Introduction

Calibre is an open source e-book management tool. Simply put, calibre allows you to organize your e-book library, convert e-books to various formats, and interact with your e-book reader, all in an intuitive and friendly manner. It is compatible with Microsoft Windows – XP, Vista, 7, and 8 – as well as Apple’s OS X (and various flavors of Linux). It was created by Kovid Goyal, who still leads its development. A number of people around the world, including myself, contribute to calibre’s development. Throughout this guide and the online docs you will see ‘calibre’ instead of ‘Calibre’. That’s the convention Kovid chose, so that’s what we use.

• Calibre organizes your library as a database so you can find the book you want when you want it. Calibre easily handles any size of library, and can manipulate e-book metadata – title, author, rating, etc..
• Calibre converts between multiple e-book formats.
• Calibre supports a growing number of e-book readers, including Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and many others.

• The graphical user interface (GUI). This is the typical mode of interacting with your library. All of calibre’s principal functionality is available through the GUI.
• A collection of command line (CLI) utilities for advanced calibre operations. For example, the command line tools are used by the ManyBooks service to convert on an as-needed basis.
• Additional GUI tools such as an e-book reader and an e-book editor. These tools can be accessed via the main GUI or directly.

The Main Library Window, aka the GUI

Once the welcome wizard finishes you will be presented with the main application window. There are a few components I would like to bring to your attention. The central piece is the book list. This takes up the majority of the window and displays the books in a table. Just above the book list you will see the search area (more on this later) and above that, the tool bar. When you connect a supported e-book reader a ‘Device’ icon will appear next to the ’Library’ icon in the tool bar. You can switch between viewing books in your library and books on your e-book reader by clicking on their respective icons.

The panel along the right of the window shows details about the currently selected book, including its cover. If you double click anywhere in the detail area (including on the book cover) another window will open exposing more information about the book. Clicking on any blue text in this area will perform an action specific to the information. For example, clicking the author’s name will open your web browser and search Wikipedia for information about the author.

At the bottom right of the window there are four icons and the word “Jobs”. Clicking any of these icons will toggle a given view state in the GUI. From left to right: