calibre portable: A great holiday gift

For a very long time calibre was tied up to the computer on which it was installed. Although the calibre content server allowed for access to the calibre library through a browser, it still required the computer on which calibre was installed to be on and accessible through the internet. But since version 8.5 a new portable calibre build was made available by Kovid for your convenience. This version of calibre can be put on to a USB stick and carried around with you. The USB stick would contain both the calibre installation as well as the calibre library. It can be then plugged into any windows computer and used to access the library on the stick with calibre.

To download calibre portable go to this page (You can also get here by going to the usual calibre download page here and then clicking on the usb stick icon shown in the figure below), where there is a link to download calibre portable. When you click on the link you will be prompted to save a zipped file. Once you have downloaded it and unzipped it transfer the contents to a USB stick. After you have done this the USB stick should contain a folder named "Calibre Portable". That folder should contain three sub-folders named "Calibre", "Calibre Library" and "Calibre Settings" and an executable file called "calibre-portable.exe".

To include your current calibre library in calibre portable just copy the entire contents of your current calibre library folder on your computer to the "Calibre Library" folder in the "Calibre Portable" folder on the USB stick. Now you are all set up, so safely remove the USB stick. To run calibre portable on another computer; this part only works on windows machines; plug the USB stick in to the windows computer and double-click on the calibre-portable.exe file mentioned above. calibre portable will open up and its ready for use. It has all the features any other calibre installation has. The only difference is it will always start up with the library called "Calibre Library" in the "Calibre Portable" folder. You can of course switch the library while using it but the next time you start calibre portable it wont remember the library switch and will again start up with the library called "Calibre Library" in the "Calibre Portable" folder. But you can manually switch the library each time.



calibre portable as a holiday gift:
calibre portable makes for a great personal and affordable christmas gift. Just go buy a USB stick, 1GB is quite enough for the purpose. Follow the steps outlined above to get calibre portable on to it. calibre portable is absolutely free. Then taking into consideration the likes and dislikes of the recipient there are many excellent places to get books to populate the library. For the classics there is Project Gutenberg, where a huge number of public domain ebooks are available as well formatted ebooks absolutely free. Then there are a number of sites that sell their ebooks DRM-free so your recipient can make the most of this gift. These sites include Baen for speculative fiction, Carina Press for romance, Smashwords, BeWrite Books,  XinXii and many more for a variety of genre.

Following image is courtesy  this site.

calibre maintains its own catalog of DRM-free ebooks from various sources and it is made available through its website Open Books. Open books now has a collection of over 2825 ebooks to choose from and features content from over 1095 authors and from 35 stores. Open books includes over 150 free ebooks and over a 1000 ebooks priced less than $3.00. Note that open books only catalogs DRM-free ebooks from various sites and provides links to them. Open Books was set up to promote authors of DRM free ebooks but Open Books does not sell any ebooks.

So get together some ebooks that your recipient would like and put it into the "Calibre Library" folder in the "Calibre Portable" folder. You can even use calibre to spruce up the metadata and add covers to make all the books look good. You can also add a couple of news magazines your recpient would be interested in using the calibre "Fetch News" feature for free. This makes a great gift, very personal, useful and can be treasured for a long time to come.

Use calibre portable to be a thoughtful Santa and Happy Holidays to all of you. The next calibre blog post will probably be early in the new year. I will be decreasing the frequency of the blog posts since a lot of the major topics have been covered. Please use the comments section to make requests for topics you would like covered.

calibre look and feel

calibre allows you to customize its Graphical User Interface (GUI) in many different ways so that you can have a GUI that suits your particular needs and tastes. In this blog post I will point out some useful tweaks that can be easily implemented and focus mainly on column coloring which is a useful way to identify certain books in your collection.

To adjust the look and feel of the calibre GUI click on Preferences in the main tool bar. In the new window that opens click on the Look and Feel icon in the first row under Interface. The following window appears.

Main Interface: The first tab in the above window is Main Interface. Here you can choose the user interface layout. By default this is set to Wide, in which case book details along with the cover appears in the rightmost column and the cover browser is above the list of books in the main calibre window. However this can be set to Narrow as shown in the figure above and then the book details with cover appear at the bottom and the cover browser on the right as shown in the figure below. You can click the little brown book icon at the bottom right corner of the screen to make the book details disappear altogther and then click the brown book icon again to make them reappear.

You can click the little curved arrow icon at the bottom right corner to mahe the cover browser disappear or reappear. The main interface tab also allows you to choose the icon sizes; small, medium or large as well as off (no icons, only the text under the icons is visible and can be clicked on).

