Review 01: Calibre

Ah, calibre, where would I be without you right now? I do know my eBook library would be a complete mess.
Let me back up…
If you’ve been around the internet for a while, you know how easy it can be to develop a nice little library of eBooks on your computer of various formats. I have pdf files of a Psychology magazine that is no longer being printed nor do they have them available to download from their site any more (that makes me sad). I also have pdf files of books from a site that used to offer free eBook downloads from a broad range of subjects. I have txt, doc, rtf files of books no longer in print. I also have various other formats that people have given me.
All in all my eBook library is a whopping 331.4 MB on my hard-drive. That may not be HUGE, but its over 500 different files/books/comic books/magazines/ect. Its too big to organize it in a way that would make Dewey proud. So, I turned to the open source community to find something that would help me in my OCD ways.
I can’t remember exactly when I discovered calibre; I believe it was around the time that Ubuntu came out with 8.04. I’ve been using it since. It imports my files, tells me if they are readable or not (I’ve had a few duds ), and lets me convert them to practically any format I could want.
Speaking of formatting books into different formats, I recently got a very good reason to do that: I now own a nook. I’ve discovered that the books convert better into epub than they do with the pdb (they also take up less space, that’s why my library is so small). And sending them to my nook is a breeze no matter if I’m in Windows or Linux. All I had to do was select the nook from the list of readers supported and select “send to device” when I want to transfer them (no need for drag and drop).
A little about calibre from their about page:

calibre started life on 31 October, 2006, soon after the release of the SONY PRS-500, the first e-ink based reader to be sold commercially in the US. At the time, I was a graduate student, with a lot of time on my hands. The PRS-500 did not work at all with Linux, my operating system of choice, so I decided to reverse engineer the USB protocol that it used, to get it working on Linux. This was accomplished with the help of the fine folks over at mobileread.com and calibre was born, albeit named libprs500.

At the time there were no satisfactory tools to convert content into the LRF format, used by the SONY reader, so I decided to implement a converter to convert the most popular e-book formats to LRF. This converter proved to be wildly popular and far better than the (mostly non-existent) offerings from SONY. It was picked up and used by various publishing houses and content digitizers to produce the first generation of books in the LRF format.

As my e-book collection grew, I realized that managing it was quickly becoming unwieldy, so I decided to write a graphical interface to libprs500 to make it easier. This became calibre, in its present form, as a comprehensive e-book management tool. libprs500 was renamed to calibre in mid-2008. The name calibre was chosen by my wife, Krittika. The libre in calibre stands for freedom, indicating that calibre is a free and open source product, modifiable by all. Nonetheless, calibre should be pronounced as cali-ber, not ca-libre.

The news downloading feature, one of calibre‘s most popular, has an interesting story behind it. I used to subscribe to Newsweek, back when it was still a real news magazine. But one fine day, Newsweek simply stopped being delivered to my house and no matter how much time I spent on the phone with various sales reps, it simply would not start again. Since I’d just got my first e-book reader at the time, I decided to add the ability to download and convert websites to calibre. From the beginning, I decided to make it as modular as possible, so that other people could contribute “recipes” for different news sites. The calibre cookbook has kept on growing and now calibre has recipes for over three hundred news sources in many different languages.

Today calibre is a vibrant open-source community with half a dozen developers and many, many testers and bug reporters. It is used in over 160 countries and has been translated into a dozen different languages by volunteers. calibre has become a comprehensive tool for the management of digital texts, allowing you to do whatever you could possibly imagine with your e-book library. Reading is very important to me and one of my goals has always been to prevent either the fragmentation or the monopolization of the e-book market by entities that care solely for short-term goals. As the calibre community continues to grow, driven by book lovers, for book lovers, hopefully it will always present an alternative for people that love to read e-books and want to be in control of their own digital libraries.

Kovid Goyal
November 2009

It truly makes the organization easy and simple. You don’t have to even own an eBook reader to enjoy its functionality and ease of use. (I know, I used it for over a year before I ever got an eBook reader.) It even takes it a step further by having an integrated eBook viewer. This truly helps if you happen to have a lit file and don’t want to take the extra steps to install Microsoft reader under wine.
Another great feature of this program is that it is cross platform compatible; which means that you can install it in Windows, Linux, and OS X. I know I’m not the only one with a dual boot system, so having my library on a shared partition really helps if I feel the need to read something, or just put it on the nook.
Organization is very simple, and exporting the books is even simpler. You can put in how you want the files saved (on your hard-drive or device) with ease. I, personally, like to have my books arranged by series/number in the series; so, I have calibre save my books in a folder with the series name as the folder name, and then the number in the series followed by the title for the file name.
Calibre is one powerful little program for eBook reading and management.
As I started when I reviewed gOS; Calibre receives 5 out of 5 fish:

Reasons why:

• Ease of use
• Wide range of file type compatibility (Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, TXT; Output Formats: EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, TCR, TXT)
• Built in eBook viewer (no need to download extra software)
• Cross platform compatibility (Windows, Linux, and OS X; SONY PRS 300/500/505/600/700/900, Barnes & Noble Nook, Cybook Gen 3/Opus, Amazon Kindle 1/2/DX, Longshine ShineBook, Ectaco Jetbook, BeBook/BeBook Mini, Irex Illiad/DR1000, Foxit eSlick, PocketBook 360, Italica, eClicto, Iriver Story, Airis dBook, Hanvon N515, Binatone Readme, various Android phones, iPhone for eBook readers)
• Extensive online FAQ, as well as a User manual that helps the average person troubleshoot any minor problems that might come their way.

• Project Gutenberg – The original and most comprehensive collection of free ebooks
• Feedbooks – Similar to Gutenberg, search and download free ebooks
• ManyBooks.net – Similar to Feedbooks and Project Gutenburg
• Books on The Knob – This blog updates regularly with all the new free deals
• Google Books – Google’s going after orphan works and anything that’s not strictly under copyright.
• WOWio – the aforementioned site where all the books were free. Now some are free, while others cost.