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One selling point of the device is its free, ubiquitous Internet service and Web browser. The screenshots used in this article are from the mobile version of Bookworm , my Web application for reading ebooks in the EPUB format. Because the mobile Web version is already heavily optimized for small devices, the layout is simpler than a traditional Web site. How different are these modes? Here is a comparison shot of the same screen from Bookworm in both modes:. In Default mode, all the information about the books runs together. It would be better to present this as a simple vertical list, the way the Amazon Kindle store does, rather than as a table.
You can choose from six font sizes in the Kindle browser. In this screenshot, the table of contents for a Bookworm book is not readable, even though this page has already been tailored for the small display of mobile phones:. The user activates links by selecting along the vertical, or Y-axis, using the scroll wheel. When multiple links fall on the same line, the Kindle will open a dialog box so the user can clarify which link is the target.
In Bookworm, users move to the next or previous chapter by selecting navigation links lined up horizontally see the top row of the first image. In the Kindle, this presentation forces the user to click a second time to select the appropriate one:. If your site uses text color to convey any useful information such as what is or is not a hyperlink , re-work the design to accommodate a grayscale display.
Finally, keep pages short. Marvin, Mapleread and iBooks itself. Start the Safari browser and type in the IP address and port of the computer running the calibre server, like this:. See The calibre Content server for details on running the server and finding out the right IP address to use. You will see a list of books in Safari, tap on any book and you will be given the option to either download it, or read it in the browser itself. If you choose to download it, Safari will ask you if you want to open it with iBooks.
There are two ways that you can connect your Android device to calibre. Using a USB cable — or wirelessly, over the air. The first step to using an Android device is installing an e-book reading application on it. There are many free and paid e-book reading applications for Android: Some examples in no particular order: Simply plug your device into the computer with a USB cable. With newer Android devices, you might have to jump through a few hoops to get the connection working, as Google really does not want you to be independent of its cloud.
First, unlock the screen before plugging in the USB cable. When you plugin in the USB cable you will get a popup notification. Finally, you might get a popup on the device every time calibre or the operating system actually tries to connect to it, asking for permission, tap OK. The easiest way to transfer books wirelessly to your Android device is to use the Calibre Companion Android app.
This app is maintained by a core calibre developer and allows calibre to connect to your Android device wirelessly, just as though you plugged in the device with a USB cable. You can browse your calibre collection on your Android device by using the calibre Content server, which makes your collection available over the net. You can now browse your book collection and download books from calibre to your device to open with whatever e-book reading software you have on your android device.
Calibre Companion and many reading apps support browsing the calibre library directly. You can now browse the calibre library and download directly into the reading software. See The calibre Content server for details. In that case, change the port in the calibre Preferences to On some operating systems, you may not be able to run the server on a port number less than because of security settings. In this case the simplest solution is to adjust your router to forward requests on port 80 to port Also some devices do not have browsers advanced enough to run the app-like interface used by the content server.
Because of the large amount of spam in email, sending email can be tricky, as different mail servers use different strategies to block email. The most common problem is if you are sending email directly without a mail relay in calibre. Many servers for example, Amazon block email that does not come from a well known relay.
The most robust way to setup email sending in calibre is to do the following:. Even after doing this, you may have problems. One common source of problems is that some poorly designed antivirus programs block calibre from opening a connection to send email. Try adding an exclusion for calibre in your antivirus program. So, when using these services to send mail calibre automatically restricts itself to sending one book every five minutes. Google recently deliberately broke their email sending protocol SMTP support in an attempt to force everyone to use their web interface so they can show you more ads.
They are trying to claim that SMTP is insecure, that is incorrect and simply an excuse. If you are concerned about giving calibre access to your email account, simply create a new free email account with GMX or Hotmail and use it only for calibre. Linux kernels mount devices read-only when their filesystems have errors. You can repair the filesystem with:. Only Kobo seems to understand that life is too short to be entering collections one by one on an e-ink screen: Note that in the case of the Kindle, there is a way to manipulate collections via USB, but it requires that the Kindle be rebooted every time it is disconnected from the computer, for the changes to the collections to be recognized.
