Calibre Quick Start Guide

By: John Schember

Introduction

Calibre is an open source ebook management tool. Simply put calibre allows you to organize your e-book collection, convert e-books to various formats and interact with your e-book reader all in an intuitive and friendly manner. It is compatible with Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, and 7 as well as Apple's OS X (Intel only) and various flavors of Linux. It was created by Kovid Goyal who still leads it's development and steers the direction of the project. In addition to Kovid a number people, such as myself, around the world contribute to the application.

The purpose of calibre is to make it easy to manage large and small collections of e-books. It does this in a few ways. It provides a means to organize, and search your collection so you can find the book you want when you need it. It can convert many e-book formants into other e-book formats. Also, there is tight integration with a number popular and obscure e-book readers.

The project is broken down into a few basic components. The graphical user interface (GUI), a number of command line tools, and an e-book reading application. However, all of the functionality is accessible though the GUI. These other tools are just another way to use the application. For instance, the command line tools are used by the ManyBooks service to convert on an as needed basis. The focus of this article will be the GUI and various tasks users often perform.

Installing

The installation processes starts with you downloading the installer for your operating system. Run the installer and when it finishes launch calibre. You will now be greeted with the welcome wizard, which will help you configure parts of the application. The first page allows you to change the location calibre stores your e-books. If this is your first time using calibre, this should not be an existing e-book collection. Calibre manages the e-books you give it in it's own way. Think of this directory as a black box. You don't do anything with it. Let calibre do the work for you. If you have used calibre in the past and are installing a new version or have moved your library then it's okay to point it at an existing calibre library.

Click next to be presented with an e-book reader selection. If you're device is not listed or if you intend to use more than one e-book reader don't panic. Just choose “default” because this selection does not influence device detection. It mainly provides some tuning during conversion for formats that require fixed sizes. Click next and then finish. Congratulations, you've successfully installed and configured calibre. If at any time you want to run the welcome wizard again, click the downward facing arrow to the right of “Preferences” in the top tool bar and select “Run welcome wizard”.

The Main Library Window aka The GUI

Once the welcome wizard finishes you will be presented with the main application window. There are a few components I would like to bring to your attention. The central piece is the main book list. This takes up the majority of the window and displays the books in a table. Right above it you will see the search area (more on this later) and above that a white box with the word Library. When you plug in a supported e-book reader an entry for it will appear next to Library in that white box. You can switch between looking at the books on the reader and in your Library by clicking on these items.

The bar across the bottom of the window shows details about the selected book and displays the cover. If you click anywhere in the detail area (including on the book cover) another window will open that gives more information about the book.

Also along the bottom bar to the right of the detail area are a few icons. These icons are really buttons. The first one opens the cover flow view. Cover flow, for people who have never used an Apple product, displays the book covers in a fashion similar to how a juke box lays out albums. The selected book has the cover facing you while the rest face sideways. You can navigate though the book covers with the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard.

The next icon looks like a dog tag and activates the tag browser. More on this later. Last is one of the most important pieces of the interface. The circle lines that say jobs at the bottom. Whenever calibre is working on something (conversion, sending books to the reader, downloading news, excreta) this will spin and the number next to jobs will change to the number of jobs (activities) calibre is working on. You can click on it to open the jobs dialog which will give you more information about what is happening.

Tasks

Remember the main focus of calibre is meant to help you manage your e-book collection. Lets take a look at a few tasks that represent common activities: organizing, conversion, news downloading, dealing with devices and viewing e-books.

Task 1: Organizing

The first part of organizing is getting your e-books into calibre. Click the “Add books” button on the top tool bar and select the e-books you would like calibre to manage. When calibre imports your e-books it makes a copy of the book and stores it in the location that was set for it's library. Once you've added your books calibre doesn't care what you do with the originals.

