Comments on: Calibre Offers Free, Cross-Platform E-book Management

By: sm

sm — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 17:48:35 +0000

How do I make the magazines or newspapers I choose from calibre fall into those catagories rather than under books on my NC?

By: sm

sm — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 17:42:55 +0000

Two part question: 1) My husband chose some newspapers from calibre to go to my NC; I don’t want them but even though I went back and put for them to stay in memory for 0 days they are still appearing today on calibre (not in my NC). How do I get rid of them totally? 2) When I choose a newspaper from calibre to go on my NC, how can I make it go under Newspapers instead of Books – same for Magazines…… Oh, and you promise these are free? Happy New Year!

By: prashanthns

prashanthns — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 10:10:36 +0000

Calibre is a great app for my new Kindle. Anything to go around Whispernet’s greed works for me!

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:00:41 +0000

I have been using Calibre for about a years now, and it works fantastic with my Sony PRS 505 and my iPod Touch.
When hooked up to a network and a wifi you can transfer your titles over to your iPod Touch using the Stanza reader.
The conversion works great to, as long as the original title is properly formated. I get a lot of titles from Gutenberg so have had some practice in that area.

I do recommend if you use multiple reading devices that this software is the way to go.

And I personally have never had any problem with it crashing.

By: Naturalnut

Naturalnut — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:34:30 +0000

I have been using Calibre (before it was called Calibre) for a couple of years now. I use it with a Sony 505 (well 3 of them actually mine and my kids) and I love it. it is especially useful for book collections and changing the metadata for each book individually and converting all kinds of formats into the one you want. Put it with Gutenburg.org and you have an insanely huge home library.

I don’t read newspapers and such so I haven’t tried the RSS feature but I am becoming curious about magazines and things.

Calibre is excellently maintained for a free (donations helpful) software. It’s creator rocks and its the best thing for multiple devices, I switched from a PDA reader to the Sony reader a while back and it converted all my unsecured MS reader format books into the Sony LRF or Epub formats. I have 1000+ ebooks so easy management is key to me.

I highly recommend it :)

By: Winter

Winter — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 10:49:25 +0000

Calibre works FINE on my vista 64 system with sony prs 505. no crashes etc….

By: mark

mark — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:56:55 +0000

Bummer. Calibre doesn’t run on Vistax64. ‘Looks like I’m left with the Mobipocket Creator and Feedbooks.com.

By: Bbusybookworm

Bbusybookworm — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:15:05 +0000

Its one of the best programs available to manage and convert ebooks between multiple formats. Its support for most dedicated readers means that its handy for people who may have multiple reading devices and content from multiple sources.

Calibre’s also handy with the iPhone that it has a built in webserver which can be used to get ebooks into Apps like Stanza,whose own PC app is not that great.

The main advantage with using something like Calibre to manage your books is that it allows you to manage multiple formats of the same book with ease, making it easy to manage multiple devices.

Kovid is also very active in developing the software, with updates coming out every week, with new features and bug fixes being rolled out regularly. I believe he is also currently working on adding email functionality to the program to allow Kindle and K2 owners to email stuff to their devices.

By: Clayton

Clayton — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:26:30 +0000

Hey Kevin! I’ve just bought a new Sony PRS-700 (should be here in a couple days). I’ve downloaded Calibre two weeks a go, tried it a little but, to be honest, could not guess what would be its big benefit, compared with the Win file system Management. To me, it’s not appealing to have another level of software between me and my files.
My use case might be peculiar: most of the files that i’m going to transfer to the ebook reader are non-protected (or DRM’d) PDF/DOC/HTML files.
I’m problably missing some thing, so I’ll wait for the device, then I’ll give Calibre a second shot and see what happens. I’ll share my experience here, soon.

Good luck with your new toy! ;)

Clayton

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:18:00 +0000

I’ve been using Calibre for about 6 months since I got my Sony Reader. It was a major influence on the purchase decision since I mostly use a Mac rather than Windows. Every time I use it there is an update, so the developer is very keen on keeping it in tip-top shape.

I mostly use the magazine web-scraping functionality to upload the Economist each week. I get the magazine delivered as well but since I got the reader I’ve not really opened the magazine once. If the Economist would offer a fully digital subscription – mp3 audio and e-book content then I’d ditch the dead-tree subscription in a heartbeat.

By: Victor

Victor — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:29:27 +0000

I have been a Calibre user for nearly 3 years now, and it has always provided a stable platform both on Windows and Mac. Before I used it with my Windows Mobile device, and now, with my Sony Reader 505 it is a fantastic way to manage the ebooks. It does not interfere with the Sony Reader software in Windows, if anything, it complements it.

Something I have found quite useful is the ability to pull metadata information using ISBN numbers for documents that are simply PDFs but do not include any other metadata. It takes a little bit of setting it up, but once it is ready, it is a no brainer to add metadata to all PDF or LRF documents I have.

By: Joe T.

Joe T. — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:05:35 +0000

Shhh. Don’t tell anyone that you can get free electronic magazines and newspapers. Or else The Man will likely put a halt to them (make it too hard to scoop up all the content via RSS).

They’re not always perfect, sometimes fail completely until someone fixes them, but there’s a big selection, way more than Kindle offers. And you can roll your own if you can’t find your fave. And add Python code too to filter and finesse problems in the RSS grab. Some magazines have always been perfect copies of the print version (except missing some pictures). That’s in the Sony Reader’s LRF format, but you can expect the constantly evolving Calibre to be equally as good in the future in .mobi (Kindle-readable) format.

OK, Calibre’s free magazines and newspapers are not as reliable as Kindle’s paid subscription versions. And they’re not nearly as convenient and easy as getting delivery over Whispernet each morning. But faithful readers/listeners of yours subscribe to your aphorism: “Free is good.”

By: Scotty

Scotty — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:49:52 +0000

In my experience it crashes a fair amount when compiling to mobipocket format (the Kindle’s only supported format.)

It also has no means of supporting the iPhone that I’m aware of (eReader and Kindle both appear to be walled gardens.)

By: vw

vw — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:34:54 +0000

Calibre is a great addition to my Sony PRS-505 and Vista machine. I dont use it for pulling rss feeds however just converting books and managing my ebook library