Book Details: The next tab is book details. As shown in the figure below here you can choose what details are to be displayed in the book details section of the main window.

calibre's tag browser has been discussed in some detail in an earlier blog post.

Cover Browser: The fourth tab is the cover browser. This allows you to choose if you would like to have the cover browser displayed within the main calibre interface or in a separate window as shown in the figure below. You can also choose to have this window appear in full screen mode and toggle the full screen mode using the F11 key.

Column Coloring: As shown in the figure below the last tab under Look and Feel is column coloring. Here you can set up conditions to have certain entries in certain columns appear a certain color.

When you click on the Add Rule button the following window appears which allows you to set the entries in a column to be a particular color provided the entries of some other column satisfy some condition by taking certain values.

For example, when we add the following rule (make title blue when genre is news)

we see

but even if we hide the genre column we can still tell which titles belong to the news genre because they are in blue as shown below.

Consider another example where all the titles are made maroon when the genre is not specified as shown in the figure below. This kind of rule would be useful for you to identify books where metadata is incomplete when you are managing your library.

Hope you found these tips useful. See you again in about a week.

calibre custom columns

The main calibre window has a default set of columns that most people find useful in organising their ebook collection. These include Title, Author, Date, Size (of file in MB), Ratings, Tags , Series, Publisher and Published. Although these columns are sufficient for many users, most calibre features are made flexible to accommodate unusual needs and whims. The set of columns in the main window can be easily customized to include those columns that you find most useful. This demo video (the part between approximately 2 and 4 minutes of the 14 minute long video) illustrates how to manipulate the contents of columns as well as how to delete unwanted columns and add custom columns.


Manipulating the columns: Depending on your screen size only a few columns can be made visible so you will only want to include columns that are useful to you. If you need more columns than fit in your screen, you can move the most useful ones to the left so they are always visible. The order of the columns can be changed by left clicking on the column title and dragging it to the left or right of other column titles. As shown in the figure below you can right click on the column title to see ways in which you can manipulate it.

You can hide the column if it is not useful to you. You can also sort the entries in your library in ascending or descending order of the entries in a particular column like the rating; having the highest rated bpooks on top and the lowest rated at the bottom of your list. This can also be used to arrange books in alphabetical (or reverse alphabetical) order of author or title. You can also implement this by simply left clicking on the title of the column you want to sort by. If you want the order reversed just click on the column title again. If the entries are arranged in descending (ascending) order of the entries in a particular column a little grey downward (upward) pointing arrow appears next to the column title; like for the Rating column in the figure above.
For a text type column like author or title you can choose the the text to be left, right, or center aligned. You can manipulate the width of the columns by hovering the mouse between two column titles, once the left-right double sided arrow icon shows up you can drag it left or right to adjust the width.

 

Adding custom columns: To add a custom column click on Preferences in the main calibre tool bar and in the new window that opens click "Add your own columns" in the first row of icons under Interface. The following window appears.

The columns marked with an "x" are the visible columns in your main calibre window. You can select or unselect columns here to choose which ones should be visible. To add a column not on the list click the green "+" sign button on the right and the following window appears.

First you must choose the nature of entries in your custom column. The figure above shows the available data types including integer numbers, text, binary yes and no entries, dates, floating point numbers, etc. This blog post will illustrate examples of two different data type columns.

Example Binary Yes/No type column: Here we are going to create a binary Yes/No type column with column heading "Read", look up name "read" and column type Yes/No. The entry Yes in this column indicates the book is read and No indicates the book is not yet read. After filling the entries and clicking OK in the window in the above figure a new column appears with title "Read" in the main calibre window. By double clicking in the position of the entries of this column a drop down box opens that allows you to select "Yes" or "No" or leave it blank as shown in the figure below. So you can now mark the read status of the ebooks in you collection as done for a few in the figure below. A green tick indicates Yes or read and a white cross in a red circle indicates No or not read. You can also leave the read status blank.

Example Text with fixed set of permitted values type column: We will use this type of column to indicate the genre of the book. The figure below shows how we have chosen the values and corresponding colors for the entries in this column.

Setting the column up as shown above will create a column titled Genre with allowed entries Adventure, Mystery, Classic, Humour, Play and News as shown below. The adventure entry will always be in black the Mystery entry in blue etc.

 To fill the entries of this column as before double click on the column entry and a drop down box will show up with the allowed entries as shown in the figure above.  The figure above also shows a few books with this entry filled in and the News entry is in red while the Humour entry is in green. The colors will help quickly distinguish the different genre at a glance.

