# Could this be the end of Calibre?



## tekline (Jul 10, 2011)

Two e-book formats now dominate the scene. Amazon's Kindle .mobi (.azw when uploaded to Kindle) and EPUB used by a number of devices such as Nook, Kobo, Sony etc. Here Calibre can help to create books for both platforms.








Calibre is Open Source software (meaning it is free) and it is maintained by an army of volunteers and Calibre can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats. It supports all the major e-book formats. But that is the problem. Do you really want to produce so many formats? Technology has moved forward in leaps and bounds since Calibre was first developed in 2006, when EPUB dominated the scene. Today it is Amazon who now dominates the ebook device market with the Kindle. Furthermore, with their free apps, you can read Kindle books on Android, Mac, PC, Ipad, Iphone and many more devices. So what this means you buy a book from the Kindle Store and read it on most devices.

If you want to write books just for the Kindle, then Calibre which tries to be all things for all things may be like cracking a nut with a sledge-hammer. So is there a better solution? Have you taken a look at the new Kindle Writer?

Calibre: http://calibre-ebook.com/
Kindle Writer: http://www.kindlewriter.co.uk

Kindle Writer is not free but it is very cheap and more to the point it is designed specifically for developing books for the Kindle, and in this it excels judging by the testimonials on the official website. But what about EPUB you ask? Is that format so important now? Perhaps! Perhaps not! If it is then Kindle Writer has a solution as the software also links into Kobo Writing Life so that Kindle Books created by the software is converted by Kobo automatically, and an EPUB is created and the book added to the Kobo bookshop. You can then download the EPUB file and use it for other EPUB platforms. So in this way both EPUB and Kindle .mobi are covered with one solution.

Kobo Writing Life http://www.kobobooks.com/kobowritinglife

So the question remains. Could programs like Kindle Writer be the death knell for Calibre? Is the writing on the wall? What do you think?


----------



## gdae23 (Apr 30, 2009)

I'm not a writer, so I can't respond to that aspect of your question. I do use Calibre to help organize books, fix titles, send items in bulk to a new Kindle, etc., since Amazon doesn't have any internal means for doing these things. I hope Calibre will still be available.


----------



## luvmy4brats (Nov 9, 2008)

I use Calibre for organizing my ebooks and editing metadata. That's about all ill ever use it for and it's exactly what I want.


----------



## VickiT (May 12, 2010)

I sincerely hope it's not the end of Calibre...


----------



## readingril (Oct 29, 2010)

I use Calibre daily to send me custom feeds and to manage my ever growing ebook collection. Does your program do that?

Judging by the number of non-writers out there (including myself) I don't think Calibre is in jeopardy. Catchy title line though, for someone who appears to be pushing their own product.


----------



## Pushka (Oct 30, 2009)

I dont know the statistics but I would have thought caliber was used for cataloging books not to write them in a format. So my response is very much no.


----------



## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Pushka said:


> I dont know the statistics but I would have thought caliber was used for cataloging books not to write them in a format. So my response is very much no.


Calibre does have conversion capabilities -- one format to another, assuming there's no DRM -- but most folks around here use it as a database management tool and/or to adjust metadata in the file so thing sort as they wish.


----------



## Pushka (Oct 30, 2009)

Ann in Arlington said:


> Calibre does have conversion capabilities -- one format to another, assuming there's no DRM -- but most folks around here use it as a database management tool and/or to adjust metadata in the file so thing sort as they wish.


True, and I have used that, but I have found the output always has some glitches, not bad ones by any stretch, but not good enough for an author to use to produce a book to sell.


----------



## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Pushka said:


> True, and I have used that, but I have found the output always has some glitches, not bad ones by any stretch, but not good enough for an author to use to produce a book to sell.


For sure. . . . . .based on time spent lurking in the Writer's Cafe, Calibre is NOT a tool for formatting your manuscript for publication -- on Kindle or anything else.

