EBooks are the next generation source of information and knowledge. There are a lot of sites providing free eBooks. You can download a big list of eBooks, if you have a decent internet connection. Viewing and storing the eBooks is a problem. EBooks comes in different formats, to open the eBooks, that has a different format will be a real headache. Moreover, arranging and organizing is a bit difficult if you have a big collection. Don’t worry here is a free solution for all !
The utility that we mentioned here is Calibre. In a few words, Calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. The calibre manages your e-book collection for you, as it is designed around the concept of the logical book, that is 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. One of the great feature of calibre is, it can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats and it supports all the major e-book formats. Now what about the e-reader integration, Calibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding support for different e-reader devices easy. 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. Calibre 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.
Once the welcome wizard finishes, the main application window appears. First you notice is a central console with the main book list. You will see a search area above that and the tool bar. When an e-book reader is connected a Reader icon will appear next to the Books icon in the tool bar. Ccalibre 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..
The panel on right of the window shows details of the selected book. If you double click in the detail area, more information about the book is displayed. You can add books in to Clibre’s library by clicking the ‘Add books’ button in the tool bar at the top of the window. After importing the e-books it makes a copy of the book in the defined storage location at the time of setup. At the time of import calibre read the metadata from the e-book. You can also change the metadata for organizing the book by clicking ‘Edit metadata’ on the top tool bar.
If your eBook doesn’t have a cover you can download cover using ‘Download cover’ button. There are several eBook readers available. The first thing you need to do share eBooks with your device is to find out what formats your e-book reader supports. For example Kindle reader supports AZW, MOBI, PRC, AZW1, TPZ, PDF and TXT. The PRS line from Sony supports EPUB, LRF, LRX, RTF, PDF and TXT. You can find out more from the manufacturer’s website. Still confused, then here is the Calibre’s manual, read it or want to view a video tutorial then watch this demo tour (it can also be downloaded from the site). If you want to ass books to Kindle with Calibre a readymade tutorial is available in xtreemhost. As it provides the detailed instruction with enough images, I don’t want to peat the same here.
What is your opinion about Calibre? Is it worth mentioning ? Can you find any alternative solution better than Calibre?