When adding, calibre tries to read the metadata from the e-book. Metadata is information about the book that is stored within the e-book itself. Different formats support different information. Often the information is incomplete or just plain wrong. Don't worry it is very easy to fix this. Click the book whose metadata you want to change so that it is selected. Then click the “Edit meta information” button on the top tool bar next to the “Add books” button. The metadata editor will open. The easy way to get the metadata correct is to either fill in the tile and author or the isbn (it's better to use the isbn for the paper or hard back version not the e-book version) and click the “Fetch metadata from server” button at the bottom of the window. Calibre will open another window with possible matches for the information entered. If there is more than one match select the entry that looks best. A whole lot of information should be filled in now. To the right of the “Fetch metadata from server” button is the “Download cover” button. If the book doesn't have a cover showing above this button or if you don't like the cover click it to have calibre download one from the internet.

Now that you have you're books in calibre there are a few different ways to find the book you are looking for. Searching is one of the fastest ways. Above the library table there is a search bar. Think of it like having Google built into calibre. Just type in what you are looking for. Be it author, title, series, or something else and watch as books that don't match disappear. Don't worry they are still in calibre they just aren't shown if they don't match the search terms.

Another way calibre allows you to find a particular book is by using the tag browser that was mentioned earlier. When activated a list will appear to the left of the library. It allows for you to select specific information that you want shown in the library or that you don't want shown in the library. Author, series, publisher, tags and news can all be shown or hidden. You might notice that as you enable items in the tag browser search queries are added to the search bar. This is because the tag browser is really just an easy way to create search queries. You could type the query directly into the search bar and see the same result but the tag browser is often easier to use.

Task 2: Conversion

This is arguably the most useful feature calibre offers and it is also the most complex. E-book readers are becoming more and more common. Two of the most popular today are the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader line. Unfortunately the two different brands don’t read the same kinds of e-books. This mess is like the one in the music world where you might find such formats as WMA, MP3, and AAC. In e-books, the same confusion exists—the Tower of eBabel, as some call it.

2.1: Background

If you are only buying from the store designed for your reader—for example, Amazon’s Kindle Store or Sony’s Reader Store—you don’t need to worry about any of this. But there are a very good reasons why you should know about the major formats, what you reader supports and how to convert between formats.

Many Web sites offer legal and often free books. Everything from public domain books to well known and less known authors. Also, you can shop for the best prices at a number of small independent e-book stores.

Often you can download these e-books in a variety of formats, but you won’t always find them in the format your e-book reader supports. Here is where conversion comes in. There is a very good chance that you will be able to take an e-book and convert it to a format your reader supports, at least if the book doesn’t use Digital Rights Management (DRM), anti-copying technology.

In the rest of the conversion section I will focus on (1) the Kindle which supports the Mobipocket format, aka MOBI, and (2) the Sony Reader line (the PRS machines like the PRS-600), which supports the EPUB format. Conversely, the Kindle does not support the EPUB format, and the Sony line does not support the Mobipocket format. The Nook, the new reader from Barnes and Noble, can read EPUB, the same format as the Sony although there are now some catches with DRMed books.

2.2: Why are there different e-book formats?

Just why do so many different formats exist? Advances in technology? In fact, that’s a major reason. Just like the transition from VHS to DVD and now to Blu-Ray, older formats which were created to solve the problems faced at that time are replaced with newer formats that better meet need of today. A great example of this is the old books people read back in the 90’s on their PDAs. Those devices were very limited in what they could display. E-readers today are much more advanced. They can display large images, and handle advanced formatting. These newer devices needed formats that can provide these features.

Another major reason is exclusivity. Many vendors like to have and control their own formats so they are not dependent on outside companies. They also have the benefit of being able to license their format for use by others. This also allows them to lock users into their platform. E-books, being relatively new, are undergoing the same growing pains that Betamax and VHS or HD-DVD and Blu-Ray went though. The EPUB format, from the International Digital Publishing Forum, is an industry standard intended to reduce these problems.

