Simple clear advice in plain English

Download, convert and manage your ebook collection with Calibre

A good free program for managing books on devices such as the iPad or Kindle

calibre-ebook-manager

Calibre can convert between a variety of different ebook formats including epub, mobi, PDF and plain text, and can sort books by author and title

Ebooks are a great way to stay occupied when on the move or keeping a large collection of books so there is always something to meet you mood. Calibre is a very useful program for creating and managing an ebook collection on a variety of different devices.

Installation is simple and includes an option for choosing the kind of ebook reader you own. There are plenty of suggestions including some generic options should your device not appear.

It uses the concept of a the logical book so it doesn't matter if you have several versions of a book for different devices, it will only appear once in the collection. Helpfully Calibre can also convert between a variety of different ebook formats including epub, mobi, PDF and plain text.

Books can be sorted by title and author as well as rating and series. Books can also be given tags and comments. Writing a short review of a book for yourself is a good way to remember what it is about.

Calibre includes links to a wide variety of sites that provide ebooks with a mix of free ebooks for Manybooks.net and paid-for sites for more recent books.

Calibre can also be used to read ebooks on a computer. While few of us are likely to spend time at a desktop reading a book, this can be very useful if you have a laptop with you when travelling.

Beyond ebooks, Calibre can also download articles from different websites such as the the Guardian and Time and convert them for reading on a portable device.

Calibre is also available for Linux, Mac and as a portable app from the Calibre download page.

Reader Comments

Where is it?

I have tried several times to download this programe without success. I get the message: 404. That’s an error. The requested URL /files/calibre-0.8.6.msi was not found on this server. That’s all we know. Clicking on the link to the Calibre download site takes you to a website called: ManyBooks.net with no links to any software. Something wrong here. I posted this on the Forum yesterday but my 1st post, so still in moderation. Can anyone throw any light?

Posted by Robert Andrews, 08 Jul 2011

tried to download

Tried several times to download this software all I get is error 404

Posted by JPT, 09 Jul 2011

Download link fixed

Hi All Sorry about that; a new version came out and the old link stopped working. Fixed now. Tim

Posted by tim smith, 15 Jul 2011

tried to download

As JPT, I tried several times to download software get the same error message 404

Posted by RJ, 15 Jul 2011

No it's not

No it's not.

Posted by Roger, 17 Jul 2011

Download link changed

Right, it seems that Calibre are releasing new versions faster than I can keep up. So the download now button now points to the download page on the Calibre website rather than the individual file. Sorry about all this, thanks for bearing with me. Kind regards Tim

Posted by Tim Smith, 18 Jul 2011

Software

Very nice application. I want to download this

Posted by saraenterprise, 21 Aug 2011

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Our verdict

Download type

Open source

Suitable for

Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 64-bit, Windows 7

Download size

40.5Mb

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