Quote:
Originally Posted by bcgirl
Btw, do I or would I need Calibre software, what will it do for me? Is this only for Amazon ebooks?
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People use Calibre instead of Sony software to manage their ebook collection because it's easier and more powerful than the Sony software. If most of your books are purchased from Sony or Kobo then you wouldn't really need Calibre. But Calibre is useful for your putting your own materials on the reader. Most of the materials on my reader are not store bought books. This is how I and others use Calibre:
(Note:Calibre doesn't work for library books.)
- A lot of people use Calibre to have the flexibility to getting books from BN and Amazon to the reader. (Removing drm and conversion.) Really, without DRM you are free to shop anywhere. People also use it to put their third party drm-free books on their readers.
- I use Calibre to manage a lot of the PDFs to put on the reader. Using Calibre, I can change the metadata (title, author for example) of the PDFs so I can sort them correctly.
- I like to download articles from web sites to read to my reader (aka timeshift web reading). It's easier on the eye. The service I use is instapaper.com. It's a service that lets you save web sites and then download them as epubs. I actually download them as .mobi format - Kindle's format - and then use Calibre to convert it to epub because the .mobi format comes out better. I use Calibre to transfer it to the Reader.
Example: reading Nytimes.com, I see a lot of interesting article on the front page. I open the articles and then save them using Instapaper and put them in a folder called Frontpage. I then download the Frontage folder as an epub (or mobi). It's like I have a book of all the front page articles.
One cool thing that Calibre does is that you can give content tags. Sony will automatically use the tags to put the content in a collection. For example if I tag the Frontpage epub as 'News' the Frontpage epub will automatically be put into the News collection. If the collection doesn't exist it will be created.
There are a lot of cool features of Calibre I don't know about. For example, you can automate downloading from Instapaper (I just download manually). You can also automate downloading of RSS feed into the reader. (I don't know how to do that).
- If you convert Kindle to epub, there are a lot of control over the look and feel of the epub. Same for importing epubs. You can embed your own fonts for example.
Hope this helps. I highly recommend looking into Calibre. It has a good epub manual that'll help you get started.