Calibre: the best ebook manager out there

Last year I received the best birthday gift ever: an ebook reader. For someone who likes reading as much as me, and can’t help buying more books all the time, having an ebook is almost a basic need. And for those of you also own an ebook reader, Calibre is definitely a must-have app.

Calibre is like iTunes for ebooks. It’s a cross-platform, feature-rich manager that helps you organize your collection of ebooks in a snap, adding the ebooks from your hard drive folder, downloading their metadata from the Web and displaying them in a handy list – though you can also view your collection in a flashier, Coverflow-like style.

To start using Calibre, click the Add books button and select your preferred method to import ebooks to your library.

Once Calibre is finished adding ebooks, it’ll display them on the program’s interface. You can see the library either as a list sorted by title, author, size, date and other custom criteria, or browse books by their covers.

But that’s not all. If any of your ebooks lacks data, or has wrong tags, Calibre can take care of it as well. Simply select the ebook you want to fix and click Edit meta information on the top toolbar. You’ll be able to enter the right data into the ebook’s metatags, or even better, have Calibre download everything for you.

Besides the ebook manager functionality, Calibre features two outstanding tools that every ebook reader owner will need to use sooner or later. The first one is a conversion tool, with which you can convert your ebooks between all popular formats, such as EPUB, FB2, PDF, MOBI. TXT and more. The second one is a powerful built-in viewer that lets you preview the content of any book, no matter what formtat it’s saved in, before transferring it to your device.

Calibre works with any ebook reader, but some of them (Kindle, Nook, Cybook, BeBook, Hanlin, Sony Reader…) have special support which allows the program to produce optimized conversions for your reader.

In all, Calibre is an impressive ebook manager that will suit the needs of those of you who own an ebook reader. And those of you who don’t, give it a try. If you love reading, you’ll love these devices!