aNewDomain.net: When it comes to eBooks, you typically think of Amazon, Barnes&Noble or Apple. There’s also Project Gutenberg, one of many eBook sources that provide you with eBook and PDF original sources. How to integrate them all?
Calibre is my freeware choice of the week. Available online for Windows, Mac and Linux, it’s a free way to organize all of these eBooks and documents into a single neat library.
After you download and open Calibre, it will ask you to choose where you would like your library to be located — and where it should scan for eBook files.
After it completes the scan, you’ll find your books are categorized and indexed based on filename information and various other metatags. For instance, such standard file types as ePub employ the author and publishing date as metatag information. Calibre will take advantage of all this metadata. And it will even let you use it to add new metadata to a file.
One of the best features of Calibre is its ability to run a Calibre content server. This allows you to have access to your books via a browser on your home network. Tweak some settings and it’s possible to make your content server accessible from the Internet, allowing full access to eBooks and documents Internet-wide.
Calibre is available as a $2.99 app for Android, too. The app lets you easily connect to your Calibre content server from your mobile device or push files wirelessly to your device from your desktop running Calibre. That’s a great feature if you’re heading on a trip. Just highlight all the books and documents you will be taking with you and send them to your device.
Calibre is a niche program, but it is great at what it does. I’ve used it to organize years’ worth of collected books and documents that I never would have had the time to do manually. And I even found a few that I forgot I owned.
Calibre is available as a paid app in Google Play, but it’s free for Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Find links to all OS versions of it here.
Based in Burma, Eric Finkenbiner is an IT pro and a senior contributor at aNewDomain.net. Follow him on Google+ and email him at EricF@aNewDomain.net.
