Calibre Quick Start Guide
Contents
1. In the rest of the conversion section will focus on 1 the Amazon 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 and 3 the Barnes amp Noble Nook which also supports the EPUB format The Nook has some issues with DRMed books 2 2 Why are there different e book formats Just why do so many different e book 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 s e book reader devices 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 book readers today are much more advanced They can display large images and handle advanced formatting These newer devices needed updated formats providing these features Another major reason is exclusivity Many vendors like to control their own proprietary 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 EP2. 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 atdifferent times for fine tuning on a per e book basis The next place to look is the online user manual There is alink 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 okayto 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
3. Calibre Quick Start Guide By John Schember Table of Contents e Introduction e Installing calibre e The Main Library Window aka The GUI e Common Tasks o Task 1 Organizin o Task 2 Conversion a 2 1 Background 2 2 Why are there different_e book formats 2 3 Conversion basics 2 4 More robust conversion 2 5 Limitations of conversion 2 6 PDBs they are not all created equal a 2 7 DRM the bane of conversion o Task 3 Downloading News o Task 4 Interacting with e book readers 4 1 Putting an e book on your e book reader a 42 E book reader optional configuration o Task 5 The e book viewer e Where to get help Introduction Calibre is an open source e book 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 and various flavors of Linux It was created by Kovid Goyal who still leads its development A number people around the world including myself contribute to calibre s development Throughout this guide and the online docs you will see calibre instead of Calibre That s how Kovid named his program so that s what we call it The purpose of calibre is to simplify management of your e book collection lt does this in several ways e Calibr
4. UB format from the International Digital Publishing Forum is an industry standard intended toreduce 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 and 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 e book reader This preferred format is the one that gives the best formatting As mentioned earlier for the Kindle you really only need to worry about Mobipocket MOBI and for the Sony Reader line PRS and Nook you only need to worry about EPUB 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 For example if you want to read an EPUB file on your Kindle you convert the EPUB to MOBI Converting e book formats with calibre is simple and straightforward e Open Calibre and select the e book to convert in the library list e Connect your e book reader to your computer Calibre takes a moment to detect and scan your e book reader e Click Send to device the 6th button in the top tool bar e Calibre is smar
5. ced with the title of the book authors will be replaced with its author and the book will be put into the favorites folder All of the replacements that can be made in the save template are listed with descriptions under the entry area Another useful configuration change is disabling and reorganizing the supported formats Let s use the Cybook Gen 3 my primary reader again asan example In Preferences Plugins Device Interface plugins select the Cybook Gen 3 Device Interface and click customize plugin The first thing inthe configuration for the device is the format list Here you can uncheck formats you don t want sent to your e book reader You can also 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 4th icon from the left to have calibre open the e book in calibre s internal e book viewer The viewer supports everything you might expect such as bookmarks and navigation via the table of contents ifthe e book has one The viewer cannot read books protected with DRM Where to get help The first place to look for help is in the Preferences dialog All options have clear descriptions and there a lot of
6. e organizes your collection as a database so you can find the book you want when you need it Calibre easily handles any size of collection with a variety of tools to manipulate e book metadata title author rating etc e Calibre converts between multiple e book formats e Calibre supports a growing number of e book readers including Kindle Sony Nook and many others Calibre is composed of three functional groups e The graphical user interface GUI This is the typical mode of interacting with your database All of calibre s principal functionality is available through the GUI e A collection of command line CLI utilities for advanced calibre operations For example the command line tools are used by the ManyBooks service to convert on an as needed basis e An e book reading application accessed from the GUI Installing calibre The installation processes starts by downloading the installer for your operating system Run the installer When it finishes launch calibre You will now be greeted with a welcome wizard which will help you initially configure calibre The first page of the wizard allows you to change the storage location for your e books If this is your first time using calibre the storage location should not be an existing e book collection but a new directory location for calibre s exclusive use Calibre offers import functionality for existing collections Calibre manages the e books you give
7. h between viewing books in your Library and books on your e book reader by clicking on their respective icons The bar across the bottom of the window shows details about the currently selected book including its cover If you click anywhere in the detail area including on the book cover another window will open exposing more information about the book At the bottom right of the detail area are three icons e The curved arrow activates the cover flow view Cover flow displays the book covers in a fashion similar to how a juke box lays out albums The selected book is in the center while the neighboring covers are shown at an angle You can navigate though the book covers with the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard Click the curved arrow icon again to hide the cover flow view e The luggage tag icon activates the tag browser view More on this later e The spinning progress icon labeled Jobs is one of the mostimportant pieces of the interface Whenever calibre is working onsomething conversion sending books to the reader downloading news etc this icon will spin and the number next to jobs will display the number of jobs activities calibre is working on You can click the iconto expose more detail about the jobs in progress Common Tasks Let s take a look at a few common activities e Organizing your e book collection e Conversion e Downloading news from websites e Dealing with devices e Viewing e book