But, by all accounts, from those who use it to manage their libraries, it excels at that. 

I guess my feeling is that the question posed in the OP is basically non-sensical. The program being proposed as an alternative, is not designed for the same user as Calibre. The two don't really seem comparable! Writers will look for some program to aid in their publishing in various formats. Readers will use Calibre, or something like it, to manage their library. They're two completely different tools for two completely different jobs!


----------



## VickiT (May 12, 2010)

Pushka said:


> True, and I have used that, but I have found the output always has some glitches, not bad ones by any stretch, but not good enough for an author to use to produce a book to sell.


Sorry, Pushka, but I have to disagree about the glitches and the formatting quality. I've lost count of the number of books I've formatted and none have had any issues. Calibre produces a professional ebook in multiple formats if, like other software, it is used correctly.

I did offer to help you with Calibre.  What glitches have you encountered? Maybe I can help.

Cheers
Vicki


----------



## Pushka (Oct 30, 2009)

Hi Vicki
Thanks for the offer - but it was more to say I was surprised that Calibre is good enough for an ebook format for sale - i don't do that, and the output I get is fine for my personal use but obviously I haven't fine tuned it enough as your experience is that it works really well.  I think maybe the OP was perhaps posting more in hope, than reality, as people who use calibre, for whatever purpose, swear by it!


----------



## VickiT (May 12, 2010)

Pushka said:


> Hi Vicki
> Thanks for the offer - but it was more to say I was surprised that Calibre is good enough for an ebook format for sale - i don't do that, and the output I get is fine for my personal use but obviously I haven't fine tuned it enough as your experience is that it works really well. I think maybe the OP was perhaps posting more in hope, than reality, as people who use calibre, for whatever purpose, swear by it!


Agree with your take, Pushka. Being nosey here, but what conversion software do you use?


----------



## VickiT (May 12, 2010)

tekline said:


> Two e-book formats now dominate the scene. Amazon's Kindle .mobi (.azw when uploaded to Kindle) and EPUB used by a number of devices such as Nook, Kobo, Sony etc. Here Calibre can help to create books for both platforms.
> 
> Calibre is Open Source software (meaning it is free) and it is maintained by an army of volunteers and Calibre can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats. It supports all the major e-book formats. But that is the problem. Do you really want to produce so many formats? Technology has moved forward in leaps and bounds since Calibre was first developed in 2006, when EPUB dominated the scene. Today it is Amazon who now dominates the ebook device market with the Kindle. Furthermore, with their free apps, you can read Kindle books on Android, Mac, PC, Ipad, Iphone and many more devices. So what this means you buy a book from the Kindle Store and read it on most devices.
> 
> ...


Quick question: Does Kindle Writer create _validated _ EPUBs? Calibre doesn't guarantee that and it can be an issue.

Cheers
Vicki


----------



## kenhensley (Nov 17, 2012)

I've used Calibre to convert three books to the Kindle format and found the learning curve a bit steep.  Learned mainly by trial and error.


----------



## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Kenhensley,

welcome to KindleBoards!  When you get a chance, head on over to Introductions and tell us a little bit about yourself!

Betsy


----------



## David Anderson (Dec 15, 2012)

How user friendly is the Kindle Writer? 

I used Sigil (free, open source EPUB editor) to format an ebook. That turned out to be an extremely useful and powerful program, but it required learning some foreign stuff, like css code. I then converted the EPUB to MOBI using the wonderful Calibre software. I did try using Calibre to do some formatting/coding as with Sigil (the functionality is there), but had a lot of trouble figuring it out, so stuck with Sigil, which is more user friendly.

I'd be interested to see how user friendly the Kindle writing software is. And how much flexibility there is for users (or if it's one of those horrible cookie cutter ebook applications that produce awful results with no control to the author).


----------



## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

David, if you're talking about doing books to be sold, the best place to ask about the various software options is in the Writer's Cafe. . . .they're the power users.  The rest of us just use various solutions to send personal stuff. . .we're not usually so concerned about dead-on formatting because we're not trying to sell it to anyone else.


