E-books are no longer the exception in many of our home libraries, though we tend to spread our collection among our computer, our smartphone, our laptop, and of course our favorite e-book device, just as we like having our printed books scattered all around the house. calibre is an open-source experienced cataloging tool specialized in keeping your entire e-book collection nicely organized, so you always know which books you have, in what formats, from which authors, on what subjects, etc.
calibre is open source, which means – among other things – that it is distributed for free. It gets updated very frequently, which guarantees not only that new features are constantly being added to its already extensive functionality, but also that the latest firmware of the e-book reader you connect to it is also supported. The program supports all the most widely used e-book formats and file formats that are not directly related to the e-book market, such as Word or PDF files. The same wide support is true for e-readers, allowing you to import and export e-books from and to your device seamlessly.
This amazing free tool comes with two other professional tools embedded in it that are surely worth noting. One is a comprehensive e-book conversion utility, which not only performs bulk conversions between the most common e-book formats, but also allows you to configure the conversion process (and therefore the resulting books) in a thorough and professional way. The other is the e-book editor, which will let you add or remove text from the e-book, change its cover, add a table of contents, etc., in a truly convenient WYSIWYG environment.
calibre counts with all the metadata you can imagine, but that does not prevent you from creating and adding your own. You can create new fields for new data, just as I added a “Read” field to my e-book collection – a simple tick-box to mark a book as “already read” or not. You can add your own collections and series, and thus keep all your trilogies or Booker Prizes together and make them easier to locate. You will also find a nice-to-have (yet not the best out there) reader/viewer for your e-books. This utility has improved a lot over the years, and though it may not be perfect, is a great addition to the overall functionality.
There are many other features and utilities hidden in the latest version of calibre, such as the Get Books option (to find e-books on various free and commercial online sites), the metadata and covers downloader, or the catalog builder, to take a full (and ordered) list of your books with you as an e-book so you don’t get the same title twice.
I’m sure it has transpired from this review that I’m a hopeless calibre fan – I’ve been using it for years, and I discover a new feature and a new reason to keep using it every week. That does not mean that I believe this is the ultimate perfect e-book cataloging tool, and that it just cannot get any better. Despite its amazing wealth of features and functions, I still think it has room for improvement. For instance, I would love to add to my calibre library my entire printed books collection too, but I can’t unless I associate each of them to an electronic object, i.e., an empty e-book file. Also, why can’t calibre use the original EPUB or MOBI file I download from my online store as the file that goes into my calibre library? Why does it have to make a copy of it while it could simply move it to its place in my library, forcing me to either get rid of the original file or to keep it as a duplicate or (in a more positive tone) a backup copy? These are just two of the things I’d love to see in calibre in the near future, but none of them will detract from an inch from the fact that calibre is probably the best free e-book tool out there.
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