DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - MAR 2016
CALIBRE: A FREEWARE EBOOK FINDER,
READER, AND CONVERTER
©2016 Donald R. Snow
This page was last updated 2016-03-07
These Freeware Corner notes are published in
TAGGology, our Utah Valley Technology and
Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter. They
are also posted on my Freeware Corner Notes page
on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where you can just click on the links and where
they may have corrections or updates after the
printed version.
THE FREEWARE PROGRAM CALIBRE
CALIBRE is an open source program, and hence free,
available from https://calibre-ebook.com/ . It is an
ebook library manager, reader, converter, viewer,
and editor. It works with many different
ebook formats to catalog, manage, and use them,
and will convert ebook files between many
different formats. It also has features to
go to the Internet to find ebooks you want.
It is cross-platform so there are versions
for Windows, OS, and Linux. With ebooks in
CALIBRE you can transfer them to your mobile
device by connecting it to your computer and
waiting for a few seconds until CALIBRE detects
it, then highlight the ebook and click Send To
Device and it's transferred. If it isn't
already in the format needed by that device, it
will convert it to the needed format as it
transfers. It is then ready to read on your
mobile device. This note will consider a few
of CALIBRE's many features.
HELPS AND TUTORIALS
The author, Kovid Goyal, has a 10-minute tutorial
video at https://calibre-ebook.com/demo .
The same video is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vPXVc9mFJk .
The CALIBRE Users Manual is at http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/
with lots of information about the program and is
worthwhile browsing before you get too deep into
using it. The Users Manual can be downloaded
in pdf, epub, and Kindle (AZW3) formats. It
can be imported into CALIBRE and then the epub and
Kindle versions can be viewed immediately by
highlighting and clicking on the View button at
the top. More about importing ebooks into
CALIBRE below. The CALIBRE "About" menu,
https://calibre-ebook.com/about ,
lists categories of help and information.
Under Library Management it says that it
will manage your ebook collection, including
finding online information about your ebooks such
as author, complete title, publication date, etc.,
and will allow you to enter tags and comments of
your own. It has a search box to find all
your ebooks with any of the terms in the titles or
metadata or tags you select. Under E-book
conversion it can convert ebooks to and from a
huge number of formats, including all the major
ones. It allows changing font sizes and can
automatically detect or create chapter formats and
tables of content. CALIBRE allows you to
sync between any of your computing devices and can
change formats of the ebooks to suit the device
used. It has RSS feeds from several large
newspapers and magazines such as the New York
Times, Wall Street Journal, Time to download news
articles and save them as ebooks to be read on
your devices. It has a comprehensive ebook
viewer and allows you to access your ebook
collection using a browser on any computer or
device. This means that if you can get to
the Internet, you can browse, read, or download
your ebooks to or from any of your devices.
It has a built-in ebook editor for the two
most popular formats, epub and Kindle (AZW3).
A very helpful 14-minute YouTube tutorial by
the author describes some of this at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J1usDkKJKE .
HOW TO IMPORT YOUR EBOOKS IN CALIBRE
There are 4 panels or boxes for information; the
list of ebooks, their categories and tags that you
have added, their metadata, and a box to enter
terms for searching among your collection.
By clicking on a book title you see its
information and you can click to edit any of it.
At your request it will search the Internet
for information about the book and bring back
additional metadata and even book covers that have
been used on the hardcopies and you can select any
of this to have it included in the metadata.
The book titles can be sorted on the data in
any column, e.g., author, date published,
publisher, etc., by clicking on the column name,
and you can add additional columns that you might
want. CALIBRE makes copies of the ebooks you
import into it and puts them into the CALIBRE
folder you set up at the start, so your originals
remain untouched wherever they are on your
computer.
HOW TO FORM AN EBOOK FROM A PDF OR OTHER FORMAT
A 7-minute YouTube video discussing how to import
books into CALIBRE is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4HPdq__WCk&ebc=ANyPxKopIN7xEVckp-TDrM3h3JVRwaVcfwy6LzlBogSeryqiPGPWmw1bB6xbLwymXStRBfBE7X0Vmcir6uFcOglP4qdl21XoKA .
This one also includes how to import a pdf
into CALIBRE to form an ebook. This is one of the
uses that appeals to me since I deal with so many
pdf's and want to have them in other formats to
read on my smartphone and tablet. However,
the Users Manual mentions that pdf is the most
difficult format to convert from, so your mileage
may vary. For example, I have downloaded
from FamilySearch the large Erastus Snow biography
book that the Snow family commissioned Andrew Karl
Larson to write in 1971. It downloads from
FamilySearch Books as a pdf and FamilySearch
provides the pdf text layer with it, so it is
completely searchable. I imported it into
CALIBRE and requested that it go online and find a
better cover photo, a more complete name and
publisher's data, and the rest of the metadata,
which it did. Then I tried to convert the
whole thing into epub format for my smartphone and
tablet, but the final result was terrible.
