Caliber program. Library management and universal e-book converter

Foreword

Since I am a big fan of reading, at what point my gaze fell on e-books. The benefits were obvious to me. Especially with frequent business trips. Weight, size, convenience, and the price of electronic versions of books (I prefer an honest purchase of texts). Using a few copies stopped at Sony PRS-505. At first I was embarrassed by the lrf format, but the output was quickly found - online fb2 to lrf converters. Online - because I am a Linux user both at home and at work, plus I use WinXP at home for games. In general, a complete disorder. But when I started looking for books in English, I came across a bunch of other formats from pdf to epub and even more exotic options. Plus books on computers has become a lot and it became difficult to understand them (I'm not the only user of eBooks in the family). In general, there is a need for some kind of management of this chaos and convenient format conversion, plus native support for Linux. In one of the comments on Habré saw the mention of Caliber . I downloaded, installed - I liked it. Now I use it completely. Therefore, I would like to make a brief overview of this program.

About the program and its capabilities

Caliber is a free, open-source, cross-platform application developed for users of electronic books with many possibilities.

• Library management
  
  Caliber provides the ability to manage your book collection. The concept of the program - many identical books in different formats are presented as one book in the library.
  
  You can sort and search for books by metadata such as: name, author, date of publication, date of addition, size, series of books, rating, etc. There is also support for tags and comments and reviews.
  
  You can easily find the desired book with a simple search or use the advanced search.
  
  The books you add are organized by the program into a clear hierarchical structure of folders on your hard disk, so that even in the absence of a program you can sort out your library.
  
  Plus caliber can search for metadata about books and covers on the Internet by title / author or ISBN. The metadata search system is determined by plug-ins and can easily be expanded independently. (With literature in English, I am looking for a bang)
  
  
• Book Converter
  
  Caliber supports converting from a pile of formats to a bunch of others.
  
  Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC **, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, TXT
  
  Output Formats: EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, TCR, TXT
  
  Conversion has many options, such as changing the font size, creating a book structure and footnotes, etc.
  
  
• Synchronization with readers
  
  Caliber uses a modular driver system for readers that allows you to add new devices. Now the program already supports many devices. When synchronizing Caliber itself chooses the most suitable format, or if there is no necessary one, it will convert it into the required one. Also adds to the reader all the necessary metadata and information about the series of books.
  
  
• Downloading news and converting them into a book
  
  Caliber already contains 3 hundreds of news sources. And after reading the manual, you will not be difficult to add new sources.
  
  
• Built-in book reader
  
  Caliber contains firmware for reading all supported book formats.
  
  
• Content web server
  
  Caliber contains an embedded web server for remote library management. She can also download and e-mail you books.
  
  

Calibre demo can be viewed here .

Installation

For Windows, everything is simple - take the distribution here and install it.

For Mac here .

For Linux, we are looking for in the repositories of your distribution, with a high probability there.

If you use something less common (in Arch, for example, it is only in AUR) or you want to have the latest version, then run the script

sudo python -c "import urllib2; exec urllib2.urlopen('http://status.calibre-ebook.com/linux_installer').read(); main()"



or take the source and proceed according to the instructions

http://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux



When you first start setting up the program using a wizard.

Choose the language, the location of the library. Next, select the model of our reader. And the installation is complete. We can enjoy the work.

Experience of use

Having started working with this library manager, first of all I threw my entire collection there. It did not take much time, since everything lay in one folder, in which there was something similar to order, but not perfect. Choosing to add all the books from this folder Caliber scanned its contents and transferred it to your library by sorting everything neatly into daddies.





Next, enjoy her pleasure. I really liked the conversion of books to the format I needed and the download of information about the book on the ISBN. Some of the books I had in fb2 and there were already some descriptions of books. I put it in order a bit and checked the series of books and the unity of the authors' names, I connected my reader to Sony and told me to put all the books on the reader's card. Caliber herself converted all the books into lrf and carefully put them on the reader's memory card.



Also liked the built-in content server. At work, the computer is always on the Internet and has a white address, then the main library I got there. Conveniently, I shake books at work and throw it into a single library. If the reader with him then immediately synchronize. Or I download at home from my own library and sync with my home library. But the most convenient when you go somewhere in the city or on a business trip and forget the reader, then you can climb from the phone and download the book you need to finish reading even on your mobile. Or it’s convenient to share a book with a friend.



For books in English, the program finds all the metadata and the cover with a bang, with the Russians it is more difficult. The news download function has not been deeply tested for much uselessness. But at first glance it is quite convenient.

')

Conclusion

Starting to look for the converter of book formats for Linux, I finally found myself an excellent library manager that I now use on all my computers under different operating systems and finally put my library in order. Major bugs were not noticed and the program does not cause complaints. Therefore, I would like to express my gratitude to its creator Kovid Goyal and recommend to all owners of e-books and fans of reading.



Program site.



PS This is my first attempt to review the program, so I will accept and consider any constructive criticism.



UPD: 0.6.44 was released in which some bugs were fixed and experimental CHM conversion added. Well, some other features are not very interesting for me.