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’101: iPhone+Stanza+Calibre (the almost-perfect solution’
March 16, 2009 | 7:29 am
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By David Rothman
How to manage the e-book collection on your desktop? Books in some cases may even be spread over different directories? And how about clashing formats? A mess.
Also, how can you send copies to your iPhone or other mobile device?
To the rescue comes the feature-rich Calibre program. And now a handy guide has appeared in MobileRead, showing how to use Calibre when also using the Stanza e-reading program. Stanza works on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Bonus: Calibre also does format conversions of nonDRMed books and can be a handy way to get e-books in popular formats into ePub, the new industry standard. And of course it can also be invaluable to owners of E Ink machines such as Kindles and Sony Readers.
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Comments:
Looks good, but it doesn’t handle PDB files, which comprise well over half of my library. I can add ‘em manually, but it’ll take a long, long time…
Maybe you’ll like to know that
Calibre does not support PDB (you cannot convert from PDB to any other format), but you may add your PDB books (those you have on your desktop) to the Calibre library: click the Add Books button then, from the file types drop down list select “All files” and you will be able to add the PDB books to the library
THEN
as of version 0.5.1 of Calibre (released last week) you may upload PDB files from your PC to your iPhone/iPod Touch using the web server provided by Calibre (you should follow the 101 guide mentioned above).
[Changelog - Version 0.5.1 (13 Mar, 2009) - Implement #2036 (Add PDB support to the Stanza content server)]
Sure you can change PDB files. Not those purchased from Fictionwise or eReader.com, but the many PDB files I’ve created so I could read my files with eReader can easily be opened again and saved back to text.
But I wasn’t looking to convert them, I just wanted Calibre to read the PDBs’ metadata and fill in the fields for me. As I mentioned above, I can add them individually, but if all I’m after is to get them on my iPod Touch I have HSF set up in my context menu and that handles my needs just fine. Instead I was hoping for an iTunes sort of e-book manager, which this could be, but adding a few thousand files and correcting the metadata one by one is eminently unpractical for me.