Kindle and Calibre

I installed Calibre back when it was recommended by Wil Wheaton on his blog, and I found I didn't use it at all. The file structure was strange, and I only had a few ebooks to put into it. I didn't realize it had a viewer, and in short the usefulness of it seemed extremely limited.

But now I have a Kindle, and I suddenly understand why Calibre is so well-loved by the literati of the ebook crowd. Yes, the file structure is odd, but that's because the program is looking at the files as books, not as files. And it can be hard to get it to work if you aren't technically competent, as the manual isn't written for the average user. That's due to it being written by a computer engineer for computer techies. But more people are going to be using it in the future, so I thought I'd start to work on writing up some of the tricks of using Calibre so I can remember what I did, and other people might be able to benefit from my experiences as well.

Today's first trick: downloading and installing Calibre.

Ok, not much of a trick. If you've done any installation at all, you know already what to do. The Calibre downloads are available for lots of different operating systems, and I've installed it on both Windows XP and Ubuntu myself. At the moment, I'm mostly using my Windows install, so my tricks will be written with that in mind.

Now, when you install it, Calibre will create a library, and THAT is a very key point. I have several libraries for my books. I have a main library that is actually located in my Dropbox and holds only the stuff I'm currently working with. On my external drive I've put several libraries that have my archives, my backups, and some other stuff. I'll get into those more in the future. But the location of the library is important, if only because later in my tricks I'm planning on explaining how I made a bunch of different libraries and why.

In any case, once you've installed Calibre, you'll want to know what to do with it. Well, the best thing is to watch the video tutorials, as those will give you a good start on figuring out the program, and introduce you to Kovid, who is the guy who built this fantastic system and is giving it away for free (though donations are accepted). The tutorials use an older version of Calibre, but still manage to give a good idea of how it works.

I'm tempted to leave it at that, because if you watch the tutorials you will probably be able to figure out the rest without difficulty, but I know that most people won't bother with the tutorials. So here's some of the basics: Use the "Add books" button to add books to Calibre. It copies the books from whatever location you get them from into it's own file structure. The original is left alone. Once in Calibre, you can edit just about everything that has to do with the file by clicking the "Edit metadata" button, or right-clicking on a book title and selecting "Edit metadata".

The metadata is actually where the magic of Calibre sorting comes in, as you can sort on just about every field in the metadata, and you can add your own custom fields and sort on those as well. For instance, I like knowing where I got an ebook from, so I added a field called "Source" in which I put where I bought it, or if I got it from Gutenberg or another free site. Adding a custom field is simple, you go to "Preferences", then "Add your own columns". The lookup name must be one word and lowercase, otherwise you can play with the settings and come up with what you want. Other fields I added include a boolean (yes/no) column for whether or not I've read the book, whether or not I've reviewed it, and in my Dropbox library I have a column to indicate if I've backed it up to my external drive.

Well, I'm going to write more on this topic, but at the moment I think that's enough to get someone started on the program. If you have any favorite Calibre tricks you'd like to share with me, feel free to post about them in the comments. I'll be covering Calibre news and blog recipes, how to get a series title to show up as part of the title when you upload to Kindle, and using multiple libraries while still having a nightly news download in future installments.