Calibre Quick Start Guide
Fourth Edition
By: John Schember
Copyright © 2010-2014 John Schember
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Installing calibre
The Main Library Window, aka The GUI
Common Tasks
Task 1: Organizing
Task 2: Conversion
2.1: Background
2.2: Why are there different e-book formats?
2.3: Conversion basics
2.4 Auto conversion
2.5: More robust conversion
2.6: Limitations of conversion
2.7: DRM: the bane of conversion
Task 3: The e-book editor
Task 4: Downloading News
Task 5: Interacting with e-book readers
5.1: Putting an e-book on your e-book reader
5.2: E-book reader optional configuration
Task 6: The e-book viewer
Where to get help
Introduction
Calibre is an open source e-book management tool. Simply put, calibre allows you to organize your e-book library, 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, 7, and 8 – 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 of 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 the convention Kovid chose, so that’s what we use.
The purpose of calibre is to simplify management of your e-book library. It does this in several ways:
Calibre organizes your library as a database so you can find the book you want when you want it. Calibre easily handles any size of library, and can manipulate e-book metadata – title, author, rating, etc..
Calibre converts between multiple e-book formats.
Calibre supports a growing number of e-book readers, including Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and many others.
Calibre is composed of three functional groups:
The graphical user interface (GUI). This is the typical mode of interacting with your library. All of calibre’s principal functionality is available through the GUI.
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.
Additional GUI tools such as an e-book reader and an e-book editor. These tools can be accessed via the main GUI or directly.
Installing calibre
The installation processes starts by downloading the installer for your operating system. Run the installer; when it finishes, launch calibre. You will be greeted with a welcome wizard, that will help you initially configure calibre. The first page of the wizard allows you to choose the storage location for your e-book library.
If this is your first time using calibre, the storage location should not be an existing e-book collection, but a new empty directory for calibre’s exclusive use. Calibre manages the e-books you give it in its own way. Think of the storage location as a black box. You don’t do anything with it – calibre manages the storage location for you. If you have used calibre in the past and are installing a new version, or if you have moved your library, then it’s okay to indicate a directory with an existing calibre library. calibre is smart enough to know to use an existing library when it sees one.
Click ‘next’ in the welcome wizard 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 use the default ‘Generic’ choice. This selection provides some conversion optimization for formats requiring 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 the Preferences button (looks like a set of three gears) in the 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 I would like to bring to your attention. The central piece is the book list. This takes up the majority of the window and displays the books in a table. Just above the book list you will see the search area (more on this later) and above that, the tool bar. When you connect a supported e-book reader a ‘Device’ icon will appear next to the ’Library’ icon in the tool bar. You can switch between viewing books in your library and books on your e-book reader by clicking on their respective icons.
The panel along the right of the window shows details about the currently selected book, including its cover. If you double click anywhere in the detail area (including on the book cover) another window will open exposing more information about the book. Clicking on any blue text in this area will perform an action specific to the information. For example, clicking the author’s name will open your web browser and search Wikipedia for information about the author.
At the bottom right of the window there are four icons and the word “Jobs”. Clicking any of these icons will toggle a given view state in the GUI. From left to right:
The luggage tag toggles the tag browser (on the left of the window). More on this later.
The curved arrow toggles the cover flow display. 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. The book list will still be visible under the cover flow area.
The nine squares in a grid toggles cover grid view. The cover grid replaces the book list with a grid of book covers. You might want to think of this as bookshelf view.
The book toggles seeing the details panel on the right.
The jobs indicator is one of the most important pieces of the GUI. This is the word ‘Jobs:’, the number next to it and the circular progress indicator. Whenever calibre is working on something (conversion, sending books to the reader, downloading news, etc.) the circular icon will spin and the number will reflect the number of jobs (activities) calibre is working on. You can click any part of the jobs indicator to show more detail about the jobs in progress.
Common Tasks
Let’s take a look at a few of the common tasks people use calibre for:
Organizing your e-book library
Conversion
Editing e-books
Downloading news from websites
Dealing with devices
Viewing e-books
Task 1: Organizing
The first part of organizing is getting your e-books into calibre’s library. Click the ‘Add books’ button in the tool bar at the top of the window, then select the e-books you would like calibre to import. When calibre imports your e-books it makes a copy of them 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 metadata’ on the top tool bar (to the right of the ‘Add books’ button) and the metadata editor will open.