What do you use Calibre For?

[morriss003]

I've used Calibre in the past to convert from one format to another, but from the posts I read recently it seems to have gotten a lot more sophisticated. Please educate me. What do you use Calibre for? Thanks.

[Rylon]

I use it to manage the books on my Kindle that I don't buy. (I.e., got them from Project Guttenberg.)

[BeccaPrice]

I use calibre to manage all my books, purchased and free. I've got a column set up to indicate whether I've read the book or not. I edit the metadata all the time. I use it to install the books on my kindle, and to set up collections with the Kindle collections manager. Basically, I use it for everything except reading the books.

[Sydney's Mom]

I use it:

To keep track of my books by genre, read or unread status, authors, series, publisher, date of publications, date I acquired the book, . . .

To backup my ebooks (by putting my Calibre folder in Dropbox)

To find new books to read, at the best price

To see what I have read in the last month, year

To convert books to another format

I'm sure I have left out a lot. I just know I couldn't live without it.

[AlbertaCowboy]

I use it for all my books.
I never liked Sony's software at all, and since I discovered those wonderful little third party plugins, I use Calibre exclusively for all of my book management.
The biggest benefit of Calibre to me, is the ability to do epub-epub conversions to format them the way I like (Yes, I know, epub-epub is EVIL, but I just don't have the patience to learn how to do things in Sigil, plus I'm lazy).
I also love the way I can change the tagging and series metadata.
Actually, I pretty much love everything about Calibre.

[Aleyst]

I use Calibre for:

• Storing all my books
• Managing what's on my Kindle
• Picking books for my iPad (Because, Who really wants to store a bunch of books in iTunes)
• Storing and managing knitting & crochet patterns (Converting from the web for my kindle.)
• Offline Fanfiction

Stuff like that, It's pretty darn handy.

[yoho]

Originally Posted by Aleyst

I use Calibre for:

• Storing all my books
• Managing what's on my Kindle
• Picking books for my iPad (Because, Who really wants to store a bunch of books in iTunes)
• Storing and managing knitting & crochet patterns (Converting from the web for my kindle.)
• Offline Fanfiction

Stuff like that, It's pretty darn handy.

thanks for your sharing.

[caleb72]

I use Calibre as my library and to some extent my reading management.

I use tags (for genre and sub-genre) and custom columns to include whether the books are read/unread, page and word counts, labelling when I'm intending to read a book for planning, whether I paid for the book or got it for free.

Additionally, I use it to move books and cover images to my Kindle and manage the Kindle content as well (I sometimes remove books from my Kindle through the Calibre interface).

The other day, I wanted to look at all the zombie books that I'd downloaded as freebies because I was getting birthday gift ideas for a friend of mine. I know he likes zombies and he's unlikely to have trawled the internet for indie offerings. A simple click on the tag for zombies and there I have it. The books pop up and I can start purchasing.

Obviously, I use Calibre for conversion as well. All my books are stored in mobi and epub so I'm as future-proofed as I can be. My library is in Dropbox so that I can access books from the back-end of the library from work as well as home and even from my Kindle/Blackberry.

I also use Calibre to store the books that I make up for my own benefit from web resources and my own work - pasting recipes into Sigil, lyrics for songs I'm working on, crochet patterns. I also use the supplied reader as a quick check on what I've been working on in Sigil.

I have multiple libraries: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Libraries where I keep copies of books that I've bought for other people (so I can keep repurchasing the same book for the same person). I even have a specific Delphi Classics library as I'm slowly deconstructing what I've purchased there to store individually in my fiction library.

The Kindle is my patron saint of reading, but Calibre is my saviour.