2.3: Conversion basics

The first thing you need to do is find out what formats your e-book reader supports. The Kindle supports AZW, MOBI, PRC, AZW1, TPZ, TXT. The PRS line from Sony supports EPUB, LRF, LRX, RTF, PDF, TXT. Don’t let this scare or confuse you; all of the major e-book readers support multiple formats. Even with this jumble of letters, you only need to worry about the preferred format for the reader. This special format is the one that gives the best formatting. As I mentioned earlier for the Kindle, you really only need to worry about Mobipocket (MOBI), and for the Sony Reader line (PRS) you only need to worry about EPUB (same for the Nook). However, it is a good idea to be aware of all of the supported formats because it wouldn’t make sense to convert an AZW to MOBI for reading on your Kindle because the Kindle can already read AZW books. Conversion is only necessary to fill in the gaps. Meaning you want to read an EPUB file on your Kindle so you convert it to MOBI.

Using Calibre to convert is very easy. Plug in your e-book reader. Open Calibre and select your book the library list. By now Calibe should have detected your e-book reader. Click “Send to device” in middle of the top tool bar. Calibre is smart enough to know if the book is in a format supported by your reader. If it’s not, it will ask you if you want to auto convert it. Say yes, and it will take care of the conversion and put the book on your reader. That’s all there is to it. Doing it is easier than it sounds because all you need to do is select the book you want on your device and clicking “Send to device.” Calibre worries about the formats and converting for you.

2.4: More robust conversion

Auto conversion is the easiest way to go and in most cases will be all you need to do. However, there are a few options that allow control over conversion process. Click the “Convert E-books” button in the top tool bar. This screen looks very complicated but realize that the majority of options here are best left alone. Most of the options only need to be changed on a are per book and in special cases basis. There is one option that is very important and may need to be changed. At the top right there is a drop down for “Output format.” This control what format the conversion will result in. Kindle owners will want to select MOBI and Sony and Nook owners will want to use EPUB.

In the conversion dialog there are a few things to check before clicking “OK” which begins the conversion. The first thing you need to do is double check the metadata and make changes if necessary. Click on “Look & Feel” on the left and side. The “Remove spacing between paragraphs” option is a popular option. It will cause paragraphs to be formatted with a indent at the beginning instead of separating them with a blank line. Basically it makes the result look more like a printed book than the default which looks more like a web page.

Next click “Page Setup” which is the first item under “Look & Feel”. When you installed Calibre if you didn’t select your device in the welcome wizard you should select it here. The input and output profiles provide specialized turning for the specified device. Be aware that not all formats are affected by the profile.

That’s it for the basic conversion options. Every option in the conversion dialog has a description of what it does when you put the mouse over it. Look though the options and play with them to produce output that suits your taste.

Click “OK”, the dialog will close and the conversion will begin. Look at the bottom right of the screen at the “Jobs” indicator. When it spins that means Calibre is working. Clicking it will show what is being worked on.

When the conversion is finished the jobs count will drop to zero and the indicator will stop spinning (unless there are more jobs pending). Once the conversion is finished click the downward facing arrow to the right of the “Send to device” button. Select the one of the “Send specific format” options (main memory is usually the best choice). A dialog will appear asking you which format you want to send. Select the format you just converted the book to.

2.5: Limitations of conversion

Converting between e-book formats does have some limitations. One limitation using a tool like Calibre is the inability to edit the book before conversion. Calibre simply moves the content and formatting from one format to another. It is not a editing tool. If there are typos in the text, you will need to use a dedicated editing tool such as Sigil or Book Designer.

Another issue that often arises when converting is missing formatting. Not all e-book formats support the same formatting so it can be lost when converting to a format that supports limited or no formatting. Things like bold and italics will be preserved in most cases but complex page layout may not be. MOBI and EPUB both support complex formatting so you won’t have to worry about this when using these formats.

