Find yourself collecting eBooks, but not sure how to manage them all?
Open Book: Managing Your eBooks With Calibre is the free download youve been looking for.
From music to movies, various products previously sold in brick and mortar stores are shifting to digital distribution.
Books, it seems, are not immune to the trend.
The sheer number of eReaders on the market points that out.
This guide focuses mainly on the open sorts of eBooks, not those protected with DRM.
Free your files and learn to read them on any rig!
Table of Contents
1Introduction
2eBooks: An Introduction
3Enter Calibre
4Advanced Tips
1.
It may be surprising to you, but eBooks are far from a recent development.
Project Gutenburg, a repository of digital texts, dates back to 1971.
Dedicated to providing eBooks in open formats, Gutenburgs collection can be read on any gadget today.
Sadly, for the most part, texts purchased using such devices are not open.
This is because of technology known as Digital Rights Management, which Ill explain in more detail shortly.
Like I said, theres something here for everyone, so lets get started!
2. eBooks: An Introduction
2.1 What are eBooks?
Chances are that youve come across eBooks before in some capacity, even if you havent realised it.
Youre reading one right now, for example.
Much like paper books, really; just distributed digitally.
There are lots of free books, too, however!
There are otherplaces to find free ebooks, such asGoogles recently opened bookstore(US only, sorry).
Youll also find many free eBook reading blogs, such as thesefantastic books about social media and blogging.
This locks you into using only hardware made by the company you bought the book from (e.g.
Sonys Reader Store books will only work on Sony Reader devices), which is far from ideal.
There are ways to remove DRM, but they arent easy.
Plain text (.txt) this is the most basic of eBooks and contains nothing but the text itself.
That means no headings, no bold or italics, no formatting, colours or pictures.
This makes plain text perfect for archiving large amounts of information.
EPUB (.epub) EPUB replaced the Open eBook format in 2007 as the standard for eBooks.
Portable Document Format (.pdf) this is the format that youre reading from right now!
PDF files are based on an open format that has been around since 1993.
Most computers, and many eReader devices, are able to open PDFs without a third party program.
However, its still quite popular.
Most .prc/.mobi files are found through the Mobipocket web store.
Its actually almost exactly the same as a mobipocket eBook it just uses a slightly different indexing system.
Enter Calibre
3.1 What Is Calibre?
Calibre is an system that is used for managing your eBook files.
Calibre is across-platformapplication, which means that it has versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Its also important to mention that Calibre only works with eBooks thatdo not have DRM.
However, there are ways to get around it theyre just a little grey-hat.
Youll find some more details towards the end of this manual.
3.2 What Can It Do?
eBook Library Management
it’s possible for you to think of Calibre as your one-stop personal, automated library.
Thats not it, though!
Theres no need to use another program to get the job done.
Hosting Your eBook Collection
As I mentioned earlier, Calibre has a built in feature called a content server.
Any book, anytime, anywhere!
3.3 How To Get It
Calibre is really, really simple to get.
The last setting to worry about is whether or not you want to initiate the content server.
Thats pretty much it!
Next up is to browse to the folder where you keep all your books.
Calibre will now create a copy of all your books in the Calibre library folder you created earlier.
Thats not what I want!
I selectLord of the Flies, hit the i and then on Edit metadata individually.
Thankfully, Calibre allows bulk editing.
Next Ill fix the books I have by Terry Pratchett.
I go for the books, and then go for the I and then on Edit metadata in bulk.
Quick and simple, right?
I know that Kindles can read .mobifiles, so Ill choose that as my output format.
All I need to do is click OK, and off it goes!
Clicking on each one opens up the appropriate version in the built in reader.
You send eBooks to iTunes and then use iTunes to sync the eBooks to iBooks on your Apple rig.
Thats all there is to it.
In this case, its the news button.
Repeat this until youve selected all your sources, then select Save.
This will schedule all the sources to be downloaded at their specified times.
Thats what we can use to download books to wireless devices.
First you better double-check that the content server is switched on.
If it says start, click it to start it.
If it says stop then the content server is running and youre good to go!
What does this mean?
Any other equipment will launch the book in its default eBook app.
All you better do is connect your rig to the same online grid as the computer running Calibre.
Once youre connected youll see the following interface.
Youll also need toinstall Pythonon your system and download a set of scripts calledMobiDeDRM.
Youll want to install the32-bitversion of Python 2.7 for your platform.
MobiDeDRM contains 4 scripts: mobidedrm.py, mobidedrm2.py, kindlepid.py and mobihuff.py.
Youll be using only the first 3 of those scripts.
Once youve done that you’ve got the option to get to work.
Save this for later.
python mobidedrm.py book-title.azw book-title.mobi
If all is well youll see the following message:
Decrypting.
c’mon wait… done.
Additional Reading
Guide Published: June 2011
