The latest Calibre update launched today, and it was interesting enough that I had to try it out. He's added a "Polish" option. New tool: "Polish books" that allows you to perform various automated cleanup actions on EPUB and AZW3 files without doing a full conversion. Polishing books is all about putting the shine of perfection on your ebook files. You can use it to subset embedded fonts, update the metadata in the book files from the metadata in the Calibre library, manipulate the book jacket, etc. More features will be added in the future. To use this tool, go to Preferences >Toolbar and add...

If I'm not mistaken, the last Calibre update we mentioned on TeleRead was 0.8.55, back in early June. Calibre updated to 0.9.15 this past Friday, January 19. But to keep things short and sweet here, we'll simply list the major new features of the latest release, 0.9. Do bear in mind that, according to Calibre, "many of these features were actually introduced during the lifetime of the 0.8.x series. This [update] describes new features as compared to 0.8.0. If you'd like more specific details on the latest updates, go here, and then click on the "Changelog" tab. (The following comes directly from calibre-ebook.com.) What's New in...

Many TeleReaders will be familiar with the Calibre e-book collection manager, that astonishingly powerful and ever-developing software tour de force from Kovid Goyal and his associates. For those that aren’t, Calibre is a free open source multi-platform interface which stores, and provides access to, a collection of hundreds or thousands of e-books in over a dozen different formats. It will find and display your e-books, convert them from one format to another, download cover images and metadata from the Internet, produce a list of titles and authors, and much more. The drawback with Calibre from a tablet user’s point of view is the way it stores its...

A million thank-you's to everyone who took the time out of their collective schedules to participate in our Calibre Survey over the weekend. As for the 100 101 of you who've taken the survey thus far, I'm sure you're at least somewhat curious to learn the final results. (And for those of you who may not have the slightest idea what I'm talking about, head on over to this post from last Friday, August 24.) At any rate, onto the results: We asked you to share your opinion about TeleRead's previous practice of republishing Calibre's weekly updates each Friday.  ¶ We found it particularly...

Happy Friday, TeleReaders! We've got an important question for you today, and we would truly appreciate hearing from as many of you as possible. It has to do with our previous practice of republishing Calibre's weekly updates (bug fixes, new features and so on) every Friday. We haven't yet decided if this is a practice we should continue, or halt immediately, and that's where you come in: Regardless of whether you log onto TeleRead five times a day or five times a year, we sincerely value your opinions. (Seriously. We're not joking. We really do want to know what you think.) So with that in...

We already knew it was possible to use Dropbox to host your Calibre library, or to load e-books onto any e-reader app on your iPad. But O’Reilly is going just a bit further with its own Dropbox integration feature: it is providing a way to link Dropbox to your O’Reilly account so that any e-books you buy from O’Reilly (or e-books that you choose that you’ve already purchased) are automatically synced into your Dropbox account. That will make them available on any computer or device you use with the service. Of course, you can already do this with anything...

Calibre is one of the only good open-source options for managing your e-book collection, but we all know it’s notoriously user-unfriendly. On one of the mailing lists I follow, I’ve heard from Becca Price, who is trying to do something about that. She is compiling a help file for Calibre as part of a class she was taking on how to develop help files. Becca notes that this is an entirely unofficial project, and “isn’t even quite a beta draft.” And the sound file on the “About Calibre” topic does not work reliably (apparently it works on Macs but not PCs) has...

CNet Rich Brown has a hands-on preview of the Raspberry Pi $35 computer. Powered by a system-on-a-chip that gives it the same computing power as an iPhone 3G, the device boots from a distribution of Linux downloaded onto an SD card, and uses USB or network-connected drives as storage. Part of the fun of Pi ownership so far seems to be discovering what others have done with the system, and then trying it out for yourself. In addition to the discussion board linked above, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has its own forum with hundreds of...

As I was browsing through Zite last night to find more stories to blog, I came across what was effectively an advertisement (though Zite apparently considered it a blog article; clearly the program needs some fine-tuning) for an EPUB DRM removal tool. I’m not going to link to this advertisement, because I don’t want to provide it with even a smidgin of search-engine-optimization respectability. Suffice it to say this program, “ePub DRM Romoval,” sells for $29.95 and offers “easy access to DRM-free ePub ebooks for your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, NOOK, Sony Reader and more ebook reader...

The Kindle is great for e-reading, but what about editing? British writer Stephanie Zia blogs that the keyboard Kindle makes a great editing tool: Be it a book, a dissertation, a company report, you can email your own work to your kindle with the special email you're given with your purchase. Or you can transfer it direct from your computer. Your MS magically transforms into 'book'. A nice chunk of that all-important distance is added that doesn't happen when you read to edit from the screen, or even from paper. You can highlight text and add...

Calibre has updated their software to version 0.8.43 and is now available for download. Here are some of the New Features in the latest version.   Support for reading Amazon's new KF8 format [0.8.42] Implement the ability to automatically add books to calibre from a specified folder. [0.8.38] Kobo: Add support for fetching annotations from the kobo reader. [0.8.24] Input plugin for OCR-ed DJVU files (i.e. .djvu files that contain text. Only the text is converted) [0.8.22] News download: Add algorithms to automatically clean up downloaded HTML [0.8.16] Add a 'languages' metadata field. [0.8.15] Make the keyboard shortcuts used by the main calibre interface user customizable, via Preferences->Advanced->Keyboard [0.8.14] When doing a...

While libraries everywhere are scrambling to come up with an ebook plan that can satisfy both their patrons as well as their long-term organizational goals, sometimes the greatest resources they can offer are already in their libraries.  What’s this?  Simply put, it’s the utilization of their local resources, of history, genealogy, and local authors.  This is the sort of information that is highly desired, yet sometimes falls off the radar, lost to the deluge of publishers, best-sellers and other more “trendy” technological items. It’s easy to dismiss local materials from any project planning, arguing there’s no budget, no staff and no...