Finally converting will only shift what the input provides into another format. It will not add anything that was not already in the input to the output. So if the input is poorly formatted, the output will be too.

2.6: PDBs they are not all created equal

This is of particular importance to Barnes and Noble Nook owners. Barnes and Noble sells books in the PDB format (along with EPUB) and as you might expect it is supported by the Nook.

PDB is not really an e-book format. It is a container for e-book formats. Think of it like a zip file. You put other files into a zip file so you only have to worry about having one file instead of many. That is what PDB essentially does for e-books. There are 28 e-book formats that can be put into the PDB container that I know of.

An e-book reader like the Nook which supports PDB does not support all the possible formats that can be within a PDB file. The two most common formats found in PDB files are PalmDoc (also known as textread and Aportis) and eReader. PalmDoc does not support any formatting or images. eReader supports basic formatting and 8-bit images. The PDB files sold by Barnes and Noble are in the eReader format.

2.7: DRM the bane of conversion

DRM, as noted, stands for Digital Rights Management. Let’s think about physical books for a moment. With a physical book, you can lend, and sell that book. But when you do either, you have to go without the book. With e-books, that is not the case. E-books are just files on the computer and they can be copied any number of times and given away any number of times. DRM is designed and was created to prevent unlimited copying of an electronic file (although some e-book users would also note that it is a handy way for companies to try to lock them into specific brands).

DRM affords different books various rights as determined by the publisher and seller. Some can be read on more than one device. Some will allow for partial copying and printing. Simply put, DRM restricts what you can do with an e-book.

Any e-book with DRM cannot be converted to a different format. This is because conversion itself would require the removal of the DRM. Not all e-book formats support DRM and different e-book formats support different sets of privileges granted by the DRM. There is no way to move the DRM with the content when converting; thus DRM prevents conversion.

You might be tempted to look for some way to remove DRM from e-books in order to facilitate conversion. A word of warning about doing this: In the USA there is a law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This law makes it illegal to circumvent a copy protection system (DRM). It also makes it illegal to produce tools, distribute tools, and aid in circumvention. Not everyone lives in the USA, but many countries have similar laws. Check your local laws and realize that even though you my may only want to read an EPUB book you’ve legally purchased on your Kindle, it may not be legal to do so. If you’re don’t like this silliness—and I don’t—then speak up to whoever in your country makes the relevant laws.

Task 3: Downloading News

This is an often over looked feature especially by people who own Amazon's Kindle. Integrated into calibre is the ability to download news from a variety of sources. As of this writing 337 different sources from all over the world, including free and paid content is supported. The real advantage of having calibre manage your news subscriptions is, once downloaded the content will be formatted for reading on an e-book reader. However, you can still read the news right on your computer. If you're going to be reading the downloaded news on an e-book reader it's best to go into “Preferences” and under the general options set the “Preferred output format” to the preferred format for you're e-book reader. This would be MOBI for Kindle, and EPUB for the Sony Readers as well as the Nook.

Click the “Fetch news” button in the middle of the top tool bar to open the news download scheduler. With 337 sources the best thing to do is find the ones you like and set them to automatically download at a time convenient for you. If you don't want to schedule automatic downloads and would rather handle it manually, you can. Just use the “Download now” button that appears when you have selected a news source.

In the news download scheduler expand the categories that are relevant to you (the ones in languages you can read) by clicking the little arrows next to the bold text. Look thought the items and when you find one you like select it and check the “Schedule for download” check box on the right. You can also set how often and when you want it to download. Once downloaded it will be turned into an e-book.

By default when you attach your e-book reader calibre will automatically transfer the downloaded news to the device. If you don't want this to happened and would rather transfer manually go into the “Preferences”, select the interface category and uncheck “Automatically send downloaded news to ebook reader”. Also, if you do want it send to the reader automatically it might be a good idea to check the “Delete news from library when automatically sent to reader” option in “Preferences”, interface.

