# Series of Articles on Using Calibre



## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

I'm writing for TeleRead now, and Joanna, my colleague, and I are writing a series of articles on using Calibre. Part one is up

http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/using-calibre-for-e-book-management-downloading-and-setting-up/

We'll be updating the series as quickly as we can write them. I hope you find it useful. Please feel free to comment, and I'd really appreciate suggestions on what topics you'd like to see us cover. We're trying to make it accessible to users of all devices, but obviously I'll have a bit of a Kindle bias. Lucky that Joanna is a Kobo person. 

Enjoy! I'll post subsequent articles in this thread, so keep an eye on this space.


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## musclehead (Dec 29, 2010)

Hmmm... I never thought of putting my calibre library in Dropbox. Glad I read the article! And I'm looking forward to the rest.


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## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

musclehead said:


> Hmmm... I never thought of putting my calibre library in Dropbox. Glad I read the article! And I'm looking forward to the rest.


Awesome. You know what's funny? I thought using Dropbox was so obvious that I almost didn't make a point of mentioning it. Thanks for confirming I made the right choice.


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## chilady1 (Jun 9, 2009)

musclehead said:


> Hmmm... I never thought of putting my calibre library in Dropbox. Glad I read the article! And I'm looking forward to the rest.


It's the only way to go - access to your entire Calibre library from wherever! Keep in mind, depending on how large your library is, the first upload and sync within Dropbox could take a substantial period of time, so allot for that. Once it's there, the beauty of the putting it in Dropbox is that it is ALWAYS there and books sync across devices wonderfully. Word of caution: never have two copies of Calibre opened at once - it tends to not like that. Good Luck!


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

chilady1 said:


> It's the only way to go - access to your entire Calibre library from wherever! Keep in mind, depending on how large your library is, the first upload and sync within Dropbox could take a substantial period of time, so allot for that. Once it's there, the beauty of the putting it in Dropbox is that it is ALWAYS there and books sync across devices wonderfully. Word of caution: never have two copies of Calibre opened at once - it tends to not like that. Good Luck!


Well, really, you don't need Calibre or Dropbox to do this. My library is all in the Cloud at Amazon -- admittedly, it's mostly books purchased from Amazon, but there are probably a couple hundred other documents that I've uploaded to Kindle and are archived there as well. Accessible by any of my kindles as long as there is WiFi. 

Of course, many folks find very good reasons for both those tools apart from that. . . .


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## chilady1 (Jun 9, 2009)

Ann in Arlington said:


> My library is all in the Cloud at Amazon -- admittedly, it's mostly books purchased from Amazon,


Hence why I prefer Dropbox which is for everything whether purchased at Amazon or not, whereas, Amazon is only for items purchased at Amazon. It is a personal preference but my reason for recommending Dropbox is because your entire library is available to you. If you only ever purchase from Amazon and you use the cloud, then your entire library will be available.

For people who don't solely use Amazon for purchase books, Dropbox is another way to go.


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## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

chilady1 said:


> Hence why I prefer Dropbox which is for everything whether purchased at Amazon or not, whereas, Amazon is only for items purchased at Amazon. It is a personal preference but my reason for recommending Dropbox is because your entire library is available to you. If you only ever purchase from Amazon and you use the cloud, then your entire library will be available.
> 
> For people who don't solely use Amazon for purchase books, Dropbox is another way to go.


Not to mention the ability to tag books and manage your library in ways you can't on the Manage Your Kindle page. Which is a nice segue into the latest article in the series. 

http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/using-calibre-for-e-book-management-chapter-2-setting-and-changing-metadata/

Btw, I love the Manage Your Kindle page and use it extensively as well. Maybe that's just obsessive-compulsive of me? Won't be the first time I've been accused of that.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

chilady1 said:


> Hence why I prefer Dropbox which is for everything whether purchased at Amazon or not, whereas, Amazon is only for items purchased at Amazon. It is a personal preference but my reason for recommending Dropbox is because your entire library is available to you. If you only ever purchase from Amazon and you use the cloud, then your entire library will be available.
> 
> For people who don't solely use Amazon for purchase books, Dropbox is another way to go.


