calibre
E-book manager, viewer, and converter.
- Free • Open Source
- Ebook Reader
- Ebook Library
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Homebrew
- PortableApps.com
- Flathub
- BSD
- Self-Hosted
What is calibre?
Calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application made by users, for users. Many languages, designed around the concept of the logical book, i.e., a single entry in your library that may correspond to actual e-book files in several formats.
Calibre can sort the books in your library by title, author, date added, date published, size, rating, or series, along with extra metadata such as tags and personal comments. You can easily search your book collection for a particular book, based on any of this information. Calibre can also go onto the internet to find online books based on existing title/author or ISBN information.
In addition, Calibre also: -syncs to your ebook reader -downloads news from the internet and converts it into ebook form -offers a ebook viewer that can display all major ebook formats
Features:
Library Management E-book conversion Syncing to e-book reader devices Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form Built-in e-book viewer Content server for online access to your book collection E-book editor for the major e-book formats
calibre Screenshots
calibre Features
- Built-in viewer
- DRM Free
- Portable
- Lightweight
- Extensible by Plugins/Extensions
- Decentralized
- Ebook Conversion
- Works Offline
- Handwritten Notes
- Built-in e-Book converter
- Book organization
- Batch conversion
- Library Management
- Supports All Ebooks Format
- Customizable
- E-book management
- Book Manager
- Edit metadata
- Indexed search
- Ebook Editor
- Book search
- Custom cover image
- File Sync
- Built-in Adobe Flash Player
- Built-in editor
- Email notifications
- Facebook integration
- Integrated PDF Viewer
- Update Notifier
- Live updating
- Read fb2 format
- Sync with e-reader
- SMS Reminders
- Multiple languages
- Live Push Notifications
- Built-in PDF converter
- Bibliography generator
- Auto Update
calibre information
- Developed byKOVID GOYAL
- LicensingOpen Source (GPL-3.0) and Free product.
- Written in
- RatingAverage rating of 4.3
- Alternatives103 alternatives listed
Supported Languages
- English
GitHub repository
- 13,843 Stars
- 1,822 Forks
- 3 Open Issues
- Updated
Comments and Reviews
Tags
- Ebook Library
- Ebook Reader
- RSS to Kindle
- bibliography-management
- e-readers
- bibliography
- ebooks
- ebook-management
- e-book-readers
- ereader
- rating-system
- EPUB
- EPUB Reader
- ebook-collection
- Books
- e-reader
Recent user activities on calibre
gamefiend added calibre as alternative(s) to Apprentice Alf's DeDRM Tools
Opensrc thinks Librera Reader is an alternative to calibre- Opensrc liked calibreOp
Where are you getting ebooks that don't have ISBNs? Commercial ebooks do have ISBNs and Calibre does have the ability to extract those (or download from multiple online metadata sources) and list them in a column.
Calibre does copy all ebooks into a single directory PER LIBRARY. I have yet to determine the limit on how many libraries it will support, but I currently have separate library folders for Fanfiction, Short Unread Fanfiction, Long Unread Fanfiction, Unread In-Progress Fanfiction, Commercially Published Fiction, Cookbooks/Gardening, Manga/Graphic Novels, Nonfiction, Poetry, and a fileless database of my Physical Fiction collection (which I brought in as a list of ISBNs I scanned with a barcode reader into a file on my computer).
More than about 2000 books in a library does tend to slow it down, which is why I subdivided my libraries. A library with only metadata and no book files opens very fast.
Calibre does have an update notifier. When there's an update available, there will be a link at the bottom right. It does require you to download and install the update, but that's not really all that hard.
Calibre is primarily aimed at managing books, so all entries in the library are called "books" but the program will handle image, video, and audio files as well, and call your default program for that filetype when you click on it to open. Each "book" will accept multiple files, as long as there is only one of each format. For example, one book can have PDF, EPUB, MOBI, MP3, MP4, PNG, JPG, and ZIP, but you can't have a folder full of JPGs. Honestly, that's my main gripe. I prefer my graphic novels and downloaded webcomics as individually numbered image files, rather than forcing them into EPUB or ZIP.
There are lots of useful plugins, and if the default metadata options are insufficient, Custom Columns can be created. Too many Custom Columns may impact performance, depending on how many books Calibre has to sort when you use them, but you'd have to go pretty crazy with the columns.
There don't seem to be any AV-related metadata plugins yet. Someone requested an IMDB metadata plugin years ago, but since plugins are made by volunteers, there apparently hasn't been enough interest to get it done yet. Maybe someone could be persuaded to customize the Ant metadata scripts for Calibre...
Calibre is primarily a powerful ebook organizer and secondarily a viewer. For smaller epub and mobi files I find that Calibre works well enough even if the internal reader is simple. I suggest users setup Calibre to view PDF files in either Okular (linux) or SumatraPDF. The internal reader tends to be slow or occasionally crash with larger or unusual files regardless of ebook format.
You should take note of where Calibre is storing it's ebooks (Calibre Library icon > first line of text will contain your folder/path). From here add this path to a backup program so that you don't lose all the work you will eventually put into Calibre.
Calibre is incredibly good software and updated often. I have donated to the project twice and recommend others do so as well. $5 (or less) goes a long way towards helping the creators of open source software.
This software forces you to copy your entire ebook collection into a single directory. The developers aren't willing to consider anything else. Additionally, it doesn't modify the original files. So literally, this software will — without confirming with the user — duplicate your entire reading collection.
I've used the application for a number of years now and am abandoning it for good now. Can't believe this software won't let you manage a collection manually. I don't know about other users, but my reading collection contains both fiction and educational material, which I've spent a great deal of time organizing to be accessible. I'd love to use this application but it's just not possible unless you want to mix EVERYTHING you have into one folder. Yet another application that could be 100x better with little to no change but wont because the developers are religiously bound to a flawed approach to ebook management.
I recommend using another application called Blio for personal reading needs. It also has a flawed approach to file management, but it makes up for the fact with looks.
I fully agree with you! I spent a lot of time to THINK about the best way to organize books even before using any e-book management software. I concluded that due to the following reasons:
Lack of dedicated ISBN number filed in metadata in official standards for all the popular e-book file formats (PDF, CHM, DJVU, EPUB) I am forced to use file name as a ISBN storage. If popular e-book file formats did have dedicated ISBN number in that case ISBN number for my e-books would be inserted into book files (and then extracted easily with any e-book management software) and in that case I wouldn't care if Calibre or any other e-book management software insists on its own naming scheme. The essential point here is -> I cannot trust a buggy SW to control the connection between file names and ISBN numbers for my book collections!
Performance hit when Calibre accepts a large number of new books (e.g. >100). Since Calibre insists on controlling book files it hits performance wall when it has to ask operating system's File System to check for name collisions for every file and directory created. I am using another e-book management software which does not care how the file will be named (in fact it relies on the fact that the book files already exist somewhere so there is no performance hit). Importing 500 book files in Calibre is extremely SLOW especially if your e-book collection is large. On the other hand importing 500 books in the SW I am using right now is almost instantly (however that SW is poor in search capabilities which is a strong feature of Calibre).
Normally I would use Calibre but due to its deep reliance on its file/folder naming control (which is deeply rooted in its architecture) I am forced to use a weaker SW... Too bad!
Reply written ago
You just have to accept that the manager, manages your ebook collection for you. That's it. Simple!
Reply written ago
I would not say Calibre is useless! It is the BEST ebook software out there. If you don't like it, you don't like any of them. You can always manage your ebooks manually however you like, but Calibre HAS to have its own libraries in order to store the metadata, sort books into folders, by author, etc. It's also very useful because you can search for a book by title or part of one, author, or part of an author's name, rating, etc. This would not be possible (or at best extremely slow) if you used your own folder system. It DOES sort all books into folders by author! They're readily accessible through your computer's File Manager, as well, if you want to find a book the hard way. I've done this using Thunar (which isn't available on Windows, for those of you thinking you could use a better file manager than the horrible one provided by MicroSoft.) AS to ISBN number, it CAN download that metadata from the web and insert it. It's not automatic because there are different sources, and you choose the best match. Otherwise you might get the WRONG metadata for a book titled "Ocean" By "Waves" or something. You can have multiple libraries. You can name them "Fiction" and "Education" and switch between them, in your example. If you do decide to modify the Calibre Libraries manually (say, adding a book, or modifying a book, or deleting a book) you will most likely ruin the databases for the metadata, number of books, etc. Instead, clone the library to another partition or drive and do your modifications there! Also, if you do manage the content of your Ebook reader manually you're doing it the slow, hard way, unless you have one with that capacity built in, such as Kindle (in which case, USE THE KINDLE software if you're happy with it.) On Android devices I sorely miss the full-blown Calibre. There are no good alternatives to it for this OS. They all require you to manually sort your book collection, which is difficult to even find in the Android file system and its persnickety icon based interface with all those slide and tap and touch the screen things (shudder)! I'd prefer an automatic Library where, when you open your Calibre application, you could sort your books, etc. as in the full Linux edition (and I suppose there's one for you few remaining Windows users, as well.) One day we'll have Android with NO ICONS and NO TOUCHSCREEN needed, I hope. Ubuntu almost had a solution... Calibre CAN modify original files, saving the originals. With this feature, you can convert books to other formats, MOBI to EPUB, etc, and you can optimize them for whichever reading device you prefer, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, etc. You can even modify an EPUB that has no chapter structure, and add a table of contents, if you want. You can edit a book with a lot of typos in it to correct them. As to others objections to its "clunky" look, YOU CAN MODIFY the interface however you like, removing icons/shortcuts you don't use, selecting wide or narrow screen format, etc. Yes, it CAN be slow if you try to add 100 books to an ereader device (also not recommended.) That's not Calibre, that's the DEVICE speed holding you back! If Calibre were slow in moving books, when you clone a library of 100 or even 500 books with it, it's almost instantaneous. I've done it. You COULD also do this using File Manager on your Linux based computer, of course. (I don't think you can do it with Windows, which is one of its many flaws.)
Reply written ago
A multifunctional program, even too much. I used it for a very long time until a very unpleasant situation when Calibre Viewer (viewer is for read) silently modified my EPUB files. The author of the program does not consider this a problem :-( https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1896392 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1821122 So keep in mind.
It's the best book reader available on the internet. If you don't want to use library to open your books you can change default epub application to "The calibre e-book viewer" which just opens book.
It is the best ebook app. I expect it to grow and may be add AI features like DeepLearning and Natural Language Processing.
users don't understand why calibre is making a copy of the files and stupidly getting angry but alright. It's simple because if the software tried to keep track of files all around the filesystem it would be a nightmare to try and keep track of them: user manually renaming the files, moving them, deleting, etc it would only remain the metadata but file would be gone. So Calibre was designed to prevent this kind of stuff and this way is better for synchronizing the library. Calibre is necessarily workarounding a filesystem issue. It's a simple concept to understand.
The biggest issue with Calibre is it's UX/UI.