Calibre 8.4.0

★ Winner of Best Ebook Management Tool in 2017 and 2014.

Overview

That Kindle you’ve been dreaming about in the last months is finally in your hands. Dozens of e-book bestsellers were purchased by you in a heartbeat. As a result, you have thousands of e-books waiting to be read. But the management of your books is a mess. It doesn’t exist, to be more precise. You need Calibre; a tool that incorporates all the elements you need to organize and manage an e-book collection. Any electronic reading lover will appreciate this lightweight yet very useful tool. Let’s analyze its features in this quick article and find out more about Calibre.

Installation

Calibre boasts a fast and smooth installation process that will certainly not pose any problems to you. With a setup kit that measures around 40MB in size, you will be organizing your e-books in no time. It doesn’t come bundled with adware, spyware or other programs and in terms of specs, you might want to know that Calibre supports all of the available versions of Windows.

Interface

The professionally designed layout and easy-to-use command icons of the interface are a triumph. The interface looks great, it is intuitive and the process of downloading your e-books from your desktop or hard drive to Calibre is a simple one. Novice users will certainly appreciate the interface of Calibre as well as the strategic placement of the buttons and easy to navigate controls.

Pros

In a nutshell, cataloguing your e-book collection has never been so easy. Calibre is a powerful library management tool that works by surveying all of the e-books as well as other relevant files from your hard drive or r-reader. Once scanned, these files are introduced into Caliber’s main directory. Any of the data fields Calibre fills in can be organized, categorized, annotated, searched and rated. The left side of the main windows offers the following categories: Formats, Authors, Publishers, Ratings, News and Tags. All of the books of a specific author can be easily found just by clicking on its name. Once a book is selected, the cover art, a list of formats in which the e-book is available, tags (either downloaded or added by the user) and the file path on your PC or e-reader where the work is stored will be available on the right side of the main window. Other features of Caliber include the ability to add books from different sources, convert various e-book formats to the one your e-reader uses and organize info about the authors.

Cons

Some gaps in the functionality of Calibre can be found because not everything works smooth. Any e-books stored in your e-reader's archives cannot be seen by the directory. Another downside that is present in Calibre is its inability of keeping track of where your e-books are stored. As a result, you don’t know if a specific book is on your tablet, smartphone or PC.

Alternatives

Some of the alternatives to Calibre include: Google Books, Project Gutenberg, iBooks and more.

Conclusion

Calibre is a good library management tool and while it may suit budding e-book collectors, advanced users who need a more comprehensive set of functions in regards to perform complex actions for their e-book collections might find Calibre a little disappointing.