If you have a Kindle, the de facto way to get books on your eReader to buy them from Amazon and send them straight to your device. That’s fine, but if you like getting your eBooks from other sources, like your local library or a third-party bookstore, you’ll want another way to manage all your books.

It’s there that Caliber Think of it as an open-source iTunes to handle all things e-books, but without a digital storefront. Once your books are all loaded into the app, you can manage metadata for author, title, publication date, and other information you might need to keep things tidy.

Integration

There’s good news and bad news – you’ll need to do a bit of work to set up Calibre, but once all that work is done you’ll have a nice little hub to view, manage and sync all your e-books to your liking. . You can even have it automate tasks that you’d rather not have to worry about doing manually.

After downloading the app to your computer, tablet, or phone, make sure you know what format you want all your ebooks to be in before you start adding them to Calibre. So if you’re using a Kindle, you’ll want to convert any ebook to a Kindle-compatible format like AZW3 or KFX, or for a Kobo, you can just stick with the standard epub.

Either way, once you know what file formats your device supports and what format you want to use, go to Caliber’s preferences and select Behaviour then set the preferred output format to the file type that best suits your device.

Then go back to the Preferences menu and select Add Books below Import / Export The second tab should be titled Adding actionsthen check the box indicating Automatically convert added books to preferred output format.

To the right of that is a tab that says Automatic addition, which you can use to let Caliber monitor a particular folder for ebooks and automatically add them directly to your library, then convert them without you having to do anything.

Once you’ve taken care of the automated stuff, it’s time to play around with some plugins to give Caliber some extra functionality.

Finally free

If you want to transfer eBooks from the Amazon bookstore to your Caliber library, either for safekeeping or to transfer to a non-Amazon device, you will need to remove Amazon’s DRM from the files. This will ensure that non-Amazon devices and software, like Calibre, can read and modify the files. To be clear, DRM removal software should only be used on eBooks that you have purchased for personal use. It must not be used to infringe the copyright of the author and/or publisher.

To install the DeDRM plugin, just download .zip file from Github, and unzip the file. From there, go to Caliber plugins menu under Preferences and choose Load plugin from file.

From there, select the unzipped folder and select the new zip file inside (don’t unzip this one). You should receive a notification that the plugin has been installed and be prompted to restart Calibre.

After that, you will need to configure it, which is simple. If you’re using a Kindle, you’ll need to enter your Kindle’s serial number, which can be found under Content and Devices on Amazon.

picture perfect

If you like having all your shows, movies, and books to have all the right information and look good on whatever device you watch them on, you’ll need a few plugins to manage your ebooks metadata. To find them all, just go back to the plugins menu and select “Get New Plugins” at the bottom.

High Resolution Kindle Covers is an easy way to find high resolution versions of your eBook covers. If you’re not happy with the cover of a particular book and want to exchange it for another, or if the one your book comes with doesn’t look right on your device, it’s just a click away. right to put it away.

Quality Control is a handy plugin that lets you easily scan all the eBooks in your library against a number of parameters, to find issues that Caliber might have missed. You can use it to find duplicate titles, books you haven’t rated, or if any of your book covers are below your ideal resolution. If you are a metadata fanatic, this is the plugin for you.

These aren’t the only plugins you can install to boost Caliber’s capabilities, but it’s a good start. As you build your library, you might notice a thing or two that just isn’t right for you. If that happens, check out Caliber’s plugins section and see if some clever tinkerer has found a way to alleviate your woes.

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