BooksBarbecue
Back Calibre Quick Start Guide Save as PDF
Chapters (10)
  1. Introduction
  2. The Main Library Window, aka the GUI
  3. Common Tasks
  4. Task 1: Organizing
  5. Task 2: Conversion
  6. Task 3: The e-book editor
  7. Task 4: Downloading news
  8. Task 5: Interacting with e-book readers
  9. Task 6: The e-book viewer
  10. Where to get help
  • The luggage tag toggles the tag browser (on the left of the window). More on this later.
  • The curved arrow toggles the cover flow display. Cover flow displays the book covers in a fashion similar to how a juke box lays out albums. The selected book is in the center while the neighboring covers are shown at an angle. You can navigate though the book covers with the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. The book list will still be visible under the cover flow area.
  • The nine squares in a grid toggles cover grid view. The cover grid replaces the book list with a grid of book covers. You might want to think of this as bookshelf view.
  • The book toggles seeing the details panel on the right.
  • The jobs indicator is one of the most important pieces of the GUI. This is the word ‘Jobs:’, the number next to it and the circular progress indicator. Whenever calibre is working on something (conversion, sending books to the reader, downloading news, etc.) the circular icon will spin and the number will reflect the number of jobs (activities) calibre is working on. You can click any part of the jobs indicator to show more detail about the jobs in progress.

Common Tasks

  1. Organizing your e-book library
  2. Conversion
  3. Editing e-books
  4. Downloading news from websites
  5. Dealing with devices
  6. Viewing e-books

Task 1: Organizing

The first part of organizing is getting your e-books into calibre’s library. Click the ‘Add books’ button in the tool bar at the top of the window, then select the e-books you would like calibre to import. When calibre imports your e-books it makes a copy of them in the storage location you specified during initial setup. Once you’ve added an e-book, calibre doesn’t need further access to the original file.

During an e-book import, calibre tries to read the metadata from the e-book. Metadata is information about the book that is stored within the e-book itself. Different formats support different information. Often the information is incomplete or just plain wrong. Don’t worry – calibre makes it easy to fix this. Select the book whose metadata you want to change by clicking the book title in the main window. Then click ‘Edit metadata’ on the top tool bar (to the right of the ‘Add books’ button) and the metadata editor will open.

The easy way to correct the metadata is to fill in the title and author, then click the ‘Download metadata’ button at the bottom, center of the Edit Metadata dialog. Calibre will display possible matches for the information entered. If there is more than one result select the entry that looks like the best match. A lot of information should be filled in now.