There is a software for practically every task. There are professional photo editors for photo editing, similar ones for video editing, browsers for browsing the web, movie players and so on. Is there one for eBooks? Many of us will spend hours staring at our phones reading eBooks, some of us might use our tablets too, and a lot of us attempt reading books on our PC or laptops. This isn’t practical. Calibre is the software that can help, but it’s more than just your everyday eBook reading package. If you spend a decent amount of time reading online, eBooks or web sites online, or if you own an eBook reader, this is the tool you ought to use.
It is entirely free, and even open-source. You can download it from https://calibre-ebook.com for platforms, such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS and if you own an Apple device or an Android tablet or phone, there are ways to access eBooks remotely or sent to you directly from your Calibre installation on your PC or laptop.
eBooks are available in all kinds of formats, the most popular of which are EPUB, PDF, LIT, TXT, MOBI , and Calibre supports them all. Each format has its benefits, some of which let you click and jump from one chapter to another, while others are purely text with no dynamic linking. Some other format may include images. You can even set it as the default eBook reader for these popular formats.
Calibre acts as an eBook reader too, so you don’t need to use third-party packages to read files, except for maybe, PDFs. The inbuilt eBook reader works for most formats and it can be customized in all kinds of ways. You can have books flow across multiple columns, change the background colour or choose between themes, and more. It’s even a comic book reader, and it supports the popular formats such as CBR and CBZ. Calibre is firstly a book manager, so you can easily sort through vast volumes with ease, even categorize and set ratings for them.
Calibre’s strength isn’t just reading books, it’s also converting them. Let’s take for example, you have books that you wish to read on a smartphone, or an old eBook reader. Calibre lets you convert them. This can be from standard text formats to popular eBook formats supported by eBook readers. This is handy also if you have study material that you would prefer to read on a tablet or an eBook reader like a Kindle. There are several settings that you can use, while converting eBooks. You can change the fonts, the chapters, margins and more. If you are converting books from simpler, text formats, this can be used to make the book more interactive so you can jump from chapter and section, on an eBook reader.
It also can be used to look for books online. There are also quite a few eBook stores that sell books that are DRM-free and can be easily copied on any eBook reader without any conversion. Once you have the books in your Calibre library, you can easily send them over to a device like a Kindle, smartphone or tablet connected over a USB cable. When you search for a book, you might find paid books and free books. Calibre directs you the stores to purchase and download the books, and the free ones can be directly downloaded using Calibre.
Calibre has a Connect/Share feature that is particularly interesting because it lets you host a eBook server and read books on devices remotely, that may or may not have Calibre installed. One can simply start the server and access the entire library of books using a web browser. So for example, you could run a network-wide eBook server for your friends, classmates, or family. You can also add security too, by assigning a password to the server and user accounts. This is useful at home, where you may have a PC or laptop running the Calibre server, but you can get it to run over the internet too. Calibre can also be configured to send you eBooks over e-mail. Simply use an existing email account that Calibre can send e-mails using. Once completed, Calibre lets you select books and choose the device you want to send it to.
Calibre is more than an eBook reader, it can be used to download news from the web, package it and send it to your Kindle or other eBook readers. A Fetch News button on the interface gives access to a large library of online news sites across the world. Simply choose the ones that interest you and how often you wish to download the news. You can also download older news. You can even add your own custom news sources or import feed libraries from other new readers too. This reduces time that would otherwise e taken to manually browse news topics on say, a phone, instead you can easily sync a collection of news from your favorite sources.
Calibre is another one of those cool utilities that can help you organize your data. Here at Reliance Digital, we try to bring forward solutions and software that are both fun, and useful. We hope you enjoy them, and we hope you’ll keep visiting us to read more such interesting snippets.