Well, you quoted only part of my response. Here it is, in full:



Ann in Arlington said:


> Well, really, you don't need Calibre or Dropbox to do this. My library is all in the Cloud at Amazon -- admittedly, it's mostly books purchased from Amazon, *but there are probably a couple hundred other documents that I've uploaded to Kindle and are archived there as well. Accessible by any of my kindles as long as there is WiFi.
> 
> Of course, many folks find very good reasons for both those tools apart from that. . . .  *


I have bolded the part you failed to quote. I have a couple of hundred documents; items acquired from other than Amazon -- legally -- that I have been able to upload to my Kindle via Amazon and are now archived there and available to any of my kindles any time -- assuming connectivity.

You'll note I also observed that many folks may choose to use other tools as well -- Juli mentions another feature of Calibre which she and many find useful. But it's not something that I am interested in. I was simply stating that I didn't feel the need for either Calibre or Dropbox and I do have my "entire library" available.


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## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

And now for part 3, loading books on your device. Basic stuff in this article. Next article is where it gets fancy.

http://www.teleread.com/calibre/using-calibre-for-e-book-management-chapter-3-loading-books-on-your-device/


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## Judith (Jan 5, 2009)

Thank you for the articles. 
I have been using calibre to organize convert and send my ebooks to my Kindle2 ereader. I have 264 books which consist mainly of word document stories that I have saved from various places on the internet. 
My problem is that I have 264 books with many notes etc in calibre.  I purchased a new computer and would like to transfer the whole calibre program including the books with my notes etc. to my new computer.  For some reason I cannot find a way to do this. It's probably simple, but it is not cooperating. Can you help? I would prefer not to use dropbox or icloud at this point. 

Thanks.
Judith


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## booklover888 (May 20, 2012)

I really enjoyed today's article (which I read on my Kindle Touch every day). Despite using Calibre for several years, I had never gotten the server to work before. Following your directions, it worked! Thanks!


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## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

Judith said:


> Thank you for the articles.
> I have been using calibre to organize convert and send my ebooks to my Kindle2 ereader. I have 264 books which consist mainly of word document stories that I have saved from various places on the internet.
> My problem is that I have 264 books with many notes etc in calibre. I purchased a new computer and would like to transfer the whole calibre program including the books with my notes etc. to my new computer. For some reason I cannot find a way to do this. It's probably simple, but it is not cooperating. Can you help? I would prefer not to use dropbox or icloud at this point.
> 
> ...


Judith, sorry for not answering sooner. Life got interesting for a few days. Yes, it is easy. Just copy your library to an SD card, removable hard drive or the like. Then transfer it to your new computer. Remember where you put that folder. When you install Calibre on the new computer and run the welcome wizard, use that folder as the location for the library in Calibre. The program should recognize it and import all your books automatically.


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## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

booklover888 said:


> I really enjoyed today's article (which I read on my Kindle Touch every day). Despite using Calibre for several years, I had never gotten the server to work before. Following your directions, it worked! Thanks!


Glad it worked! Just curious, how do you access the articles on your Touch? Web browser? Instapaper or some other way?


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## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

Obviously many of you are following along even though life got interesting and I forgot to post the last few links here. Sorry about that. Here's the rest of the series (so far)

Using Calibre for E-Book Management, Chapter 4: Calibre Content Server 
http://www.teleread.com/calibre/using-calibre-for-e-book-management-chapter-4-calibre-content-server/

Using Calibre for E-Book Management, Chapter 5: More Metadata 
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/using-calibre-for-e-book-management-chapter-5-more-metadata/

Using Calibre for E-Book Management, Chapter 6: Managing Kobo Bookshelves (written by Joanna Cabot, another TeleRead writer)
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/using-calibre-for-e-book-management-chapter-6-managing-kobo-bookshelves/

Using Calibre for E-Book Management, Chapter 7: Conversion Basics 
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/using-calibre-for-e-book-management-chapter-7-conversion-basics/


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## booklover888 (May 20, 2012)

JuliMonroe said:


> Glad it worked! Just curious, how do you access the articles on your Touch? Web browser? Instapaper or some other way?


