calibre - What Can It Do For E-Books?

calibre is a comprehensive and free e-book management program developed by users of e-books, for users of e-books. One of the major hurdles to widespread e-book adoption today is the large number of mutually incompatible e-book formats and reading devices. So for example if you own an iPhone and an Amazon Kindle, and want to read a book on both, you have to convert the book into the EPUB format for the iPhone and the MOBI format for the Kindle. calibre is designed to make converting the e-book and sending it to your device as easy as clicking a button.

calibre is developed around the principal of a ''logical book''. A single logical book can have many files in various e-book formats associated with it. calibre makes managing all these multiple formats as painless as possible. Often, books you obtain from the internet have missing or incorrect metadata like author names and book covers. calibre can automatically fetch this metadata from the internet and add it to the books it converts. calibre's conversions are so good that it is now used by several publishers and digitization companies to create e-books in different formats. calibre allows everyone from individual readers to publishers to independent authors to painlessly create high quality e-books with minimum effort and at no cost.

Another very popular feature of calibre is that it can download news from over a hundred different news sites and convert it into e-books. This is like the news and blogs service of the Kindle, except that it is free, supports multiple e-book devices and is designed to allow users to easily add their own favorite news sites. The downloaded news contains full text and pictures from all articles. calibre even supports subscription based websites like the Wall Street Journal, if you tell it your username and password. The built-in news sources range from the The New York Times to comics to newspapers in several different languages, from all corners of the world.

In addition to all this, calibre has an e-book viewing program that supports all the major e-book formats and can be used on laptops and netbooks to read e-books. calibre is developed by volunteers from all over the world. It is rapidly evolving with a new release every week. Its goal is to make reading, managing and creating e-books accessible to everyone.

To see a comprehensive list of features and download the latest release of calibre, visit http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net