Calibre E-book Management calls itself, “the one stop solution to all your e-book needs.” Calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by e-book users for users of e-books. It has a host of features for digital editions of books, called digitions, including:

• Library Management
• E-book Conversion
• Syncing to e-book reader devices

Library Management

Calibre helps manage your e-book collection for you by organizing your e-book files by the book name even though it might be in several different formats.  Calibre can also sort the books in your library by: Title, Author, Date Added, Date Published, Size, Rating, and Series fields, much the same way iTunes can.

In addition, Calibre allows users to add meta data like tags and comments.  Tags are a, “flexible system for categorizing your collection however you like,” and comments are, “a long form entry that you can use for book description, notes, reviews.”

You can easily search your book collection for a particular book. Calibre supports searching any and all of the fields mentioned above. You can construct advanced search queries by clicking the helpful “Advanced search” button to the left of the search bar. Search results can then be exported to your hard drive to create custom arrangements of files.

Finally, Calibre retrieve metadata on its own from the Internet using title, author, and ISBN information. It can download various types of information a pictures of book covers for viewing thumbnails, automatically. Its metadata system is written using plugins so that different types of metadata sources can be supported in the future.

E-book Conversion

One of the biggest and most popular uses of Calibre is its conversion function.  It can convert a huge number of formats and it supports all major e-book formats.

Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC**, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, TXT

Output Formats: EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, TCR, TXT

The conversion engine has lots of powerful features. It can rescale all font sizes, ensuring the output e-book is readable no matter what font sizes the input document uses. It can automatically detect/create book structure, like chapters and Table of Contents. It can even insert the digition’s metadata into a “Book Jacket” at the start of the book.

Syncing to e-Book Reader Devices

Calibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding support for different e-reader devices easy. It can support a large number of devices, including the ONY PRS 300/500/505/600/700/900, Barnes & Noble Nook, Cybook Gen 3/Opus, Amazon Kindle 1/2/DX, Entourage Edge, Longshine ShineBook, Ectaco Jetbook, BeBook/BeBook Mini, Irex Illiad/DR1000, Foxit eSlick, PocketBook 360, Italica, eClicto, Iriver Story, Airis dBook, Hanvon N515, Binatone Readme, Teclast K3, SpringDesign Alex, Kobo Reader, various Android phones and the iPhone/iPad. Syncing supports updating metadata on the device from metadata in the library and creation of collections on the device based on the tags defined in the library. If a book has more than one format available, calibre automatically chooses the best format when uploading to the device. If none of the formats is suitable, calibre will automatically convert the e-book to a format suitable for the device before sending it.