8. he query directly into the search bar and see the same result Task 2 Conversion This is arguably the most useful and most complex feature calibre offers Two of the most popular e book readers today are the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader 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 e book content from the store designed for yourreader 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 formats your reader supports and how to convert between formats Many online sites offer free e books from public domain to texts offered at no charge by well known and lesser known authors You can also comparison 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 as longas the book doesn t use Digital Rights Management DRM anti copying technology
9. it in its own way Think of the storage location directory as a black box You don t do anything with it it manages the contents of the storage location directory 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 indicate an existing calibre library Click next to be presented with an e book reader selection If your device is not listed or if you intend to use more than one e book reader don t panic just choose default This selection provides some conversion optimization for formats requiring fixed sizes Click next and then finish Congratulations you ve successfully installed and configured calibre Ifat any time you want to run the welcome wizard again click the downward facing arrow to the right of the Preferences button looks like a hammer inthe top tool bar then 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 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 Just above the main book list you will see the search area more on this later and above that a white box with a Library icon When you connect a supported e book reader a Reader icon will appear next to the Library icon You can switc
10. o be formatted with a indent atthe 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 the first item under Look amp Feel If youdidn t select your device during the welcome wizard you should select it here The input and output profiles provide specialized optimization for your 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 displayed when you put hover the mouse cursor over it Look though the options and play with them to produce output that suits your taste Clicking OK closes the dialog and begins the conversion job 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 job is being worked on When the conversion is finished the jobs count will drop by one When the job count drops to zero the indicator will stop spinning After the conversion is finished click the downward facing arrow to the right of the Send to device button Select 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 chose in the conversion options 2 5 Limitati
11. ons of conversion Converting between e book formats does have some limitations One limitation of using a tool like Calibre is the inability to edit the e book content before conversion Calibre simply moves the existing content and layout from one format to another Calibre is not a editing tool If there are typos you wish to correct or layout changes you d like to make you will need to use a dedicated editing tool such as Sigil or Book Designer Another issue that often arises during conversion is missing orincomplete formatting Not all e book formats support the same formatting so layout details may be lost when converting from one format to another Formatting attributes 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 conversion 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 Nook e book reader owners Barnes and Noble sells e books in both the EPUB and PDB formats Both formats are 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 y
12. ool 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 removing the e book from your e book reader Once you ve finished refreshing the e book content stored on your device hover your mouse over the reader icon for your connected device You will see an eject icon upward pointing triangle inside a circle next to the mouse pointer Clicking the eject icon disconnects your e book reader from the computer 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 settings 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 repla
13. ou only have to worry about having one file instead of many That is essentially what PDB does for e books There are 28 e book formats that can be put into the PDB container that I m currently aware of An e book reader like the Nook which supports PDB does not support all the possible formats that may be within a PDB file The two most common formats found in PDB files are PalmDoc also known as textread and Aportis and e book reader PalmDoc does not support any formatting or images E book reader supports basic formatting and 8 bit images The PDB files sold byBarnes and Noble are in the e book reader format 2 7 DRM the bane of conversion DRM is an acronym for Digital Rights Management What is DRM and why is it necessary Let s think about physical books for a moment With a physical book you can lend or resell your book But when you do either you are 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 was designed to prevent unlimited copying of an electronic file Some e book reader users would also note that it is a handy way for companies to try to lock them into a specific brand DRM enables or disables various end user rights as determined by the publisher and seller Some DRM d e books can be read on more than one device Some will allow for partial copying and printing Simply put DRM rest
