Calibre is for Readers!
Calibre is a
Free App that every eBook owner should have. As a reader, I get great mileage out of Calibre.
Kobo,
Nook, iBooks, all use ePub format, but Kindle does not. If you own a Kindle,
you might buy a book on a great sale from Kobo or Barnes & Noble, but
Kindle will not open it. Likewise, if you own a Nook reader or a Kobo, you are
limited to buying books from them because they will not open a Kindle book.
There is a solution to this problem, as you will see. A book I wanted was on 50% sale at the Kobo site. No problem. I
signed into Kobo and bought the book. The book was saved to the Kobo library for my account.
I went into my Kobo Library, selected the new book, and clicked on export. The book was downloaded to my download directory on my desktop. I signed off Kobo.
I navigated to my download directory. I clicked on the book. My FREE Adobe Digital Editions app on my desktop opened it. It now appeared in the Adobe Digital Editions library directory. Adobe Digital Editions is another very useful FREE app.
I opened my Calibre program and imported the ePub file from the Adobe Digital Editions directory into Calibre. I used Calibre to convert the ePub into Mobi, and emailed the Mobi file to my Kindle. The whole process took five minutes, and I was reading the book on my Kindle!
Books that you get from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and
most sellers, (including Amazon), are often DRM protected. This is especially true of books from
traditional publishers.
This means that when you try to open the book in a reader for which it was not sold, the warning you see below pops up. You are unable to open the book.
This means that when you try to open the book in a reader for which it was not sold, the warning you see below pops up. You are unable to open the book.
The book I bought from Kobo was DRM protected. Since I
paid for the book, and all I wanted was to be able to read it, I opted to
remove the DRM.
In order to open the ePub book and convert it to Mobi,
Calibre must remove the DRM first. It must have the right plugin installed to
do so. Good news is that Calibre and its plugins are all FREE and widely available on
the internet.
You can spend money buying the DRM removal tools, but that would be
foolish when the best of them are available for FREE as open source apps. DRM can be removed from Nook, Kobo, and Kindle books using these Calibre plugins.
Calibre is also a fantastic reader, organizer, and
manager for books. It can organize your books in just about any order you want. It can open dozens of file formats. It can convert from just
about any format into another.
If you try to convert from one format to another and you can’t, you can usually find a plugin that will enable you to do the task.
If you try to convert from one format to another and you can’t, you can usually find a plugin that will enable you to do the task.
Another great advantage of the app is that you can use it to copy books from your Kindle to the computer or portable drive and vice versa. There are also internet instructions on how to transfer books from Calibre to your iPad.
Calibre is made for Windows, Mac, and Linux! If you are a user of, let’s say Ubuntu, you can download Calibre straight from your Ubuntu apps manager.
You can get a Dropbox account and back up your
Calibre library so you can access it from any device. I have my Calibre
library also stored in an external drive. You might think that
is silly, but you never know what companies like Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble may do in the future.
Your books should be forever yours. I am paranoid about sellers going out of business or denying me the books I paid for, in the future, for whatever reason.
Your books should be forever yours. I am paranoid about sellers going out of business or denying me the books I paid for, in the future, for whatever reason.
I have not even touched the tip of the iceberg in terms
of what Calibre can do. I honestly can say that it is
the most useful tool I can have both as a reader. I could write another post on how useful it is to me as a writer.
No, I do not work for Calibre nor make any money from
recommending it. I benefit from the app
and feel every reader should too. It is an Open Source App; this means that it
is totally FREEEE!!!!
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Thank you very much. I really appreciate the books and the information.
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