calibre is an open source Mac utility for managing your e-books. With its help, you can read and convert your favorite e-books, fetch metadata for any of your electronic books, download the latest news articles, and so much more.
The application works with a wide variety of e-book formats, provides you with a feature-rich editor, and helps you find and download e-books from the web. You can also use this program to keep track of the latest news. Simply subscribe to a RSS feed and the app will automatically download the news to your Mac.
Another advantage is the fact that the utility comes with an efficient e-book converter. This built-in tool works fast, preserves the quality of the original files, and is very simple to handle.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of this app's design. It's not as intuitive as other Mac applications, with dozens of screens each with a certain amount of panels. You might need to waste a while to find the app panel or the setting you need. Not to mention, the application doesn't bring you a built-in help manual. So, if it's the first time you work with this type of utility, you should first check the app's homepage and read the instructions before using this program on your Mac.
Still, this application comes without a price and might prove to be of good use if you work with e-books often.
v0.9 [Sep 28, 2012]
- Wireless driver: Speed up deleting of multiple books
- E-book viewer: Add options to hide the scrollbar and show reading position in full screen mode.
- News download: Add a field to allow recipe authors to tell calibre to remove duplicate articles that a re present in more than one section from the download.
- Metadata download: Turn off the use of the published date for the earliest edition a book as the published date. The earliest edition was identified via worldcat.org, which has rather poor data, leading to the occasional incorrect result. If you want this feature back, you can turn it on again via Preferences->Metadata download.Bug Fixes:
- ODT Input: More workarounds for the image positioning markup produced by newer versions of LibreOffice.
- Metadata download dialog: Fix selected cover being changed when covers are re-sorted after download completes
- MTP driver: Ignore errors when getting the driveinfo.calibre file from the device and simply regenerate it
- E-book viewer: Use the system locale settings to display the 24/12 hour clock in full screen mode
- Content Server: Make OPDS initial page respect the fields to display tweak
- Fix regression that caused calibre to not use OPF files when adding books recursively from directories with multiple books per directory
- KF8 Output: Fix handling of input documents that have URL unsafe characters in the file names of their images.
- Fix enumeration type custom column not being merged. New news sources:
- PVP Online, Mobile Nations, The Verge and Television Without Pity by Krittika GoyalImproved news sources:
- Pubblico Giornale
- Der Spiegel
- Shortlist
- FHM UK
- Countryfile
- Cosmo UK
- The Sun UK
- NME