The book is an 800-page volume and was pdf'd
two pages on one, so it has about 400 pdf images.
Because of its size it took nearly an hour
(53 minutes actually) to convert, but I'll have to
redo it with other settings. Before I run
the entire book again, I'll experiment with
smaller pdf's to see what the option settings need
to be. But even without converting, CALIBRE
found the complete metadata which I now have with
the pdf version. For converting from an rtf
or doc file, it seems to work great and give good
results easily. As a book is being converted
you see a small rotating circle at the bottom
right to show that it is working. Clicking
on the circle opens a menu that shows you the
progress of the conversion and how long it has
taken so far. For large ebooks I find it
helpful to keep the conversion menu open so I can
see that it is working and the progress it is
making. After converting a book you see the
new formats added to the metadata in the
information box on the right side of the screen.
Highlighting a book title and clicking on
the View button at the top opens it in the
built-in ebook reader. Clicking on the
format type in the metadata opens the file in your
default program for that format.
Double-clicking on a book title opens the
CALIBRE folder where the book, its metadata, and
other formats are stored, so you can click there
and open the copy in your default program.
If you always want epub's to be read with
the CALIBRE's built-in reader, set CALIBRE as the
default reader for epub's on your computer.
CATALOGING AND SEARCHING FEATURES
If you have many ebooks, or even just pdf's and
doc files you consider as books and articles, you
can import them into CALIBRE and set up the
metadata, author, titles, etc., and you will have
a catalog that is searchable for your collection.
They seem to be searchable in their imported
formats, even if not converted, but that may only
be if they were already searchable. I need
to experiment further with that. With the
title named appropriately you can have CALIBRE go
out to the Internet and find additional
information about it or related articles and
books. By entering an ISBN (International
Standard Book Number) you can have it search the
Internet for the full title, author, publication
data, etc., and form a catalog entry, even if you
don't have the ebook itself or if you only have a
hardcopy of it.
It also has a Get Books search feature where you
can enter a book, author, keywords, etc., and it
will search various websites on the Internet to
find titles that match that description, where
they are available, and the price. I tried
this by searching for As A Man Thinketh by James
Allen which has been out-of-print for many years.
It found many copies available to download,
including several that are free, so I downloaded a
free epub version from Amazon. I also tried
a keyword search for "Janes genealogy" (without
the quotes) and it found the book The Janes Family
which is a genealogy book that I have been using
for cousin-descendancy research on one of Erastus
Snow's wives' lines. I downloaded an epub
version that is completely searchable with the
built-in CALIBRE Viewer. The Get Books
search in CALIBRE looks at about 50 book websites,
many of them free, including the Internet Archive,
a great source of free genealogy books. But
it would also be nice to be able to add additional
sites such as FamilySearch Books to the search
list.
CALIBRE APPS FOR MOBILE DEVICES
In the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software) ,
and elsewhere, are lists of free and commercial
apps that work with CALIBRE on mobile devices to
allow you to access your CALIBRE library to update
your mobile device wirelessly on your home
network. That way you can download the books
you want from your library to your mobile device
for reading or to work with.
ADDITIONAL TUTORIALS AND REVIEWS ABOUT CALIBRE
Here are some additional tutorials, reviews, and
information about CALIBRE. Most review
websites rate it as the best free ebook reader and
manager.
Tutorials and user manual -- https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/tutorials.html
Review -- http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/calibre-hands-down-the-best-ebook-manager-available/
Goodreads review -- https://www.goodreads.com/ereaders/106-calibre
SnapFiles info and reviews -- http://www.snapfiles.com/get/calibre.html
PC World - info and review -- http://www.pcworld.com/article/232952/calibre.html
Gizmo's review - the best free ebook reader
-- http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-electronic-book-reader.htm
Software Informer review -- http://calibre.software.informer.com/
Tutorial -- http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-convert-an-e-book-using-calibre--mac-53028
CONCLUSIONS
We have only considered a few things CALIBRE can
do, but I selected it for this month's Freeware
Corner topic so I could learn about it myself.
After working with it, I think it will be
helpful, particularly for things like genealogy
books, family history instructions, and users
manuals, both on my main computer and to read on
my mobile devices. I hope you find it
helpful, too.=====================================