----------



## JeremyBenson (Feb 16, 2013)

Hmm, I've used Calibre, and like stated output always has glitches. I haven't found anything that beats just simply coding HTML for me. Not sure what anyone else does. I learned to code HTML and then heard of a method by Smashwords, but when I looked into it learning another way was just a bother... lol.


----------



## jimbro (Jan 10, 2014)

I use Calibre to convert from one format to another and it works just fine for me.


----------



## SusanCassidy (Nov 9, 2008)

You're wrong about one thing.  ePub didn't exist until 2007, not 2006.  And ePub took a while to take off.  Kindle came out in 2007, and one of the reasons they chose .mobi as their format is because ePub didn't exist yet.


----------



## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

SusanCassidy said:


> You're wrong about one thing. ePub didn't exist until 2007, not 2006. And ePub took a while to take off. Kindle came out in 2007, and one of the reasons they chose .mobi as their format is because ePub didn't exist yet.


I don't think that's right . . . . . The Sony reader already existed at that time and I'm pretty sure it used ePub. It came out in 2006 or maybe even 2005.

Calibre certainly didn't come into its own until Kindle.


----------



## SusanCassidy (Nov 9, 2008)

Sony used to use a different format.  .lit I think.  They changed over after a couple of years.

Look up the history of epub on Wikipedia, if you don't believe me.


----------



## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

No, Calibre is here to stay-until someone else comes out with something better. 

Most people use Calibre to manage their ebook libraries, but its true strength lies in its ability to edit faulty ebook files. When I buy an ebook and discover that the typography is screwed up-usually no indentation for the paragraphs-I can use Calibre to fix the formatting.

A few random facts about various ebook files:

EPUB was created by a consortium of publishers to create an open source format for ebooks. It replaced an older standard called the Open Ebook Standard. Yeah, there was definitely some industrial politics going on, as the publishers realized they could be held hostage to Amazon's control via the MOBI format files..
When Apple announced the native ebook file for the iPad would be the EPUB, its adoption grew so rapidly that Amazon had to loosen their restrictions on using the MOBI format because it was rapidly becoming eclipsed by EPUB. (Project Gutenberg offered their library mainly in the EPUB format for a number of years until Amazon loosen their restriction. Now the MOBI files are offered alongside the EPUB versions.)
Amazon did not choose MOBI because EPUB didn't exist, they chose MOBI because that was the native format of the Mobi Reader they purchased to become the Kindle.
Amazon's newest format, KF8-according to a colleague who knows these things better than I do-is actually a custom format based on the EPUB format, allowing it to act as a container for older formats such as MOBI and AZW, as well as more efficiently addressing multi-media embedding. It's encoding is still private. Personally, I greatly prefer the KF8 format over the MOBI, due to technical restraints on the MOBI format. MOBI will not be going away until Amazon declares the older Kindle models "End of Life". ("EOL" means a company will no longer offer support for those models because they are too far out of warranty to justify the expense.)
While Calibre does a decent job with conversions, it is best to use Amazon's Kindle Previewer program to make the conversion from EPUB to MOBI.


----------



## Morf (Nov 18, 2010)

Original article was written over a year ago, by user tekline.

Who produces KindleWriter? Let me see.... Ah, a company called Tekline.

Mods, I suggest this (very old) thread is not appropriate for TT&T and should be treated as an advert.


----------



## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Thanks Morf . . . we were cleaning up the old 'apps' board . . . . this was one of the few that had a relatively recent post so it was moved rather than simply deleted. (After reading over, I'm not sure that post was even in response to the OP!  )


It does appear the OP hasn't been back for a year, though, so they've either abandoned the idea, or abandoned their efforts to talk about it here.  I'm going to lock the thread. . . . . . OP if you come back, feel free to PM if you have further input or updates.


----------

