calibre e-book management software

December 12, 2009 4:16 PM

calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books.

DISCLAIMER: I've never used this. I don't even have an e-book. But it seemed like the kind of thing that I would have been glad to discover if I did have e-books. At any rate, the commenters at the Daily Kos diary where I came across it seemed to like it. So I'm just tossing this out there in case anyone's interested. Proceed at your own risk.

posted by Joe Beese (28 comments total)

This doesn't really seem like a proper MeFi post - but I love calibre, I use the crap out of it to convert stuff for my Kindle.
posted by mrbill at 4:20 PM on December 12, 2009

The mediocre ratings for the Nook are breaking my heart :(
posted by boo_radley at 4:23 PM on December 12, 2009

mrbill: "This doesn't really seem like a proper MeFi post..."

It's certainly not my usual thing. But I figure if it's free and open-source, at least it's not Pepsi Blue.
posted by Joe Beese at 4:24 PM on December 12, 2009

I use Calibre to load free eBooks onto my Sony PRS-505 via my Mac. It's pretty crap - but there aren't really any alternatives out there. Still, it's under active development, and is improving.
posted by Mwongozi at 4:32 PM on December 12, 2009

Calibre's pretty crappy, but as Mwongozi said, there's not much else out there that does the same.

Windows software for managing ebook libraries and reading the books themselves is in a pretty depressingly bad state, actually. The market is wide open for someone with coding and design skills to step up and fill the niche -- I wish someone would. Hell, as someone who's read longform writing exclusively on screens for 10 years now, I would, if I has the skills.

In terms of readers themselves, the best out there is ubook in terms of functionality, but my god, the interface is a trainwreck. The best thing I can say about is that you get used to it, eventually.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:38 PM on December 12, 2009

Maybe Zotero instead?
posted by The White Hat at 4:46 PM on December 12, 2009

Calibre is butt-ugly on a Mac, but it does a decent job of converting weirdo book formats that nothing else on a Mac will touch into something readable on my ancient Handspring Visor (which is still my favourite gadget for reading in bed with the lights out). I rely pretty heavily on Calibre and Missing Sync for Palm OS...I'd be impossibly obsolete otherwise.

If only my Tandy Model 100 had a backlight...
posted by chrisgregory at 4:52 PM on December 12, 2009

The biggest problem with calibre (for me) is that it can't convert two column PDFs into one-column text properly. The developer seems pretty resigned to fixing this problem, so my solution (on Linux) is pdftotext for my PDFs, and Instapaper's new download-as-epub feature, all thrown into FBreader on my Nokia N810.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 5:02 PM on December 12, 2009

Calibre is a serious PITA but it does fill a niche for ebook readers. It frequently only converts half of a pdf file but it removes headers and footers and unwraps lines when it does work.

Koval will probably be over here in a minute to tell me what I'm doing wrong.
posted by irisclara at 5:34 PM on December 12, 2009

I use Calibre exclusively with my Sony 505. It may not be the prettiest piece of software in the world but it's pretty damn functional. Format conversion, meta data and cover downloads, properly formatted RSS feeds from dozens of sources (and developers who will write new RSS "recipes" for you if you ask nicely), coverflow type library browsing. Not bad for freeware. There's and active Calibre board over @ MobileRead and Calibre creator Kovid Goyal often posts to answer questions. Since getting Calibre the only thing I use the Sony Reader software for is to download the free books from the Sony Bookstore and the Washington D.C. library (you can get a temp library card number online and download immediately using Overdrive from anywhere in the U.S.).
posted by MikeMc at 5:34 PM on December 12, 2009

Calibre is awesome in that nobody in their right mind should have ever tried to do such a thing. Converting between ebook formats isn't like re-encoding from WAV to MP3; it's a hairy, messy nightmare with no way to programmatically determine whether the conversion "worked" or not.