Hope you have fun playing around with various types of custom columns this week and find it useful. See you again in about a week.

plugins continued ...

The last blog post talked about plugins in general and illustrated the workings of the duplicate finder plugin in detail. Today I will point out a few other useful plugins. To obtain these plugins follow the same procedure as in the section "Getting the Find Duplicates plugin" in the previous blog post, but with the name of the plugin replaced with the one you are looking for. You may encounter a window in the process that asks you where you would like to install the plugin icon. In the following I have assumed that once you install the plugin the icon is available in the main calibre tool bar. If your screen size is small or if you have too many icons in the main tool bar not all of them will be visible. To see them all click on the little ">>" sign at the extreme right corner of the main tool bar.

Generate Cover Plugin: This plugin was developed by Grant Drake. Click here to go to the mobileread forum on this plugin. The plugin helps you generate custom covers for those books that you cant find a cover for via download metadata or if you simply don't like the available covers. It can also be used to make covers for personal documents like collections of letters or magazine articles or news downloads. The plugin uses available metadata to create the cover. The following figure shows the icon for the plugin you will see in your toolbar.

Select the ebook, you want to generate a cover for, in the main calibre window. Then click on the above icon. The following window appears.

The right side of the window shows the default cover the plugin generates. But this can be customized to your taste. The first tab in this window is "Settings". Below it you will see "Saved Settings" where there will be the "Default" option that will have all the settings of fonts, dimensions, images and contents of the cover shown on the right. You can either add a new setting or just change the default settings. To create a new setting click on the green "+" sign on the right hand top corner of "Saved Settings". A window will open that will allow you to choose a name for the setting. In this example I have chosen "antique" as you can see in the figure below. After "Saved Settings" is "Select Image". Here you can click on the green "+" sign to choose an image stored somewhere on your computer. The next tab "Fonts" allows you to choose the font sizes for the title, the author, the series and any other custom text you want to display on the cover. Under this tab you can also choose the background color, the border color, the text color, if the text should have a border and if it does what color the text border should be. The next tab is "Dimensions", under which you can choose the cover height and width. You can also choose margin sizes and border thickness of both image and cover. Finally the last tab is "Contents". Here you can choose what metadata to display in the "Field Order" section. In the following figure title, author and image are included. You can also choose the order in which these are displayed. For example in the figure below author is moved below image, while it is above image in the figure above. To do this I just selected "Author" under the "Field Order" and clicked the down green arrow to move it below "Image". Under this tab you can also add some custom text you would like displayed (I have not put any), but the "Custom Text" will have to be selected in the "Field Order" section.

Goodreads Sync: This plugin was developed by Grant Drake. Click here to go to the mobileread forum on this plugin. Some of you may have Goodreads accounts and you may want to synchronise your goodreads shelves with your calibre collection. This plugin helps with doing that. The figure below shows the icon of this plugin in the main tool bar along with available options.

The "Add to shelf" option allows you to add slected calibre ebooks to your "read", "currently-reading" and "to-read" shelves in your goodreads account. When I select the ebook "A Collection of Antiques" in my ebook collection and click add to shelf the following window appears.

Now just click "Add to shelf" to have it added to your appropriate goodreads shelf.

To use the second option "Sync from shelf", you need to first set it up. First click on the "Customize plugin" option. In the new window that opens, double click on an entry of interest under "Sync Actions" and  tell calibre what it should do with matching linked books. Now the synchronizing is set up and ready to use. Clkick on the "Sync from shelf" option under the goodreads icon. You may have some books on your goodreads shelves that you read paperback versions of and therefore do not have them in your calibre library. These books will be labelled as "No Calibre book linked" in the new window that opens. You can right click on the book and it will give you the option of adding an empty book to calibre with the metadata stored for your records. See figure below where I have added empty ebooks for the first two unlinked books.

Search the internet plugin: This plugin was developed by Grant Drake. Click here to go to the mobileread forum on this plugin.This plugin allows you to search the internetplugin in the main toolbar as well as the search options it allows for.

Some other plugins of interest may be Kindle Collections, Count pages and many more that are discussed here.

Hope you found this post useful. See you again in about a week.

calibre plugins: duplicate finder

The next few posts will deal with some of the more useful plugins in calibre. Functionality can be added to calibre via little code snippets called "plugins". The Calibre application itself comes with and makes extensive use of plugins developed by the Calibre development team. The Calibre plugins programming interface (API) makes it possible for users to write their own plugins, that offer additional features they find useful or override the default Calibre behaviour. For a full list of available calibre plugins click here. There is a help forum on mobile read dedicated to plugins. Please post here if you need help with developing or using a plugin.

