Despite its many detractors, e-books are here to stay. Nearly all published books are now available in electronic format, and many others can only be read in their paperless form. To keep your growing e-book collection nicely organized, you need a tool like Calibre, an open-source and comprehensive e-book manager packed with a wealth of amazing tools.
Having been a faithful Calibre user and fan for many years now, it is always a joy to review a new version. This one is mainly devoted to improve its e-book viewer, a tool you can use to read your e-books on your PC or tablet and to check its structure or its look and feel after editing it. Yes, because Calibre is not only an amazing e-book management tool, but also an e-book editing tool, an e-book conversion tool, an e-book cataloging tool, etc.
Primarily, Calibre allows you organize your e-book collection, to keep it neatly cataloged, and to add to your books a new cover, a wealth of basic and custom metadata, and whatever information you may need to identify and locate your e-books. As an example, I created a custom yes/no “Read” metadata item to know at a glance which titles I’ve already read and which I haven’t opened yet. It allows you to create your own series for your books, so that you can easily locate and select all your Pulitzer prizes or your “Game of Thrones” titles. When it comes to sorting your e-books by author’s name and/or title, Calibre offers you an automatic sorting feature that will try to sort in alphabetical order your titles and author names. However, it still finds it hard to apply the correct rules to non-English surnames (i.e., names with more than one surname) and titles (initial articles and other non-sortable elements). You’re allowed to modify the proposed result at any time, but if Calibre thinks that you’ve applied the “wrong” sorting rule, it will simply paint the square in red and ignore your preferences.
What makes Calibre stand out from all of its competitors is its versatility and its many extra utilities. It connects to nearly any model of e-book device in the market, allowing you to export the books you wish to read to your portable e-reader with just one click. It will let you know at a glance which titles on your library are already on your device, and manage both libraries using just one tool. If you’re exporting a title in a format that your device can’t manage (say, an EPUB title to a Kindle), it will be automatically converted on the fly to the format required (MOBI, in this case). You can also use this utility at any time just to convert titles between all the most common e-book formats – Calibre will keep one single record with links to all its available formats. You can also edit your EPUB books here in its amazing e-book editor. Its WYSIWYG design allows any user to modify their e-books at will without the need of any specific skills.
Another excellent feature worth mentioning is the Get Books option. It will search for the e-books you’re looking for in the most common online bookshops and libraries, allowing you to download or purchase them directly from your personal e-book library. There are many other things you can do from Calibre, such as sharing your books or add plug-ins to it, but I’ll leave those for you to explore. If you are a serious e-book reader and collector, Calibre is all you’ll ever need to manage your personal library.
v4.3.0 [Nov 8, 2019]
New features:
- Viewer: Halve the time taken to prepare large EPUB files for first open.
- Viewer: Add an optional toolbar with common actions turn it on under Preferences->Miscellaneous.
- Viewer: Change the default color scheme to "System" which matches the colors used by the rest of calibre/the operating system. Also means the colors change automatically when the system color theme changes.
- Viewer: Add a keyboard shortcut ; to go to a book location or position.
- Viewer: Add a control to easily reset the interface to defaults.
- Viewer: Allow also using --open-at with book positions.
- Viewer: Add command line option to force reloading of books.
Bug fixes:
- Content server: Fix conversion of comics not working.
- Book details: Allow right click to copy author links and identifiers.
- Book details: Fix removal of identifiers via right click not working.
- Book details: Fix clicking on tags etc not generating exact match searches.
- Viewer: When resizing and the resizing back to the old size ensure we return to the same page in paged mode.
- Duplicates dialog: Sort sub-list of matching books already in calibre by author for easier inspection.
- PDF Output: Fix links that go to destinations in the same file not working.
- Viewer: Fix changes to keyboard shortcuts not being applied until viewer is restarted.
- DOCX Input: Fix AlternateContent blocks rendering both choice and fallback sections.
- Windows: fix UTF-16/truncated output when reporting unhandled exceptions.
- Viewer: Fix mouse wheel not working when mouse is over page margins.
- Linux: Install bash completions as individual files for each calibre binary.
- Content server: Fix download button not working with non-ebook formats.
- Fix a crash in popup completion lists if the mouse is over the list and list is scrolled with the keyboard.
- Viewer: Fix rare exception when navigating to a CFI.
- Viewer: Ignore failures printing console message when the viewer is launched with broken stderr.
- Amazon metadata: Fix failure to get published date from audible book pages.
- Viewer: Fix shortcuts preferences not being translated.
- Tag browser: Fix incorrect text color when using dark theme for hovered item.
- Fix crash if canceling the icon theme download while covers are downloading.
- Viewer: Fix non-ASCII content in stylesheets not being interpreted correctly.
- Viewer/Content server: Fix history for completion popups such as search bars not being stored correctly.
- PDF Output: When a link with a fragment points to a non-existent anchor link to the top of the file instead of not linking at all.
- PDF Output: Fix standard svg fullscreen image markup not working.
- PDF Output: Fix some books with full screen images failing to convert.
Improved news sources:
- Clarin.
- Various Polish news sources.
Organize and read e-books on PC effortlessly with support for multiple formats
