Caliber was designed to be an e-book library management application. Caliber is meant to be a complete e-library solution and thus includes library management, format conversion, news feeds to ebook conversion, as well as e-book reader sync features.
Here are some key features of "Caliber":
Library Management:
- Caliber is primarily a ebook cataloging program. It stores your ebook files in a database along with easily editable metadata describing each book. It is designed around the concept of the logical book, ie a single entry in the database that may correspond to ebooks in several formats.
Caliber supports the sorting of the books in its database by:
- Title
- Author
- Date
- Publisher
- Rating
- Size (Max size of all formats)
It also supports additional metadata fields that can be searched on:
- Series: The series that a book belongs to
- Comments: A general purpose field that can be used to describe the book, add notes on it, etc.
- Tags: A flexible system to categorize books. You can tag any book with any custom tag to indicate subject, read status, category, etc.
- The database view also supports filtering by searching on the metadata. You can perform advanced search on individual metadata fields by clicking the advanced search button to the left of the search bar.
- The books in the database can be saved to disk using the "Save to disk" button. All selected books are stored in a folder structure organized by Author and Title.
- You can fetch metadata for a book based on its ISBN number or its title / author, instead of manually entering the metadata. You can also fetch a cover image based on the ISBN number.
Format Conversion:
- Caliber supports conversion from (HTML, LIT, RTF, TXT, PDF (simple text + few images)) to the SONY ebook reader format LRF. An graphical interface to the conversion software can be accessed by clicking the "Convert E-books" button.
- The commandline access is via the command any2lrf. The conversion is very powerful and supports advanced typesetting features like tables, dropcaps, inline images, embedded fonts, etc. Full documentation of the features of the conversion software can be found at Conversion to LRF.
Syncing to E-reader Devices:
- Calibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding e-reader devices easy. At the moment, it has support for the SONY PRS 500/505. Syncing supports updating the metadata on the device from the metadata in the library and creating the collections on the device based on tags defined in the library view. If an book has more than one format available, calibre automatically chooses the best format when uploading to the device.
Fetching News:
Caliber can automatically fetch news from a number of websites, format the news in a ebook and upload to a connected device. At the moment there is support for generating LRF ebooks. Supported news sites are:
- Newsweek
- The New York Times
- The BBC
- The Economist
- The news fetching subsystem has a modular design, which makes it easy to add support for more sites. If you are interested in adding support for a site, read the User Manual. Once you have created a recipe, consider sharing it with other users by attaching it to User Recipes.
Viewing E-books:
- Caliber has an inbuilt viewer that can display LRF format files, so you can look up a recent conversion before uploading to the reader. It supports all the features of the LRF format, except dropcaps.
What's New in This Release: [read full changelog]
New Features:
- Basic support for Amazon AZW4 format (PDF wrapped inside a MOBI)
- When viewing the cover browser in a separate window, allow the use of the V, D shortcut keys to view the current book and send it to the device respectively.
- Add an option in Preferences-> Miscellaneous to abort conversion jobs that take too long.
- Driver for HTC Evo and HP TouchPad (with a Kindle app)
- Preferences-> Adding books, detect when the user specifies a test expression with no file extension and popup a warning.
Bug Fixes:
- E-book viewer: Ensure toolbars are always visible.
- Content server: Fix grouping of Tags / authors not working for some non-english languages with Internet Explorer
- When downloading metadata from amazon, fix italics inside brackets getting lost.
- Get Books: Add EscapeMagazine.pl and RW2010.pl stores
- Conversion pipeline: Fix conversion of cm / mm to pts. Fixes the use of cm as a length unit when converting to MOBI.
- When showing the cover browser in a separate window, focus the cover bro ...