[taosaur]

I've had a real hate/gratitude relationship with Calibre. It's a volunteer program, and there's nothing else that covers the ground it does, so I'm glad there's something. Whenever I actually try to use it, though, it's exasperating. I'm always reminded of "The Entity" from Southpark (NSFW). No matter what minor task you want to accomplish, Calibre assumes you want it to have total control of every book on your hard drive and are never planning on using any other software (including Windows Explorer) for any related purpose again. It really is like iTunes for ebooks ಠ_ಠ

When you do have more than a few dozen ebooks that you want to get organized with metadata and you're committed to using Calibre to do it, it's mostly great. For anything short of that, though, like just format-shifting files that are already where you want them, the process will be anything but intuitive and you'll likely spend as much time undoing everything you didn't want Calibre to do as actually performing the simple operation you installed it to accomplish.

[Ntsimp]

I've only ever used it to convert downloads from the MR library in other formats to epub. And although it does a great job of that, it's somewhat unwieldy to use, creating a separate directory for each book!
I realize Calibre has a zillion features I know nothing about. I understand why it might be useful for managing ebooks for a Kindle or similar, which don't seem (I admit ignorance) to allow one to organize files in a hierarchy of folders. And of course there's the DRM-removal plugins. Not an issue for me; I've never had a DRMed file.
I just use Konqueror to copy my books to my Story HD.

[tecweston]

I use it to manage all my books. I buy from Amazon, Kobo, and B&N, and then import them into Calibre, strip the DRM, and fix whatever formatting issues need fixing. I prefer my books to have justified text, no spaces between paragraphs, and no embedded fonts so I can use the Malabar font on my Nook.

The worst is when a book has no chapter breaks, which means I need to go into Sigil and add them in.

[elcreative]

Originally Posted by taosaur

I've had a real hate/gratitude relationship with Calibre. It's a volunteer program, and there's nothing else that covers the ground it does, so I'm glad there's something. Whenever I actually try to use it, though, it's exasperating. I'm always reminded of "The Entity" from Southpark (NSFW). No matter what minor task you want to accomplish, Calibre assumes you want it to have total control of every book on your hard drive and are never planning on using any other software (including Windows Explorer) for any related purpose again. It really is like iTunes for ebooks ಠ_ಠ

When you do have more than a few dozen ebooks that you want to get organized with metadata and you're committed to using Calibre to do it, it's mostly great. For anything short of that, though, like just format-shifting files that are already where you want them, the process will be anything but intuitive and you'll likely spend as much time undoing everything you didn't want Calibre to do as actually performing the simple operation you installed it to accomplish.

You can actually ignore calibre's own library (think of it as an automatic backup) and use the save to disk option to keep everything how you want it... it'll automatically title and arrange in folders just the way you want it to with a regex expression... and if you don't want to learn them then just drop into the calibre forum where there's a vast number already done and ready to use...

[zhanzr]

Calibre is my only ebook management software now. She is my book shelf keeper.

1. Convert other formats to .mobi, .epub, .azw formats which are suit for Kindle Touch. Reading pdf format on the Kindle Touch is very frustrating.
2. Schedule periodical magazine downloading. The magazines I am reading are:
Foreign Policy, IEEE Spectrum, The Atlantic.

I know that Calibre has a bunch of other functions. However, I am satisfied now.

[Synamon]

I use calibre to:

• Keep track of all my ebooks with metadata including: book description, the device(s) the books are on, if I've read them, series data (added to the title when I transfer the books to a Kindle), if I have an audiobook version, if the book was a freebie, etc.
  
• Strip DRM with the third party plugins.
  
• Convert ebooks I buy in epub to mobi, or to attach a cover to mobi books that didn't have one.
  
• Sideload or email books.
  
• Organize all my books into collections with the Kindle Collections plugin.
  
• Fetch and email comic strips and daily news to my husband's Kindle.

[Ravensknight]

I use calibre as my ebook manager. I use the plugins to strip drm, and I do epub-epub conversions so my text starts out large for my 505.

For things like tags, dates read, reviews, ratings, etc, I tend to use Goodreads. But since I just found the Goodreads plugin, that might be changing real soon