Task 4: Interacting with E-book readers

In my mind the reason people start reading e-books as opposed to physical books is due to e-book readers. That's precisely why I started collecting e-books. Calibre has full support for a number e-book readers both popular and obscure such as the Kindle, Sony Reader, Nook, and Cybook Gen 3. All total calibre has integration with over 30 e-book readers. Yep, over 30. Everything from eInk devices like those I just mentioned to cell phones, and internet tablets.

4.1: Putting book on your reader

All you need to do is plug in your e-book reader. If it's one calibre has support for an icon will appear next to the library in the white box above the search area. Clicking the icon will switch the main book list from your library to showing a list of books on the device. If you want to send a book to the device just switch back to your library, select the book and click “Send to device” in the top tool bar. It really is that simple. Another often used feature is to select a book on the device and click the “Remove books” button in the top tool bar. This does exactly what it says, it deletes the book from the device.

Once you've finished making changes to the e-books stored on your device put your mouse over the “Main Memory” icon for the device. You should be seeing an eject icon next to the mouse pointer. Clicking the eject button doesn't do anything tricky, it ejects it from the computer. No need to go to “Safely remove hardware” in Windows, calibre has this built in through this button.

4.2: E-book reader optional configuration

There are a number of different ways you can configure calibre to interact with your device but I'm only going to touch on the two most common. Open up “Preferences”, go to Add/Save and select the “Sending to device” tab. Here you can customize the save template. If you have experience with music tagging programs where you can create custom save locations this should look very familiar. The save template can be customized to change where e-books are saved on your device. If you have a device like the Kindle or Sony Reader this isn't very useful and can safely be left with the default. If you have a device, like the Cybook Gen 3, that supports folders this is extremely useful. There are a number of variables (descriptions under the template) which can be used to change where the books are saved. Lets look at a basic example, “favorites/{title} – {authors}”. {title} will be replaced with the title of the book, {authors} will be replaced with it's author and the book will be put into the favorites folder. All of the replacements that can be make in the save template are listed with descriptions under the entry area.

Another useful configuration change is disabling and reorganizing the supported formats. Lets use the Cybook Gen 3 (my primary reader) again as an example. In “Preferences”, Plugins, Device Interface plugins, select the Cybook Gen 3 Device Interface and click customize plugin. The first thing in the configuration for the device is the format list. Here you can uncheck formats you don't want sent to your e-book reader. Also, you can reorder the formats. The format at the top of the list will be the one used for automatic conversion when sending an e-book in an unsupported (or unchecked) format to the device.

Task 5: The E-book Viewer

I've hinted that calibre has the ability to view e-books too. All you need to do is select the e-book you want to read and click the “View” button in the top tool bar to have calibre open the e-book in it's e-book viewer. The viewer supports everything you might expect such as bookmarks, and navigating via the table of contents (if the e-book has one). One unfortunate limitation of the viewer shares with the conversion process is it cannot read books that have DRM.

Where to get help

The first place you should look is the “Preferences”. Funny as it may sound all of the options have clear descriptions and there a lot of options. If you want to change something about calibre there may already be an option for it. It's also a good idea to familiarize yourself with the preferences because parts of it (conversion) are just defaults and will be presented to you at different times for fine turning on a per e-book basis.

The next place to look is the online user manual. There is a link in the main window right next to the big red heart for easy access. If you're curious about the big red heart, click it. There is a wealth of information in the user manual including tips and common problems (solutions provided of course).

Finally, there is the calibre forum on Mobileread. This is the official help forum for calibre. There are a number of knowledgeable users who answer questions. Also, Kovid and myself actively participate in helping new and veteran users. If you have a question or need help this is the best place to go. If you've found a bug or would like to request a new feature it's okay to ask about it on the forum but it's also a good idea to submit it to the projects bug/issue tracking system. Forum posts tend to get lost over time while the tracking system makes it easy to see what needs fixing or worked on.