The Calibre Blog
Tutorials, information and more
eReader vs Tablets (Comparison Guide)
If you are in the market for a new e-reader or tablet, you may be asking yourself, what the difference is between them. eReaders are geared toward those who want to read books or magazines on a portable device. However, tablets allow you to use different apps to watch video content, do some work, listenContinue reading “eReader vs Tablets (Comparison Guide)”
Read Comics Online Free
The comic book industry has seen a huge surge of new fans with the increase in feature films revolving around the Marvel and DC comics movies. While traditional comic books are fun to read and collect, it can get pretty expensive. Most comic books start around $4-$6 each, with special editions and releases netting moreContinue reading “Read Comics Online Free”
Read Manga Online
Reading Manga Online just got easier! Manga is one of the world’s most popular forms of graphic novels or Comic Books. It was originally created in Japan but now stretches its tentacles far and wide across the planet. Manga covers almost any genre you can possibly imagine which gives it the ability to capture everyContinue reading “Read Manga Online”
Welcome to the new Calibre Blog
Hi Everyone, I’m Sam and I’m a huge fan of Calibre and I’m so happy that I get to take this opportunity to expand the Calibre Blog. We are going to be doing things a bit differently than they were done in the past. Previous posts were mostly tutorials but we want to accomplish aContinue reading “Welcome to the new Calibre Blog”
welcome to calibre’s blog (Old Post)
Welcome to calibre’s blog on tips and tricks, that make calibre an indispensable tool to all you enthusiastic ebook users. This blog will have regular (of the order of weekly) posts on various obscure and not so obscure features of calibre with details on how and where to use them. The posts will sometimes focus on Open Books,Continue reading “welcome to calibre’s blog (Old Post)”
the calibre viewer
Today we explore the many features of calibres ebook viewer. calibre’s ebook viewer allows you to view ebooks in all of the 22 input formats that calibre supports conversion from. These include CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, EPUB, FB2, HTML, HTMLZ, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ, andContinue reading “the calibre viewer”
all about “Get Books”
“Get Books” allows you to search for ebooks online, that you can thenpurchase/download to your calibre library. It can simultaneously search over 40 different online stores for books by title and author. The returned list of matches can be sorted by price, allowing you to find the cheapest edition of the book. To access “GetContinue reading “all about “Get Books””
Custom news fetching
The “Fetch News” feature in calibre is very powerful and versatile. It has over a 1000 built in news recipes, spanning over 30 languages and 50 countries, for websites of newspapers, magazines and blogs. At the click of a few buttons you can set up regular downloads of the news source of your choice. NotContinue reading “Custom news fetching”
ebook format conversion
A lot of you have used calibre to convert your ebooks between different formats. The calibre conversion system is very sophisticated and has many subtleties. Today I will discuss just a few features that are often overlooked and yet a lot of you may find very useful. The following is the “Convert books” icon inContinue reading “ebook format conversion”
calibre’s tag browser
The calibre tag browser is a versatile and powerful tool with some obvious and many obscure but extremely useful features. Today I will discuss some of these features. The figure on the left below shows the part of the main calibre window which is the “tag browser”. One of the more obscure features I willContinue reading “calibre’s tag browser”
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 throughContinue reading “calibre resources”
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 forContinue reading “calibre plugins: duplicate finder”
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 nameContinue reading “plugins continued …”
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 needsContinue reading “calibre custom columns”
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 wayContinue reading “calibre look and feel”
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 aContinue reading “calibre portable: A great holiday gift”
calibre 0.9.0 is here!
The long awaited calibre 0.9.0 is here! This is the link to the page documenting all the improvements since 0.8.0. Some of the important improvements I will discuss here at length are: Improved support for android phones and tablets MTP support Calibre Companion Viewer Display of mathematics in e-books Page mode Table of contents panel now tracks the currentContinue reading “calibre 0.9.0 is here!”
this is the way to polish your e-books
HiIt has been a while but again calibre has some great new features. So let us take a look at them. Here I will discuss “Polish Ebooks” introduced in 0.9.23 and next time “Edit TOC” introduced in 0.9.25. Note that polishing is only supported for books in AZW3 and EPUB formats. Hopefully any bugs that wereContinue reading “this is the way to polish your e-books”
magic with TOC: edit or create a TOC for your documents or ebooks
Hope you enjoyed polishing and shining your e-books. Now let’s look at more heavy duty stuff. The last post already detailed how you can get the “Edit TOC” button on the main toolbar. It is the rightmost button on the main toolbar in the figure below. Create TOC:If you have an e-book without a Table of Contents (TOC), Continue reading “magic with TOC: edit or create a TOC for your documents or ebooks”
ebooks of web content and virtual libraries
This blog post will discuss a class of plugins that allow you to make ebooks of content from the web, like chosen Wikipedia pages and recipe pages from sites like cooks.com, bigoven.com, foodnetwork and allrecipes as well as the calibre virtual libraries feature. make your own ebooks from web content The internet makes a lot of information available at your fingertips. But sometimes it isContinue reading “ebooks of web content and virtual libraries”
Here it is calibre 1.0 in all it’s glory
calibre 1.0 has just been released. It took us only 7 years to get here ;). Yes, we are only a little more than 2 months away from calibre’s 7th birthday. This is a big moment, so allow us to indulge in a few lines of nostalgia before we go into all the cool stuff thatContinue reading “Here it is calibre 1.0 in all it’s glory”
calibre’s ebook editor
calibre has been an excellent ebook managing and viewing software for sometime now. But we intend to live up to our slogan, making calibre the “one stop solution to all your ebook needs”. To this end we have recently (since calibre 1.15) added ebook editing capabilities for ebooks in EPUB and AZW3 formats. The editorContinue reading “calibre’s ebook editor”
Announcing calibre 2.0
It has been about a year from our last big release, so it is time for another one. calibre 2.0 was released today. Since calibre 1.0 most of the development has focused on the e-book editor. calibre aspires to be the one stop solution to all your ebook needs. That is what we say onContinue reading “Announcing calibre 2.0”
calibre cover designs
Bored of all your default covers looking like this: Since calibre 2.4, released on 25 September 2014, calibre has added a selection of different cover designs with customizable fonts, font sizes and color schemes. Here are the set of default covers: There are 4 color scheme choices, namely: grass, silver, earth and water as youContinue reading “calibre cover designs”
calibre icon themes
Over the years we have had some complaints about calibre’s appearance. We have had just as many appreciative emails from people loving the look. While some people find large clear icons easy to use, other feel it makes the interface clunky. The problem with choosing a particular look is that you can never make allContinue reading “calibre icon themes”
Is calibre Safe? All You Need to Know
Broken passwords, leaked photos, stolen credit card numbers. Have you been affected by at least one of these crimes? I bet you did, even if you didn’t realize that. You and I both give out our private information like it’s candy. And then we must trust this data stays safe. But – as you probablyContinue reading “Is calibre Safe? All You Need to Know”
Managing Your Kindle Library Is Easy With calibre
Are you tired of spending so much time looking for your eBooks on an ugly Amazon page? Did you download an eBook from another website, but it’s an epub and you can’t easily send it to your Kindle? Well, let me help you with that.Kindle devices are incredibly popular and sometimes they’re used to back up arguments thatContinue reading “Managing Your Kindle Library Is Easy With calibre”
How to Backup, Move and Export Your Library in Calibre
How to Backup, Move and Export Your Library in Calibre Have you ever lost your files? Crashing hard drives and accidental deletions teach us that there are two kinds of people: those who backup their files and those that will start to backup their files. Thankfully, calibre comes with tools to do just that – quicklyContinue reading “How to Backup, Move and Export Your Library in Calibre”