Calibre

An all-in-one solution for handling your e-books, Calibre does for electronic books just what iTunes does for music, allowing you to manage your digital book collection through an intuitive albeit overcrowded interface while offering excellent support for converting books to different formats and editing their metadata. The only area where the software is lacking is its e-book reader; it doesn’t allow you to highlight or add notes to your books.

PROS

E-book converter: With Calibre you can take an e-book in one file format and convert it to another that is supported by your e-book reading device and, if you’re not happy with the result, you can tweak the conversion settings and even manually edit the book’s contents and formatting. It took us four seconds to convert a 40-page e-book from PDF to ePub.

E-book reader: The software comes with a basic e-book reader that supports fullscreen mode for distraction-free reading and that lets you choose your preferred method of pagination and gives you the ability to bookmark pages. Unfortunately, there is no way to annotate, highlight, or augment the book’s contents short of editing the book itself.

E-book organizer: Similar to iTunes, the app is much more than an e-book reader: it acts also as your e-book library, providing a central place where you can organize and sort your collection and allowing you to edit the book’s metadata and even pull information automatically from places like Google and Amazon. On the back-end, each author gets his or her own folder and each e-book gets its own subfolder, which contains all versions of the given book along with its metadata.

CONS

Crowded interface: There is a lot going on when you start using the app; just on the main screen there are three search fields and 15 buttons, many of which come with drop-down menus. Fortunately, primary functions are thoughtfully placed where you would expect them to be, so the learning curve is not too steep.

BOTTOM LINE

If you’re a serious e-book fan and read on more than one device, you should definitely give Calibre a try. Using this open-source software, you can have all the different versions of your books together in one library while keeping the actual files neatly organized in intelligently named folders.