Calibre
Key Details of Calibre
- Manage your eBook library and synchronize to reader devices
- Last updated on 04/07/20
- There have been 3 updates within the past 6 months
- The current version has 0 flags on VirusTotal
Editors’ Review
An all-in-one solution for handling your e-books, Calibre does for electronic books just what iTunes does for music, allowing you to manage your digital book collection through an intuitive albeit overcrowded interface while offering excellent support for converting books to different formats and editing their metadata. The only area where the software is lacking is its e-book reader; it doesn’t allow you to highlight or add notes to your books.
PROS
E-book converter: With Calibre you can take an e-book in one file format and convert it to another that is supported by your e-book reading device and, if you’re not happy with the result, you can tweak the conversion settings and even manually edit the book’s contents and formatting. It took us four seconds to convert a 40-page e-book from PDF to ePub.
E-book reader: The software comes with a basic e-book reader that supports fullscreen mode for distraction-free reading and that lets you choose your preferred method of pagination and gives you the ability to bookmark pages. Unfortunately, there is no way to annotate, highlight, or augment the book’s contents short of editing the book itself.
E-book organizer: Similar to iTunes, the app is much more than an e-book reader: it acts also as your e-book library, providing a central place where you can organize and sort your collection and allowing you to edit the book’s metadata and even pull information automatically from places like Google and Amazon. On the back-end, each author gets his or her own folder and each e-book gets its own subfolder, which contains all versions of the given book along with its metadata.
CONS
Crowded interface: There is a lot going on when you start using the app; just on the main screen there are three search fields and 15 buttons, many of which come with drop-down menus. Fortunately, primary functions are thoughtfully placed where you would expect them to be, so the learning curve is not too steep.
BOTTOM LINE
If you’re a serious e-book fan and read on more than one device, you should definitely give Calibre a try. Using this open-source software, you can have all the different versions of your books together in one library while keeping the actual files neatly organized in intelligently named folders.
WHAT’S NEW IN VERSION 4.13.0
New features:
- Edit book: When searching in normal mode, have spaces in the search expression match multiple spaces and line breaks in the text
- When running calibre-portable.exe popup a more useful error message if it is placed in a location with a too long path
- Edit book: Allow skipping confirmation dialog when marking non-first file as cover page
- Add a shortcut [Ctrl+Alt+p] to switch to the previously opened library.
Bug fixes:
- Viewer: Fix searching in flow mode not scrolling to display the search results
- Viewer search: Fix jumping to next match sometimes selecting previous match if the searched for expression occurs with identical context in multiple places
- Viewer: Ensure there is no bleed between pages when using single page per screen
- Fix shift click not working reliably in the book list
- Fix edit open with applications not working from files browser in editor
- MOBI Input: Upshift non-animated GIF to PNG as it is a more widely supported format
- MOBI Input: Dont auto-convert images in PNG/GIF formats to JPEG
- MOBI Output: Improve conversion of PNG images with transparency to GIF
- Check Book: Do not fail if non-UTF-8 stylesheets are present in the book
- Viewer: Maximum font size for margin text should be the body font size not hardcoded to 12px
- PDF Output: Ignore glyph size mismatches when merging fonts for TTF.
New news sources:
- Istorias and Sardinia Post by tzium
Improved news sources:
- Forbes
- LA Times
- Glasgow Herald
- Spectator Magazine
- Newsweek