5.2: E-book reader optional configuration

There are a number of different ways you can configure calibre to interact with your device, but I’m only going to touch on the two most commonly changed options.

Open up ‘Preferences’ and click ‘Sending books to devices’. Here you can customize the save template to change where e-books are saved on your device. If you have experience with music tagging programs where you can create custom save locations this should look very familiar. If you have a device like the Kindle or Kobo this isn’t very useful and can safely be left with the default settings. If you have a device, like the Cybook Gen 3, that supports folders this is extremely useful. There are a number of variables (descriptions under the template) which can be used to change where the books are saved. Lets look at a basic example, “favorites/{title} – {authors}”. {title} will be replaced with the title of the book, {authors} will be replaced with its author and the book will be put into the favorites folder. All of the replacements that can be made in the save template are listed with descriptions under template field.

Another useful configuration change is disabling and reorganizing the supported formats. Let’s use the Cybook Gen 3 again as an example. In ‘Preferences’, click ‘Plugins’, then go to ‘Device Interface plugins’, select the ‘Cybook Gen 3 / Opus Device Interface’ and click ‘Customize plugin’. In the configuration for the device you will see a e-book format list. Here you can uncheck formats you don’t want sent to your e-book reader. You can also reorder the formats. The format at the top of the list (must be checked) will be the one used for automatic conversion when sending an e-book in an unsupported (or unchecked) format to the device.

Task 6: The e-book viewer

I’ve hinted that calibre has the ability to view e-books too. All you need to do is select the e-book you want to read and click the ‘View’ button in the tool bar to have calibre open the e-book in calibre’s e-book viewer. The viewer supports everything you might expect such as bookmarks and navigation via the table of contents (if the e-book has one). The viewer, however, cannot read e-books protected with DRM.

Where to get help

The first place to look for help is in the ‘Preferences’ dialog. All options have clear descriptions, and there are a lot of options. If you want to change something about calibre there may already be an option for it. It’s also a good idea to familiarize yourself with the preferences because parts of it, such as conversion, are just defaults and will be presented to you at different times for fine-tuning on a per e-book basis.