If you read a lot of books, you know the problem: Where do they go? Did you classify your copy of Just for Fun in biographies, computer science, or science fiction?

Do you really classify books? Who are you anyway? Sheldon Cooper? And, if the book's not in your bookcase, did you lend it to someone or is it propping up a table somewhere? If you're not a librarian with OCD, you'll probably have to ransack you whole house to come up with that elusive paperback title you so desperately want to reread.

It's pretty much the same with e-books. They're guaranteed to reside within the four metal walls of your computer, but trying to find them on the hard drive, because of the pure volume and disorganization of your collection, will not be how you want to spend your Sunday afternoon.

This is where Calibre comes in. The program manages e-books in various folders and displays them for reading on your request. In this article, I'll took a closer look at the newest version 1.11 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Chapter One

After loading the software (see the "Installation" box), call it up either on the command line or from the program menu. On first startup, the program manual is available only as an e-book (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Clicking EPUB under the book's title image or double-clicking an entry in the library listing opens the reading window.

To open the book and read it, click Formats under the image of the book title. This opens a reading window that shows the contents of the book (Figure 2).

Figure 2: On the left side of the reading windows are the buttons for navigating and opening other views.

Your Own Books

Adding your own books is an important function in helping you navigate through your library. Click the book icon on the left to get a selection dialog.

The selection is impressive in regard to supported formats. Apart from EPUB, LRF, HTML, LIT, MOBI, Topaz, Text, PDF, SNB, and digital comics, Calibre recognizes various text processing documents that it reads in from diverse archive versions. Once you successfully add a book, it appears in the library listing in the middle part of the window.

Taking time to add descriptions for new books is definitely worth the effort. To do this, you can click the Edit meta information icon at the top and choose the book from the list. Figure 3 shows the dialog with some incomplete data.

Figure 3: You can add or modify the metadata for a book.

With the buttons to the left of the reading window, you set your preferred reading environment. The available print function somewhat defeats the purpose of the e-book, but at least it works.

Especially interesting is being able to extract metadata from the Internet. Press Ctrl+D and then Configure Download and identify the various metadata sources (Figure 4). After that, click Download only metadata (Figure 5) and you will see the added metadata.

Figure 4: Instead of adding metadata for a book manually, you can easily extract it from one of many sources on the web.

Figure 5: When Calibre finds metadata on the web, you can easily add it for the book.

Converting Books

The third button on the menu is for converting e-books. You can choose the conversion format from the list and set various parameters with the buttons on the left to control the complexity of the conversion process. Many of the settings for converting your books will be based on your own preferences and experience (Figure 6).

Figure 6: The form allows you to convert e-book formats, with numerous parameters to configure the process.

After you confirm your settings, the main window begins to show the conversion process visually. When it's done, the original, along with the converted copy, will appear in the directory with their respective file extensions to identify the formats. On the right of the Calibre main window, you can see both versions in their different formats, which you can then choose with a click. The conversion from EPUB [2] to MOBI [3] worked exceptionally well and without any error messages within seconds in my test.

The reading window, however, showed some significant differences between the two formats. The software did a better job with some of the document properties in EPUB format, perhaps because the heuristic rules worked out better. From a lack of some of the readers, however, I couldn't determine how the files might look on the respective hardware.

Searching

Calibre is able to search the entire web for books (Figure 7). You can use the title, author, or other keywords for the search. To start searching, click the globe icon and Fetch books .

Figure 7: With Calibre, you can search the Internet for analog and digital books.

Double-clicking a book opens it in the browser. The software can display normal print books as easily as e-books. You can also order the book through an online retailer and download it directly.

Searching for books for the first time can yield some overwhelming results. As always when searching over the Internet, the motto is "quality over quantity." In the case of Calibre, this means radically reducing the number of sources, or you end up with an untold numbers of hits on the same book from various vendors.

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.