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 TeleRead readers are familiar with the incredible e-book management program, Calibre. Some of you are power users. Some of you aren't. One of the most common questions I see on e-book forums is "how do I use Calibre?" I thought I'd write a series that answers that question, and more. In fact, by the time this series is done, we will have produced a...

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...

I used to be a library junkie with books piled on my nightstand. I’d be constantly renewing books until I finished all of them. There had to be a way to escape the clutter. That’s when I discovered e-book apps for my old Blackberry. I bought plenty of books and read and read and read. I even developed what I called ‘Blackberry Eye,’ small wrinkles under my eyes from staring down at my phone all day. After jumping into the digital book world, I haven’t looked back. Six years later, I have the original Nook, Nook Touch and a Nexus 7. I spend plenty...

Fanfiction is one of the easiest sources of free reading to track down online. I use it liberally to stretch my e-reading dollars, and if you are selective, you can find enough good writing to keep you in reading material for a long time. Traditionally, one of the downsides of fanfiction is getting the stories to your e-reader quickly, easily and well formatted. Anyone remember a little executable file called Interparse? It made converting list-serve email files into decent text documents relatively easy. I say "relatively" because a decade ago, I would occasionally spend as much time on file conversion as...

Last week, Joanna wrote about giving up on the iBooks app. It generated quite a number of comments, but one in particular, from reader Michael W. Perry, caught my eye. He said: "One final note. You’re starting to discover an issue that ebook retailers have been averting their eyes from. In the near future, ebook buyers are going to become upset when they realize that ebooks have a major headache, they’re scattered across two or more apps and most people have trouble remembering which book is where. Settling on one app is a poor answer. That app may not have the features...

At the end of 2012, I made a pledge to limit my e-book spending to only DRM-free e-books this year. I made this pledge for a number of reasons, the primary two being that firstly, since the whole rise/fall of agency pricing debacle, the books I want to read seem to be unreasonably expensive, and secondly, these very expensive books since to have an increasing quantity of typos and quality control issues, which makes the high price especially galling. I still am allowing myself to borrow books with DRM—I use my public library regularly, and feel that the function of DRM...

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...

Did you buy any e-books this Cyber Monday? All the major bookstores had big sales going on, with Amazon offering 1,000 books at huge discounts. I was tempted. But ultimately, I did not buy. Why not? Because I'm tired of how much work reading e-books has become for me. I bought from Fictionwise for years in the pre-agency days and never had a single book with a typo. But this year, I don't think I have read a single book from a Big Six publisher that hasn't had at least a dozen. I do go through and mark them for correction because...

Back in early October, I wrote about the coin jar my Beloved and I keep, which we cash in at the end of the year to buy ourselves a holiday present. Well, now the end of the year is approaching, and I have the fun task of deciding where to spend my share. He estimates we'll have $300—$400 each to spend on the gadgets of our choosing. Here's what my thoughts are about where to spend mine. (And by the way, I welcome your comments on any of my choices—or suggestions for stuff I haven't considered. And I'd love to hear what...

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...

One of the things that has fascinated me about the gadget revolution is how over time, functions have increasingly begun overlapping. I currently have three devices I regularly use on which I can read my Kindle books—and I can seamlessly move between them. I can spend an hour reading on the couch on my Kindle Touch, move to the iPad while I'm out working at the library and pick up the book where I left off, then come home and tuck into bed with the iPod Touch, which can be read even in total darkness if my partner falls asleep...