You might be tempted to look for some way to remove DRM from e-books in order to facilitate conversion. A word of warning about doing this: In the USA there is a law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This law makes it illegal to circumvent a copy protection system (DRM is such a copy protection system). It also makes it illegal to produce or distribute tools that aid in circumvention. Not everyone lives in the USA, but many countries have similar laws. Check your local laws and realize that even though you may only want to read an EPUB that you’ve legally purchased on your Kindle, it may not be legal to do so. If you don’t like this silliness—and I don’t—then speak up to whoever in your country makes the relevant laws.

Task 3: The e-book editor

Calibre includes a tool specifically for editing e-books. The e-book editor supports the EPUB and AZW3 formats. Right click any book in your library and select ‘Edit book’ to open the editor.

The editor is very useful if there are typos you wish to correct or layout changes you’d like to make. It’s invaluable when trying to clean up a book that just won’t convert quite how you want. Don’t be fooled though, the editor isn’t only for simple tasks, it’s capable of handling even the most complex of layouts.

In addition to including the features you’d expect from a text editor (syntax highlighting, line numbers, and regular expression based find/replace) it also supports a large number of features specific to e-books:

• Live preview
• Table of contents editor
• Embedded font support including subsetting
• Smarten punctuation
• Remove unused CSS
• Error checking
• Much, much more

Task 4: Downloading news

This feature of calibre is often overlooked. Integrated into calibre is the ability to download news from a variety of sources. As of this writing 1543 sources (‘recipes’) from all over the world, including both free and paid content, are supported. The real advantage of having calibre manage your news subscriptions is that once downloaded the content will be formatted for reading on your e-book reader. However, you can still read the news right on your computer. If you’re going to be reading the downloaded news on an e-book reader it’s best to go into ‘Preferences’, select ‘Behavior’ and set the ‘Preferred output format’ in General options to the preferred format for your e-book reader. This would be AZW3 for Kindle, and EPUB for the Kobo and Nook.