Above the ‘Download metadata’ button and to the top, right of the cover image is the ‘Download cover’ button. If the book doesn’t have a cover showing or if you don’t like the cover, click it to try to have calibre download one from the internet.

Now that you have your e-books in calibre there are a few different ways to find specific e-books in your library. Direct Searching is one of the fastest ways. Above the book list there is a Search field. Think of it like having Google built into calibre. Just type a few key words into the Search field. Try the author, title, series, or anything else from the e-book’s metadata. E-books matching your search terms are shown as filtered results. The other e-books are still in your library, but they won’t be shown if the search expression doesn’t find them.

You can also use the tag browser to search your library. Along the left side of the window is the tag browser. If you don’t see anything to the left of the book list, click the luggage tag icon in the lower right of the main window; a list will appear to the left of the library. It allows you to see specific subsets of your library. Clicking the icon to the left of each tag allows you to display just the e-books matching that criteria. A plus searches for all books that match and a minus searches for all books that don’t match. Notice that as you enable items in the tag browser search queries are added to the Search field. The tag browser is really just an easy way to create search queries. You could type the query directly into the Search field and see the same result.

Task 2: Conversion

This is arguably the most useful, and most complex, feature calibre offers. Three of the most popular e-book readers today are the Amazon Kindle, the Kobo and the Barnes & Noble Nook. Unfortunately, not all of these devices read the same kinds of e-books. This mess is like the one in the music world where you might find such formats as WMA, MP3 and AAC. In e-books, the same confusion exists—the Tower of eBabel, as some call it.

2.1: Background

If you are only buying e-books from the store associated with your reader—for example, Amazon’s Kindle Store or Kobo’s Store—you don’t need to worry about any of this. But there are very good reasons why you should know about the major formats, what formats your reader supports, and how to convert between formats.