BooksOnBoard has (hopefully temporarily) shut down their site for new purchases, though you can still download titles from your library. Instead of their usual welcome screen, you will be greeted by this when you attempt to access the site: That sounds concerning but not too worrisome. However, over at The Digital Reader, Nate thinks it's the beginning of the end. He has a detailed article about BooksOnBoard and their recent history of not paying their distributors. His advice, which I will echo, is, "download and back up your library now." If this is just a bump in the road, and they are back...

Every year, at around this time, I do a big e-book purge. Something about March Break brings out the spring cleaning demon, and when I need a break from cleaning my physical home, I curl up with my Macbook and tackle my digital one. My goals in years past have been to clean up metadata and cover art, complete missing series runs and prune out the freebies I really didn't ever plan to read. My goal this year? Reduce, reduce, reduce! I simply have too many books in my to-read pile. I don't remember where all of them came from, and I...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 | Ch. 11 TeleRead's Juli Monroe did a great job explaining what a Calibre plugin is, and how to install one. But of course, every e-book user has their own special needs and preferences, and my own Calibre plugin mix is slightly different than hers. So, for my part of the Calibre wrap-up, I'll tell you which plugins I use, why I use them,...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 So far everything we've written about a number of uses for a default Calibre installation. However, one of the best features of Calibre is the ability to customize the experience with plugins. There is a long list of third-party Calibre plugins, and there's no way I could cover them all. However, I'll demonstrate two of them in this article to give you an idea...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 Do you spend time on computers that are not your own, but still want your e-book library with you? Perhaps you're visiting family for a holiday and aren't taking your computer along, but you still want to be able to load books on your device. Calibre Portable is for you. It's a full installation of Calibre that runs off a removable memory device, like a...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 We've covered a lot of uses for Calibre so far, including library management, book conversion, and more. But Calibre is more than just an e-book program. Lots of us read more than books, including news and blogs. Did you know Calibre can be set up to automatically download news sources? Here's how it's done: First, fire up Calibre and click the "Fetch News" button.   As you...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 Thank you, Joanna, for that excellent post on setting up shelves for the Kobo reader. I keep thinking about getting a Kobo Mini. If I do, that article will come in very handy. And now, finally, after metadata, content servers and Kobo, we get to e-book conversion. Just so you know how good you have it in 2013, let me remind you about the bad old...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 Juli Monroe has a done a great job covering some of the ways you can tweak Calibre to organize your Kindle books. But what about Kobo users? Is there a way they can use Calibre to better organize their books? The answer is ... yes! The newer Kobo models—including the Touch, the Glo and the Mini—have a 'bookshelves' feature. You can configure Calibre to send books directly to...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 Some of our readers have been asking questions lately about previous posts in which I discussed metadata, and that's caused me to realize that I missed a thing or two. So with that in mind, here are a couple more metadata-related tips; we think you'll find them useful. Adding Publisher Metadata In my previous metadata post (Chapter 2: Setting and Changing Metadata), I discussed adding your own data. But I forgot to discuss...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 Up until now, we've covered mostly basic stuff. This post discusses a more "advanced" and seriously cool feature: Using Calibre's Content Server to manage your library wirelessly, no cords needed! Begin by firing up the content server: Then fire up a browser on a tablet, smartphone or even on an E Ink reader that supports Web browsing. Enter your computer's IP address in the URL box,...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 If you're just joining us, so far we've covered installing Calibre and setting metadata for library management. Today, we're going to cover a few ways to load books into Calibre. Let's not ignore the obvious, however. If you own a tablet or smartphone and followed my advice of storing your Calibre library in Dropbox, you can just download the Dropbox app on your device, select...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 Many people think of Calibre as an e-book conversion program, and it's true it does conversion very well. I'll be covering that aspect soon. However, to convert e-books, you need to either strip DRM (a topic this series will not be covering), or buy only DRM-free books. While that's an admirable goal, it's not feasible for many e-book readers. And if you happen to be one...