How to use Calibre as a viewer only?

[zDocwho]

Hi,

I have been given a huge collection of books, papers and docs in various formats like pdf, epub, lit, among many others. I simply want to use Calibre to view these without adding to a library, at least initially. Later on I might create a library and catalogue the books I am interested in, but for now, all I want is a viewer that can handle numerous formats.

Can Calibre do this and if not, can anyone recommend a viewer or small set of viewers that can handle all the popular ebook and document formats?

Thanks in advance.

[Adoby]

It should be very easy to use only the viewer in calibre. Just associate the file formats with the ebook viewer.

You can read more about it here: http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/viewer.html

However you might benefit from the knowledge that the calibre ebook viewer actually is a epub viewer. But since calibre has the ability to convert between different formats, calibre can convert other formats to epub "on the fly" and let you read the resulting file in the calibre viewer that way.

But you may improve the reading experience by using the tools in calibre to make a better conversion by making adjustments to the process. You can adjust things like layout, line breaks, paragraph spacing, page breaks, indentation, fonts, table of contents, headings, cover and other things.

Pdf is a special case. It is very difficult to convert. I personally have standardised on just epub and pdf. I convert everything to epub, except for pdfs, and leave pdfs as they are. That way I only have to be able to read epub and pdf.

So my main use of calibre is to fix metadata, convert to epub and then send the epub to my reading device. I don't actually use calibre for much else, but I still keep my books there, as a backup. But I only keep the books in calibre as pdf or epub, all other formats are converted and then deleted. I also save the original unconverted formats outside calibre. Good to have if I discover that something went wrong in the conversion.

[taosaur]

The last time I was looking for a multi-format reader for PC, I settled on FBReader. It's light on system resources (and therefor fast) and highly configurable. For PDFs you're probably going to want a dedicated PDF reader--I use Sumatra PDF, again mainly because it's lightweight and fast.

In my experience, when you try to use Calibre "only" for a simple task, whether reading or one-off conversion or loading some books on a mobile device, you're in for headaches. When you're ready to really dig in and organize a large library and straighten out metadata and keep devices synced (and/or set up content fetching and serving, which I haven't tried), you'll appreciate that Calibre is as powerful as it is, but until you get to that point it can feel like learning how to operate a front-end loader in order to drive in a nail.

[alexo]

Sorry for necroing the thread, but it seems that there are several multiformat "viewer-only" solutions available.

In particular, the following seem to fit the bill:
- Sumatra PDF (already mentioned above)
- STDU viewer