Organizing and reading e-books with Calibre

Affairs of the Heart

A special feature is the heart icon. Clicking it opens a webpage where you can donate to the Calibre project, which can help preserve the numerous features that make Calibre an excellent program for managing digital libraries.

A few places show where the developers may have gone a bit too far. For example, the Fetch news function transforms a news source webpage into an e-book. A feed reader would have been a more obvious choice for most users. However, the program is largely self-explanatory in daily use. Language localization is done gracefully. If you want additional help, it's available online.

The double-arrow buttons at the top right conceals further options. Among these are functions to remove books, manage the Calibre library files, save the library to a hard drive, share books with others, and change settings. All these useful extra details hide behind a single button, whereas the usually visible icons execute all the important functions for daily use of the library, which simplifies things.

Conclusion

Calibre is a powerful library software that cleans up your e-book collection and, if desired, converts reading matter simply and thoroughly into various formats. In my test, Calibre even helped uncover and eliminate format errors in an existing e-book. To eliminate errors, however, you need to open an editor, such as LibreOffice combined with the eLAIX plugin.

Bookworms will appreciate being able to locate digital reading material on the Internet with Calibre. Of course, limiting the sources will save users from drowning in the sheer amount of all the possible hits.