Calibre

Calibre is the most popular ebook manager. It is a free app that can help you manage your ebook collection and view, convert, edit, and catalogue ebooks in various formats.

Calibre was created by Dr. Kovid Goyal in 2006 but received its first user interface two years later, in 2008. It has always been offered as a free, open-source app, and after almost 18 years, it still is the best ebook manager. There are 12 main series with a total of 584 releases, which means almost one release every two weeks.

Calibre is truly cross-platform, and you can download a version for Windows (Portable is also included), macOS, and Linux. Although no versions are available, there are instructions on how to run it on Android and iOS using your browser.

Calibre Wizard

As soon as you download and attempt to install Calibre, you will be greeted by its "Welcome wizard." If you don't like the default path, you can specify the folder.

The next window will ask you about the ebook device you have. There are plenty of manufacturers, and Calibre supports most of them, such as the Amazon Kindle (all models), Android devices (phone/tablet/with Kindler reader), Apple devices (iPhones/iPads), Barnes and Noble (Nook devices), and many others, such as BeBook or SONY devices.

Important: The device support is incredible, but just in case you don't find yours, choose the first option from the "Manufacturers" - "Generic"—and select your device (Generic e-ink/Smartphone/ipad-like tablet). Calibre will most likely work with your device as well.

Click "Finish" to close the wizard and apply your settings. Demo videos and a user manual are also available.

Calibre interface

As soon as Calibre interface opens you might feel a little overwhelmed because of its many options but remember the almost 600 releases in 18 years.

Starting from the left side, you can:

• "Add books" (if you already have a few books on your computer, you can add them to Calibre).

• "Edit metadata" - once you added some books, if you notice any error or you wish to update/change the title, or author/cover this works great. If you have a large collection and don't have the time to edit each field, you can also download the metadata and covers. Calibre has the ability to connect to various stores (same as the "Get books" feature) and you can choose the most relevant result.

• "Convert books" (you can convert them from one ebook format to another - all major ebook formats are supported).

• "View" - (allows you to read a book on your computer, Calibre has a built-in viewer with support for all ebook formats).

• "Get books" - (if you want to buy an ebook - this button allows you to search for a certain book or author - which is a great feature because you can search for the cheapest price). It works as a multi-search on steroids allowing you to see all the stores selling that book. This feature alone is incredible because you don't have to go out and search on several websites. This functions works both as a built-in search engine and price aggregator/comparison. For example, if I search the "Title" of the book: Technical Analysis - I get results from various authors who wrote books that start with or contain these two words. If I refine the search and also add the "Author": John Murphy I can refine the search and obtain only the offers for this exact book but from different ebook stores. So if you're planning to buy this book you can save a lot of money as there is a significant difference in price.

Note: It is incredibly useful - the only thing you need to be aware of is about the Digital Rights Management (DRM) but the "Get books" function, allows you to separate the DRM ebooks. Dr. Kovid Goyal wrote a great explanation about it on his manual (DRM status of the books, which is whether they are in digitally encrypted or not)

• "Fetch News" - you can retrieve news by using this Calibre feature - currently it has 1076 sources and they are classified by the Language. For example "English (United Kingdom) has 35 sources such as BBC News, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror etc. You can retrieve such news from various websites like BBC or The New York Times and convert them into an ebook which you can then read on your reader.

• "Help" - button will send you towards Calibre Manual which is a great resource if you need any extra-information.

• "Preferences" - this allows you to customize the Calibre interface in many ways and you can even run again the "Welcome Wizard". I don't recommend using this option if you're a beginner and never used Calibre before. Try it later!

• "Remove books" - This is button is pretty explicit - you can remove books from your collection in multiple ways.

• "Calibre Library" - Also very useful as it allows you to manage the libraries, rename/remove, switch betwee them, make a backup of your Calibre data and restore them later for any reason - use the "Export/import all caliber data" - submenu function.

• "Save to disk" - this might be a little confusing if you are a beginner but "Save to Disk" is there to help you put a copy of your ebooks to another external device such as a hard drive. It can be used for backups of your existing library or devices that are not supported by Calibre. If you use a device (tablet/phone) that is not supported by Calibre you can use "Save to Disk" and point to your device (tablet/phone) memory card. There are some other use cases such as sharing a book with a friend over a USB stick.

• "Connect/share" - use it to connect to an external device or a folder etc.

• "Edit book" - use it to edit an existing book added to Calibre.

As you can see there are plenty of options and features. If your collection grows too big there are a few tips to make the browsing experience more personal.

Browse your collection by covers

Click the browse covers button located at the bottom right of the interface. This brings up a view of the books in your library. Scroll through this view - by cover.

Browse via the tag browser

Look on the left side of your main interface. As you can see there are plenty of options. You can browse by authors, languages, series, formats, publishers, ratings etc.

For example, if you choose the first option "Authors" it will show you the books restricted to that author. Assuming "John Murphy" has three books it will narrow my search to them.

The same for "Tags" you can restrict the search to that certain type: Love/War/Crime/Fiction etc.

Finally

Calibre is highly customizable. You can change the layout, toolbars, icons, and even the behavior of various functions. You can also use plugins to add new features. There is a large collection of user-contributed plugins available.

The "Help" button, which takes you to Calibre user manual is great and you will find detailed tutorials and tips on using every feature. There is also an active community of users and developers on the Calibre forum.

If you appreciate what Dr. Kovid Goyal has built over almost two decades please consider a donation for this incredible amount of work.

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