Today we will discuss one popular plugin; "Find Duplicates". The goal of this plugin is to find duplicate entries in your collection so you can delete or merge them. This plugin was developed by Grant Drake. The help forum dedicated to this particular plugin can be found here.

Getting the Find Duplicates plugin: In the main calibre window click on Preferences and at the bottom left corner of the new window that opens click "Plugins". Now a window opens up with the list of available plugins. The "Find Duplicates" plugin is not on the default list so you will have to first get it. To do this, click on the "Get new plugins" button at the bottom left corner. A window with a list of plugins shows up. Choose the Find Duplicates plugin and click the install button on the bottom right corner. Restart calibre to see the "Find Duplicates" button in the main calibre tool bar.

Now click on "Find Duplicates" and you will see the following window:

Duplicates by author or title: The first choice in the duplicate search type as shown in the figure above is Title/Author. This allows you to locate duplicates by either author name or by title or both. You can set one column to ignore if you want only to use the other. The figure below shows the duplicates obtained in my collection by setting the "Title Matching" column to identical and the "Author Matching" column to ignore. I have also selected "Show all groups at once with highlighting".

The above figure shows all sets of books of the same title irrespective of the author names. Books of the same title are highlighted by the same color and grouped together. The two duplicate entries for say "The Columbus Dispatch" (highlighted in green) can be combined by selecting them both, clicking the little arrow next to "Edit Metadata" and selecting "Merge book records". Here you can choose to delete the extra files or keep them. Having done this, in the above figure, we are left with only one set of duplicates. 

Similar: The figure below shows the effect of setting the "Title Matching" column to identical and the "Author Matching" column to similar. Similar authors differ only in the punctuation or order of their names.

Soundex: The figure below shows the effect of setting the "Title Matching" column to identical and the "Author Matching" column to soundex. Soundex authors also differ only in the punctuation or order of their names but can also include books where the author names have minor spelling errors so they sound similar like "Austen" and "Austin" in the example below.

Fuzzy: The figure below shows the effect of etting the "Title Matching" column to identical and the "Author Matching" column to fuzzy. Fuzzy author matches compare using their surnames and only the first initial so they detect "Jane Austen" as well as "J. Austen" as shown below. This is the most general setting for finding duplicates.

Duplicates by ISBN or binary: You can look for duplicates by comparing ISBN. This will allow you to search for books with identical ISBN and the author and title matching becomes disabled. Similarly Binary searching allows you to look for duplicate occurances of a file even if the title and author are different provided the actual files are identical. As shown in figure below "P&P" by "Unknown" contains the same file as "Pride and Prejudice" by "Austen Jane", "Jane Austin" and "J. Austen". They all contain the same identical text (.txt) file. While "Pride and Prejudice" by "Jane Austen" contains a different epub file.

Hope you found this post useful. See you in about a week with details on some more plugins.

apology: no blog post this week

Dear Blog Readers,

I am sorry but Kovid and I moved into our own apartment this week in India, so we have been very busy setting it up. I regret to say there will be no blog post this week. I will try my best to be back on schedule next week. Also please bear with delays in response on various help forums, bug reports and some what irregular releases. We will try to be back on schedule for all of these as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience.

calibre resources

calibre is a free and open source community driven project. The software has many layers. The most commonly used functions like format conversion, metadata editing, news fetching etc have big clear icons and are very easy to use. Yet calibre is very powerful and offers a lot of flexibility by way of customization options through "Preferences". Some customization options were discussed in earlier blog posts and a lot more will be discussed in the future. For the more advanced users who know how to use regular expressions, create custom style sheets, and/or have some minimum knowledge of python, calibre offers even more flexibility. So calibre, although accessible to anyone for basic functionality, is a very versatile and powerful program.

For those who want to learn to exploit the more advanced or subtle features of calibre, a lot of help is available. I hope this article makes you aware of various resources associated with calibre so you can make the most of it.

Mobileread: calibre was originally developed with the support of the mobileread community. There is a dedicated calibre forum on this site.  Kovid himself as well as a lot of long time calibre users and developers are members of this forum. The members of this forum are very friendly and responsive to help requests and questions. Many of them have a lot of experience with using the various subtle features of calibre and some are technically proficient as well. The best way to contact Kovid is to post your questions here. Also if your questions are detailed or technical in nature, this is the best place to get help.