I'm surprised no one has slapped a prettier front end on it, but I can assure you that a number of commercial services and sites run the backend, low-level conversion suite. It's that useful.
posted by nev at 5:34 PM on December 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

The mediocre ratings for the Nook are breaking my heart :(

I'm sure the nook will improve with firmware updates but the whole "release now, patch it later" way of doing business needs to die a quick, yet painful, death. I'm sure B&N wanted to release in time for Christmas orders but they're hurting themselves in the long run.
posted by MikeMc at 5:49 PM on December 12, 2009 [2 favorites]

I'm two margaritas in to my evening, so forgive my rambling, but:

The mediocre ratings for the Nook are breaking my heart :(

"Mediocre" is too kind. I played with one at B&N yesterday, and the first thing that came to mind was "total fucking train wreck." I'm disappointed, because I wanted someone to light a fire under Amazon's ass to improve Kindle and its content.

I'm not ashamed to say I was completely flummoxed by nook. The worst thing is that it gives no indication that it "heard" a keypress, so you frequently wind up tapping twice only to have it execute a menu item twice. So you tap "Read," but nook hears "Read" > "Warp you someplace random in the UI." Also, it's so goddamn slow opening eBooks that they cheat—instead of opening to the first page of the book, they open to the "description" of the book, which makes you think you did something wrong.

I eventually had to relent to the employee trapped behind the demo desk, who tried desperately to claim that this particular nook was "defective" and that's why it was so slow and confusing. I felt bad for the poor guy.
posted by Garak at 5:55 PM on December 12, 2009

Sorry about the double. I'm also having lag trouble. Pretty please mods delete one.

Calibre takes longer to open (with no collection loaded) than adobe reader does. That's not just ugly, it's clunky. I do all my ebook reading on my eee and I use Machine Age Reader to read and edit on the fly. If I didn't have that it would take hours just to get a book into readable shape. Hardware ebook readers drove me crazy because I had no way to fix anything.

I guess if I knew Python, Calibre would be more useful but I don't so it's just barely better than using separate Amber converters. I'm not criticizing any of the developers, there really are a lot of needs and challenges to address. I just wish I had something I could use to organize my collection without having to combine every possible utility into one huge mess. If you try to use it to actually manage a collection it copies and renames every file you give it. It doesn't look for duplicates, and if you have a book in different formats it doesn't always see them as copies of the same book. Anybody know of a good database for ebook collections? One that you can tell if several files are really the same book.
posted by irisclara at 5:58 PM on December 12, 2009

> Instapaper's new download-as-epub feature

Whoa, didn't know about that - I'll have to check that out. Instapaper in its original implementation was so brilliant, and it's amazing how fast it's taken off.

I use both Caliber and Stanza Desktop for massaging ebooks onto my iPod and neither is as good as I'd like it. The reason I hope Apple comes out with this tablet device is not because I'd have a use for one of those, but an Apple-quality iTunes-for-books would be very welcome.
posted by nowonmai at 6:34 PM on December 12, 2009

I've been fiddling with both Calibre and MobiPocket Creator to help me create Kindle editions for a small publisher who has everything tucked away in InDesign and provides me with HTML exports to work from.

Calibre does a nice job out of the box. It's not as wizard-y as MobiPocket Creator, but I'm willing to fiddle with it a bit more to be spared having to run VMWare to use MobiPocket Creator, which is Windows-only.
posted by mph at 7:15 PM on December 12, 2009

What are the most common ebook formats? If I had a bunch of content that I wanted to distribute electronically, what formats should I offer my readers, aside from the obvious (PDF, TXT, HTML)?
posted by Ian A.T. at 7:19 PM on December 12, 2009

The best resource for all things ebook is the Mobileread forum. There's a lot of controversy about formats, but I'd vote for rtf, pdf and epub. I read rtf converted from pdf mostly, and it sure seems like everybody else reads epub or converts them to whatever their ebook reader uses. Apparently epub files convert easily, unlike pdfs.
posted by irisclara at 7:44 PM on December 12, 2009

What are the most common ebook formats?

Well, EPUB is fast becoming the de facto open (that is to say non-Kindle) format. It is supported by Sony, iRiver, Cybook, Astak, iRex, Plastic Logic etc... Kindle uses Mobi/PRC, Topaz and AZW and does not support EPUB.
posted by MikeMc at 7:54 PM on December 12, 2009

There's a lot of controversy about formats, but I'd vote for rtf, pdf and epub. I read rtf converted from pdf mostly, and it sure seems like everybody else reads epub or converts them to whatever their ebook reader uses.