I use Calibre to download it and send it to my Kindle wirelessly. It's programmed to do so every morning after 6 a.m.


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## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

booklover888 said:


> I use Calibre to download it and send it to my Kindle wirelessly. It's programmed to do so every morning after 6 a.m.


Ah! You are using the very feature I just wrote about. Should be posted soon.

Wait a minute! I just re-read your post. Do you have Calibre automatically send it to your Kindle each morning? Or do you have to go to Calibre to tell it to send? If you can download and send in one pass, that's awesome and how do you do it?


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## booklover888 (May 20, 2012)

JuliMonroe said:


> Ah! You are using the very feature I just wrote about. Should be posted soon.
> 
> Wait a minute! I just re-read your post. Do you have Calibre automatically send it to your Kindle each morning? Or do you have to go to Calibre to tell it to send? If you can download and send in one pass, that's awesome and how do you do it?


Yes, it is scheduled. So as soon as I start up Calibre, if it is after 6 a.m., it automatically begins downloading, sends to device, and deletes from Calibre. As long as the Kindle wifi is on, it will be delivered. If wifi is off, it will download as soon as I turn it on.

Very handy. Currently I am getting Teleread and USA Today, but in the past I have gotten other news blogs, and magazine blogs also, all using Calibre's available functions. (In other words, I haven't made any recipes for anything).

The scheduling is handled in the "Fetch News". The other thing is to go into Preferences, Behavior, and the 2nd line there is Automatically send news to ebook reader, and across from that, delete news from library when automatically sent to reader. Check both of those.


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## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

Thanks, booklover888! I'd not realized that option was there. Send to reader was automatically selected on Calibre for me. Nice to know I can turn it off and on.

And here's the article about downloading news

http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/using-calibre-for-e-book-management-chapter-8-downloading-news/

Getting close to the end of the series. I plan to talk about Calibre portable and then perhaps do one or two articles on plug-ins. If there's anything else you'd like me to cover, just let me know. This series has been fun to write, and I've learned a lot.


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## booklover888 (May 20, 2012)

JuliMonroe said:


> Thanks, booklover888! I'd not realized that option was there. Send to reader was automatically selected on Calibre for me. Nice to know I can turn it off and on.
> 
> And here's the article about downloading news
> 
> ...


Juli, I learned from the latest article you wrote, too! About the RSS feeds. I will have to try it. Maybe I'll try sending it via the content server! Looking forward to your article on Calibre Portable. I have that installed on an SD card for my netbook, and another copy on a USB drive as a backup. But I haven't really done much with them.


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## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

Here's the article on Calibre Portable. I'm afraid it's mainly an article on how to install it. Honestly, I don't see much utility to it myself. I'm so rarely on a computer that's not my own, and with Dropbox and Content Server, I can see and get books on my devices easily.

http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/using-calibre-for-e-book-management-chapter-9-calibre-portable/

If anyone else uses it and loves it, please speak up. I'd love to add more utility to this article.


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## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

booklover888 said:


> Juli, I learned from the latest article you wrote, too! About the RSS feeds. I will have to try it. Maybe I'll try sending it via the content server!


Awesome! I'm glad you liked the RSS feed aspect.


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## JuliMonroe (Apr 25, 2011)

My final article, on plugins

http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/using-calibre-for-e-book-management-chapter-10-plugins/

Joanna says she plans to do another article on plugins. When she does, I'll add it.

Thanks to everyone who read and commented!


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## uppastmidnight (Mar 9, 2013)

I appreciate your series of articles about Calibre. I love that software! But when I got it, I never took the time to really manage it because I was too eager to read my books. So thank you for this. This will come in handy


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