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 “Jobsâ€. 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. The easy way to correct the metadata is to fill in the title and author, then click the ‘Download metadata’ button at the bottom, center of the Edit Metadata dialog. Calibre will display possible matches for the information entered. If there is more than one result select the entry that looks like the best match. A lot of information should be filled in now. Above the ‘Download metadata’ button and to the top, right of the cover image 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 specific e-books in your library. Direct Searching is one of the fastest ways. Above the book list there is a Search field. Think of it like having Google built into calibre. Just type a few key words into the Search 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 library, but they won’t be shown if the search expression doesn’t find them. You can also use the tag browser to search your library. Along the left side of the window is the tag browser. If you don’t see anything to the left of the book list, click the luggage tag icon in the lower right of the main window; a list will appear to the left of the library. It allows you to see specific subsets of your library. Clicking the icon to the left of each tag allows you to display just the e-books matching that criteria. A plus searches for all books that match and a minus searches for all books that don’t match. Notice that as you enable items in the tag browser search queries are added to the Search field. The tag browser is really just an easy way to create sear...
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