I continue to be amazed at how indignant some people @ MR can get over things like eBook formats. Of course there was the great "liseuse" controversy so I guess MR has their plates of beans to over think. Most of my books are in .LRF (DRM free Sony) or EPUB format. Just yesterday the Sony ebookstore dropped their proprietary format entirely in favor of EPUB.
posted by MikeMc at 8:09 PM on December 12, 2009

People who use PDF for text-based, noon-illustrated books should be hung up by their heels and beaten with dirty keyboards until they repent.

This is a personal hobbyhorse of mine.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:21 PM on December 12, 2009 [3 favorites]

Fan of calibre here (and also mobipocket reader)... useful for converting formats in my experience, and it's use as an organizer of files (very useful to my scattered sense of organ.)

have you seen or tried out Delicious Monster library as an"itunes" for books? It lets you build a library and you can scan barcodes to add books, with a webcam, it builds your library that way(autograbbing book covers and descriptions from amazon, by using the bar code (or isbn etc.). I am pretty sure it also has features to store data on an ebook collection. Really pretty interface, and virtually exactly like itunes, but for books and dvds. (not free like calibre however)
posted by infinite intimation at 8:49 PM on December 12, 2009

my favorite feature of Calibre is in setting daily (customizable intervals, can be weekly, monthly...) automatic downloads of virtually any publications of your choice, auto formatted in your chosen format, and downloaded at intervals of your choosing.

It has presets/easy setup for tons of publications that have digital distributions... like sciam, nature, newyorker, harpers, newrepublic and tons more, plus many many foreign language publications... and better... you can easily set up the same with any rss feed from the web... so for example, you can have Mefi auto download to your comp on some schedule, and calibre autoformats it to be read any way you like (offline, so on whatever kind of device you might choose to use.)
posted by infinite intimation at 8:59 PM on December 12, 2009

If you like Calibre, and have a Kindle 2, you might also like Savory, which is Calibre running on the Kindle itself.

For my Sony Reader, I used to use BookDesigner for text conversion - it's a very powerful free closed-source Windows-only conversion program. Now that I've switched to the Kindle DX, I don't really need to do very much conversion - it does a good job with PDFs without any massaging needed.

People who use PDF for text-based, noon-illustrated books should be hung up by their heels and beaten with dirty keyboards until they repent.

Keep in mind that most people reading ebooks are reading them on their computers, where PDF isn't necessarily all that bad. Most of the untold thousands of book torrents I've downloaded predate the existence of ebooks! Until ePub (another Adobe format) came along, there really wasn't a single universal format for print docs other than PDF, so that's what people used. So beat me with a dirty keyboard.*

* Being beaten with a dirty keyboard by a chicken in Korea sounds kinky!
posted by me & my monkey at 9:16 PM on December 12, 2009

What stavrostheetc said x2. PDF is horrible for many reasons; reading is only the most obvious.

* Does it have to be a keyboard? In Korea?
posted by sneebler at 5:29 AM on December 13, 2009

ePub is an open format, not Adobe's, though they are members of the trade organization that defined it.

The DRM scheme that can be applied to ePub is an Adobe product, though.
posted by nev at 7:21 AM on December 13, 2009

stavrosthewonderchicken: People who use PDF for text-based, noon-illustrated books should be hung up by their heels and beaten with dirty keyboards until they repent.

I agree. Unfortunately, I'm at the whim of an industry (policy research) that posts research documents online that look good only when they're printed on nice glossies for your funders, so until that changes, I'm stuck converting them.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 12:44 PM on December 13, 2009

I use Calibre to convert docs for my Kindle 2, usually RTF files to .mobi and sometimes PDF to .mobi -- and I also use it to change the metadata on PDFs, because I hate when those fields are wrong when I drag-and-drop PDFs onto the Kindle.

Even so, the navigation and actually conversion process is painfully slow and I wish there were a better solution. I use a Mac, though, so MobiPocket creator is out of the question.
posted by fantine at 7:25 PM on December 13, 2009