The calibre mobileread forum was divided into a number of sub forums a few months ago. The sub forums are (see figure below):

• Recipes: Here you can post requests for news sources. If you have made a news recipe for some source that is not already included in calibre we would appreciate it if you shared it here. Little contributions from a lot of people is what makes calibre such a versatile software. You should put your name in the author name section of the recipe for credit and it has to be licensed GPLv3. You can also post improvements to existing recipes here. If some existing recipe has stopped working make a post about it and the author of the recipe or somebody who has time will look into it and fix it as soon as possible.

• Devices: This sub forum deals with device specific issues. You can ask for support for new devices here. So if your question or problem concerns a particular device like the Kindle or iPhone, this is the place to post it. Those of you who use apple devices may want to check out this sticky.

• Catalogs: If you have questions about creating a catalog or list of ebooks in your calibre library, this is the place to post. calibre allows you to format your catalog and make it suitable to be printed as well as read on e-readers. There are a number of settings that you can find out about here.

• Conversion: calibre's conversion engine is sophisticated and has many features you may not have encountered yet. This is the place to get help on ways to customize the conversion process.

• Library Management: calibre allows you to play around with the ebooks metadata and present it in various ways. Any questions about downloading metadata, editing it, or exporting it can be asked here. You can also ask about the tag browser and managing and viewing your ebooks.

• Plugins: A lot of calibre's features are implemented by way of plugins. These are for less commonly used features that may be useful to specific subsections of people. This system makes calibre versatile, yet simple to use. This sub forum is for requesting new plugins or for getting help with existing plugins.

• Development: This is for those of you who want to work on calibre and add to its capabilities. You can get help from Kovid and other developers to smooth the way for you. calibre relies on inputs from various developers who have made small and large code contributions over the years. Some of them have found working on calibre to be a fulfilling experience. One thing to remember is that although you have full credit for your code  patch all code submitted to calibre must be licensed GPLv3 and cannot be proprietary.

The screen names of the calibre mobileread moderators are Starson17, kovidgoyal, Piper_, GRiker, theducks, Manichean, kiwidude, ldolse, dwanthny, chaley, user_none. Many of them have made code and recipe contributions to calibre in addition to the help they provide by way of answering questions.

Mobileread also has a number of other forums for various book devices and ebooks and authors that you may find useful.

Facebook: For those of you with facebook accounts, calibre has a facebook fanpage which we use as a help forum. You can post any questions concerns or feedback you have for calibre. It will be addressed there or you will be directed to a more appropriate place for help. The facebook fanpage is managed by Krittika Goyal (me). I answer most of the questions so please be patient with me because sometimes I may be busy and wont get to a question for a few days. Also I may not know the answer to some questions and it takes me a while to find out.



Twitter: For those of you who tweet, calibre has a twitter page called "calibreforum", run by Kovid's father Niraj Goyal. However if you have a detailed question opt for one of the other help forums because the 140 character limit on twitter makes answering difficult.

Help forum etiquette: The volunteers in the various calibre help forums are very friendly. They are happy to help with questions of all kinds from the trivial to the very technical. However please be polite in your questions and patient with those helping you. This is the quickest way to get your questions answered. Please do not vent your frustrations on those who are volunteering their time to help you.

Self help: calibre has been well documented both for the benifit of it's developers as well as it's users. There is an extensive FAQ as well as detailed user manual. When you encounter a problem first check out the FAQ. If your question has been adressed in the FAQ you have a quick solution and you will save some time for the volunteers at the help forums.  There are also a number of helpful demos and video tutorials to be found here. With time we hope this blog will also contain useful articles that you can use as a reference.

Open Books: calibre is an open source software and we firmly believe in the open source philosophy. Digital Rights Management (DRM), in addition to being a source of inconvenience to users, is one of the roadblocks to exploiting all the features of calibre. While we don't believe in breaking the law, we do believe it needs to be changed. In our efforts to eradicate DRM, we have started "Open Books", a catalog of DRM free ebooks. The idea is to give publicity to DRM free ebooks and their authors as well as to provide calibre users with a large list of DRM free ebooks to choose from so they can truly use calibre to it's full potential without breaking any laws.

Open Books, a site for easy browsing of DRM-free e-books that are not in the public domain. Most public domain ebooks are available DRM free at the Project Gutenberg site. Open Books is a compilation DRM free e-books from various sources linked to enable readers to browse and download them.
Open Books now lists over 2730 books from over 30 stores and features over 1020 authors.

I hope you will make use of these resources to improve your calibre experience and some day become an active member of the calibre community contributing help at one of these forums. This article has been a digression from our usual format of tips and tricks but I hope you find it useful. Next week we will be back with a more usual article. Have a good week!