Even if we’re not “Kindling the Classroom,” there are a lot of us out there using ebook readers for our own reading. Here’s the catch: a lot of the materials we want to read don’t come from whatever bookstores might work with our readers. We might want to load journal articles, books from Project Gutenberg, or even our own work onto our readers. We might even want to read a file format that the reader we own doesn’t support. Depending on the reader we own and the format of the item in question, we may be able to just sideload the content—but that might not work for everything.
Enter Calibre.
Calibre’s a nifty little cross-platform (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux) application that allows you to manage an ebook library and convert books from one format to another. It supports an amazing number of devices, far beyond just the Kindle, NOOK, and Sony. In this post, I’ll focus on Calibre’s conversion and transfer capabilities.
Adding a book to your library is simply a matter of clicking the “Add books” button and navigating to the file you want to add [Click on any of the images below for a larger version]:
As you can see from the list the dialog box, Calibre can import a wide variety of file types.
Converting from one format to another is also simple. Select the item you want, and click the “Convert books” button:
Again, there are a lot of output formats supported.
Once you’ve added the books and converted if necessary, getting them onto your device is easy: just connect the device to your computer via USB. Calibre will let you know when it’s recognized the device, and a new “Send to device” button will appear in the toolbar. Select the book you want, click the button, and wait for Calibre to do its thing. (If your device is a Kindle, Calibre will ask if it should convert to that format before putting the book on the device—tell it to go ahead. And yes, this means that you can read .epub books on a Kindle, provided they’re not protected with DRM.)
What’s been your experience of using Calibre? Are there other applications you’ve found that do similar things? Let us know in the comments!
[All images by Flickr user cavenderamy / Creative Commons licensed]
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5 Responses to Converting Ebooks with Calibre
walt828 - December 10, 2010 at 1:12 pm
I like Calibre a lot, especially for reading articles and reports in pdf format that I don’t want to print out. I wish there was a way for it to do something with articles that were printed with multiple columns, though.
shaviro - December 10, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Calibre is very valuable to me for converting (non-drm’d) mobi files, and also word processing files, into files that are readable on my Kindle. (You have to convert a doc or rtf file into OpenOffice format — odt — first, but that is not a big deal).
I don’t find it very satisfactory for converting pdf files, however — it messes up everything having to do with footnotes, headers and footers, etc.
Also I don’t like the “overkill” aspect of Calibre — that it tries to do everything. I much prefer to use it for converting file types only; I always close it before attaching my Kindle to my computer, because I much prefer being able to control manually which files I place on the Kindle, and when.
emin123 - April 20, 2011 at 3:45 pm
Only two students are mentioned as members of SAVE; perhaps there are others, but surely, surely, the headline could have read “Some Vanderbuilt U Students…” instead of implying there was some sort of huge groundswell of anti-UAE opinion. Whether one is pro or con stance on this isn’t the issue: one should be able to demand fair reporting and intelligent headlining in the CHE.
old nassau'67 - April 20, 2011 at 9:49 pm
“The group’s organizers say they are worried about anti-Israeli government policies, workers’ and gay rights abuses, and the lack of academic freedom,….”
If these perceived wrongs motivate SAVE, why just the UAE? Many totalitarian countries stomp on Jews, women, workers, GLBT’s, and professors, usually because these groups articulate forbidden ideas such as “rights”, “democracy”, and “freedom”.
mbelvadi - April 21, 2011 at 11:52 am
Why is it that when some students protest ties/investment relating to one country on the grounds of moral concerns about that country’s government policies, they are accused of harboring one of the most despised ethnic prejudices that can be flung at a person in Western culture, but when other students make what is exactly the same kind of protest on exactly the same kinds of grounds (not literally the same issues, but the same kinds of socio/economic/political issues) against a different country, there not only are no parallel accusations, there is even no equivalent epithet in the English language to accuse them of. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this other recent CHE article, http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/some-complaints-of-campus-anti-semitism-are-called-attempts-at-censorship/32321?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en