Managing e-Books with Calibre

We have more than one reason to tell you about Calibre. One is that it's a

great Open Source tool to manage all your E-Books. So if you have or are

planning to buy an E-Book Reader like a Kindle or Nook, or Sony or even a

smartphone that supports it, you'll need Calibre. Two, PCQuest itself is now

available in E-Book format, so you can actually subscribe to it online and then

use Calibre to manage your monthly copies. We've given Calibre on this month's

DVD along with details on how to subscribe to the PCQuest E-Book edition. Let's

now look at what Calibre is all about.Calibre is a free and  Open Source e-book

management utility developed by Kovid Goyal which allows you to read e-books,

synchronize them with the ebook reader devices and more. Written in Python and

C, the cross platform  application contains  lots of features with which an

e-book reader device becomes more formidable for you. With Calibre, the entire

process of file conversion, library management, syncing to e-book reader device,

etc. becomes simple and easy.

The program interface is quite simple and easy to understand because of its

easy to use icons and professionally designed layout. The flexibility to

customize helps you to customize tags and covers. as well as it gives you the

option to sort the titles in alphabetical order,  cover images, etc. It has

become a comprehensive tool for the management of digital texts.It thus allows

you to perform different roles,one could possibly think of with an e-book

library.  All it requires to configure  is just a  few clicks.  Let's look at

some of its features.

Conversion capabilities



Calibre supports most of the major e-book formats and is capable of converting
from/to a number of formats including CBZ, CHM, EPUB, LIT, CBC, HTML, ODT, TCR,

TXT, MOBI, etc. One smart feature of Calibre is that it automatically detects

and creates book structures that comprise of table of content & chapters, etc.

Library management



This makes  sorting of books very easy as it allows you to sort them by

title, author, size, rating, series, size, etc.  In addition, it also supports

tags and comments. In case of tags, it allows the categorization of your

collection the way you want and likewise for comments; you can use it for book

description, notes, etc. It also allows to do advance search queries by clicking

on the advanced search button. One very interesting feature of this is that it

can search for the book metadata based on the existing title/author when

connected to Internet. Through this, it can download covers for your book &

various types of metadata. Plugins are used for these metadata system so that in

future different metadata sources can be easily supported.

e-Book device support



Due to its modular design, it supports a large number of e-book devices. The

list is huge and some of the key ones comprise of Sony PRS, Barnes & Noble Nook,

Amazon Kindle, PocketBook 360 & various Android phones & iPhone/iPad. The

interesting feature to note here is that it automatically chooses the best

available format while uploading to the device in case a book has more than one

format.

Upon installation, the welcome wizard prompts you to select the desired language and folder location where it should store your E-Books.

Next, simply select from the wide range of E-Book reader devices that are supported by Calibre.

Once you're through with the wizard, click on "Add Book" and choose an E-Book to open. If you don't have any, then download the latest edition of PCQ from http://ld2.in/ab.

This screenshot is displayed after adding books. Herein, to view other books, you simply need to click on different books. You can also sort them by authors, news, tags, etc.

This is the welcome screen wherein we have added PCQuest April 2010 issue after downloading it. It also shows the Title, Author, Size followed by its Path and Format.

Convert web news to e-Book format



With over three hundred news sources ranging from The New York times, The

Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Time to even a IT mag like PCQuest,  & much

more, it can fetch news automatically from the websites or RSS feeds. The news

then can be formatted into an e-book, and uploaded  to a connected device. The

users can easily create and contribute new sources to the Calibre.

This is how an E-book article will look.. To view the magazine, you need to click on the view button on the top. You can also view the covers of different books and other information.

To convert ebook, you just need to click on the convert ebook menu which will display this image. With this, you can edit the metadata, change the look, do page settings & much more.

Built-in e-Book viewer



With an inbuilt e-book viewer, it is capable of displaying all the major

e-book format and has support for CSS, bookmarks, table of contents, printing,

searching, embedded fonts, etc.

If you've subscribed to different magazines and newspapers, then you can automate their downloads by clicking on "Fetch News".

Choose the magazine you've subscribed to from the left screen and configure its auto-download, username and password from the right screen. Click "Download Now".

To view the job status or to stop selected jobs or to stop all jobs, you just need to click on the jobs menu. You can also view the job details.

You can also control different functions such as converting ebooks, viewing them to saving to disks, etc just by right clicking on the particular title for that magazine.

To save the books to disk,you just need to select Save to disk menu.you can save only EPUB format or other formats from the list as shown.