14. rences By default when you conntect your e book reader calibre will automatically transfer the downloaded news to the device If you don t wantthis to happen 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 s usually 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 pBooks is due to e book readers That s precisely why started collecting e books Calibre has full support for a wide variety of e book readers In total calibre currently supports over 30 e book readers Yep over 30 Everything from elnk devices like the Kindle Sony and Nook to cell phones 4 1 Putting an e book on your e book reader Connect your e book reader to your computer and start calibre if it s not already running If your device is supported by calibre a reader icon will appear next to the library in the white box above the search area Clicking the reader icon will switch the main book list from your library toa listing of e books on your connected device If you want to send an e book to your device just switch back to your library select the book and click Send to device in the top t
15. ricts what you can do with your e book An e book with DRM cannot be converted to a different format This is because conversion itself would require the removal of the DRM Not alle 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 withthe 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 is such a copy protection system lt 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 may only want to read an EPUB book that you ve legally purchased on your Kindle it may not be legal to do so If you don t like this silliness and don t then speak up to whoever in your country makes the relevant laws Task 3 Downloading News This feature of calibre is often overlooked especially by users who own an Amazon Kindle Integrated into calibre is the ability to download news from a variety of sources As of this writing 337 different sources recipes from all over the world including both free and paid con
16. s Task 1 Organizing The first part of organizing is getting your e books into calibre s database Click the Add books button on the top tool bar then select the e books you would like calibre to import When calibre imports your e books it makes a copy of the book storing it in the storage location you specified during initial setup Once you ve added an e book calibre doesn t need further access to the original file During an e book import 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 calibre makes it easy to fix this Select the book whose metadata you want to change by clicking the book title in the main window Then click Edit meta information on the top tool bar to the right of the Add books button The metadata editor will open The easy way to get the metadata correct is to either fill in the title and author or the ISBN for the print version of the book then click the Fetch metadata from server button at the bottom left of the Edit Meta Information dialog window Calibre will display possible matches for the information entered If there is more than one match select the entry that looks like the best match A lot of information should be filled in now To the right of the Fetch metadata from server b
17. t 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 convertit 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 correctly set by default Most of the options only need to be changed in special cases 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 controls what format the conversion will generate Kindle owners will select MOBI and Sony and Nook owners will select EPUB In the conversion dialog there are a few things to check before clicking OK to begin the conversion The first thing you need to do is double check the metadata and make adjustments if necessary Click on Look amp Feel tab on the left side The Remove spacing between paragraphs option is a popular option lt will cause paragraphs t
18. tent are supported The real advantage of having calibre manage your news subscriptions is that once downloaded the content will be formatted for reading on your 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 set the Preferred output format in General options to the preferred format for your e book reader This would be MOBI for Kindle and EPUB for the Sony Readers and Nook Click the Fetch news button 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 convenientfor 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 you can expand the categories that are relevant to you the ones in languages you can read by clicking the disclosure triangles to the left of the language groupings Look through the recipes for something of interest When you find one of interest select itand check the Schedule for download check box on the right or click Download now You can also set how often and when you want itto download Once downloaded the content will be converted to an e book according to your conversion prefe
19. utton is the Download cover button If the book doesn t have a cover showing or if you don t like the cover click it to try to have calibre download one from the internet Now that you have your e books in calibre there are a few different ways to find an e book in your collection Searching is one of the fastest ways Above the library table there is a search bar with a binoculars icon to the left of the search text input field Think of it like having Google built into calibre Just type a few key words into the Search text field Try the author title series or anything else from the e book s metadata E books matching your search terms are shown as filtered results The other e books are still in your collection but they won t be shown if the search expression doesn t find them You can also use the tag browser to search your collection Click the luggage tag icon in the lower right of the main window between the curved arrow and the progress icon A list will appear to the left of the library It allows for you to display specific subsets of your collection to be shown in the main window Clicking the disclosure triangle to the left of Author Series Publisher News or Tags allows you to display just the e books matching the criteria Notice that as you enable items in the tag browser search queries are added to the search bar The tag browser is really just an easy way to create search queries You could type t
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