well as the Tag Browser. In effect, you have temporarily reduced you calibre collection to only the books matching the search
You can now merge book records and have calibre automatically merge the metadata and formats into a single entry for you. Accessed via the arrow next to the edit meta information button.
You can now use regular expression when searching and also relational operators like
date:>yesterday.calibre can now optionally download tags/reviews/rating from Amazon.com
- Device driver improvementscalibre now shows a
"On Device"column in the main Library view when you connect a supported device. This column can be used to see at a glance what books in your library are also on the device. There is a complementary"In Library"column in the device views that shows what books on the device are in your library. Since you can sort and search on these columns, it becomes very easy to quickly see what books are on the device. For example, the search"not ondevice:main and not ondevice:card"will show you all the books in your library that are not on the device. This feature works best with books you send to the device from calibre 0.7 onwards.calibre caches the metadata of all books on the device. This means that when you re-connect the device creating the list of books on the device will be very fast. Especially if you have a number of large ODF files on your device, this will make a huge difference in the time that calibre takes to connect to the device and display the list of books.Users can now specify the folder structure and file name of files placed on the device when using the Send to Device action. This is useful for those devices that allow browsing of the on device folder structure. Customization is available via Preferences->Add/Save->Sending to device and can also be overridden on a per device basis from Preferences->Plugins->Device Interface plugins. - Performance improvementsIf you have a large library with thousand of books or more, you will notice significant performance gains in starting up calibre and doing common editing tasks like changing metadata, compared to 0.6.0. In addition, thanks to the device caching described above, connecting to devices should become much faster if you have large collections on your device.The download of news has been speeded up as well (as of 0.6.27) by making it truly multi-threaded.
- Improvements in the conversion and metadata enginesThe conversion engine now supports Unicode characters in RTF Input documents and auto-converts ligatures for PDF input documents.calibre can now set metadata in DRMed Topaz and MOBI files.When generating EPUB files, calibre now creates SVG based covers, that automatically stretch to fill up the available screen real estate on the device used to read them.
calibre can now convert CHM files.
- Creation of catalogs You can now easily generate a catalog of all books in your calibre library by clicking the arrow next to the convert button. The catalog can be in one of several formats: XML, CSV, EPUB and MOBI, with scope for future formats via plugins. If you generate the catalog in an e-book format, it will be automatically sent to your e-book reader the next time you connect it, allowing you to easily browse your collection on the reader itself.
- E-book viewer improvementsThe e-book viewer now has built-in dictionary lookup. Just select a a word and right click to look it up using the dictionary servers at dict.orgThe viewer now supports SVG embedded in XHTML when viewing EPUB files.
- USB syncing with the iPadcalibre now has an experimental driver for the iPad. If you connect the iPad to your computer with calibre running, it should be detected and you can send books directly to iBooks on the iPad with calibre. The driver works by using iTunes in the background, so you also need to have iTunes installed and your iPad setup in it. This works on Windows and OS X 10.5 and higher. And of course, you can browse you calibre collection wirelessly on the iPad with the calibre content server. For details see the FAQ.
