Quote:
Originally Posted by Goblingoddess
Quite soon, like around this year's Christmas season, the Kindle will no longer corner the market on wireless available of books. Sony is coming out with a new reader just in time for the holidays with wireless capability. It will run approx $400 and I am considering it. I have the 505 and I love it over the Kindle because it can read all my pdf files which was a major sell point for me. I like the idea of saving all my personal writing files as pdf's and I can take them with me instead of a huge chunky binder.
Btw, I'm curious, but what's Calibre? I've heard about this but I'm not sure what it is.
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The short version is that it is a library management system for keeping track of your books on your PC, and then sending them to your book reading device. There are many features that it provides.
First, a caveat. Many of the options assume that your books do not have copy protection (DRM). Calibre can actually re-publish the books to update them and this only works if your books don't have copy protection or if you are willing and able to remove the copy protection. Anyway:
1) Fixing the book meta-data. Many of my books, including some of the older books from Baen have missing or incorrect meta-data. For example, my Kindle expects books to store the author as Lastname, First even though it displays it as First Lastname. If you want it to sort correctly you may need to correct the author name.
2) Changing the title. I have quite a few book series on my reader. It is quite a pain trying to figure out which order they are meant to be read in. I usually go to wikipedia and figure out the sort order and retitle them. For example, someone here (mountain bear??) pointed out the free continuing time series by Daniel Keys Moran (google his web site). I had read this many years ago so I rushed to get it in ebook form. Any way, I prefixed each title as shown- CTime 1: Book title 1; CTime 2: Book title 2. This helps me keep track of them and ends a lot of frustration.
3) Format conversion. I also have a book reader on the way for my son. His reader doesn't handle the same formats. However Calibre can convert easily from one format to another so he can read all of my books. Or some authors only publish their free works in pdf, so you need to switch them to a format that is more reasonable for an e-reader.
4) Clean up. If you are a bit more adventurous, you can use Calibre to clean up books. When I get a poorly edited or formatted book I can switch it to epub format. This is a zip file that includes HTML. I can then open the file(s) in my favorite plaintext editor (Notepad ++) and directly edit the book itself. Finally I reconvert the book back to my reader's preferred format.
5) Newspapers, magazines, RSS. I don't know too much about this since I prefer to consume this type of stuff on my computer. However, many folks use their reader to keep up to date on the news. I understand you can use Calibre to set up automated downloads from certain web sites. It is then easy to quickly update your reader with a 'book' that is the current news.