As such, it is unlikely that any calibre developers will ever feel motivated enough to support it. There is however, a calibre plugin that allows you to create collections on your Kindle from the calibre metadata. It is available from here. Amazon have removed the ability to manipulate collections completely in their newer models, like the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire, making even the above plugin useless, unless you root your Kindle and install custom firmware.
The Kobo has very buggy firmware. Connecting to it has been known to fail at random. If you are getting an error when connecting to your touch with calibre try the following, each of which has solved the problem for some calibre users. Books sent to the Kindle only show up on the Kindle after they have been indexed by the Kindle.
This can take some time. If the book still does not show up after some time, then it is likely that the Kindle indexer crashed. Sometimes a particular book can cause the indexer to crash. Unfortunately, Amazon has not provided any way to deduce which book is causing a crash on the Kindle. Your only recourse is to either reset the Kindle, or delete all files from its memory using Windows Explorer or whatever file manager you use and then send the books to it again, one by one, until you discover the problem book. This will most likely take care of the problem.
When you first run calibre, it will ask you for a folder in which to store your books. Whenever you add a book to calibre, it will copy the book into that folder. Books in the folder are nicely arranged into sub-folders by Author and Title. If you want to add a file associated to a particular book, use the top right area of Edit metadata dialog to do so.
Metadata about the books is stored in the file metadata. This file is a sqlite database. When backing up your library make sure you copy the entire folder and all its sub-folders. The library folder and all its contents make up what is called a calibre library.
You can have multiple such libraries. To manage the libraries, click the calibre icon on the toolbar. You can copy or move books between different libraries once you have more than one library setup by right clicking on a book and selecting the Copy to library action.
Author names are complex, especially across cultures, see this note for some of the complexities. The first thing to understand is that books and authors are separate entities in calibre. A book can have more than one author, and an author can have more than one book. You can manage the authors of a book by the edit metadata dialog.
You can manage individual authors by right clicking on the author in the Tag browser on the left of the main calibre screen and selecting Manage authors. Using this dialog you can change the name of an author and also how that name is sorted. This will automatically change the name of the author in all the books of that author.
This is useful when dealing with names that calibre will not get right, such as complex multi-part names like Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra or when dealing with Asian names like Sun Tzu. With all this flexibility, it is possible to have calibre manage your author names however you like. For example, one common request is to have calibre display author names LN, FN. To do this, and if the note below does not apply to you, then:. Suppose your book collection is nicely sorted into folders with the following scheme:. Now this makes it very easy to find for example all science fiction books by Isaac Asimov in the Foundation series.
But suppose you want to find all unread science fiction books. In calibre, you would instead use tags to mark genre and read status and then just use a simple search query like tag: To those of you that claim that you need access to the filesystem, so that you can have access to your books over the network, calibre has an excellent Content server that gives you access to your calibre library over the net. If you are worried that someday calibre will cease to be developed, leaving all your books marooned in its folder structure, explore the powerful Save to Disk feature in calibre that lets you export all your files into a folder structure of arbitrary complexity based on their metadata.
Finally, the reason there are numbers at the end of every title folder, is for robustness. That number is the id number of the book record in the calibre database.
The presence of the number allows you to have multiple records with the same title and author names. It is also part of what allows calibre to magically regenerate the database with all metadata if the database file gets corrupted. Look elsewhere for your book cataloguing needs. Kindly do not contact us in an attempt to get us to change this. In addition, you can add any columns you like. Watch the tutorial UI Power tips to learn how to create your own columns, or read this blog post.
In the add column dialog use the Quick create links to easily create columns to show the book ISBN or formats. You can use the powerful calibre template language to do much more with columns.
For more details, see The calibre template language. You can export all calibre data books, settings and plugins and then import it on another computer. Simply copy the calibre library folder from the old to the new computer. You can find out what the library folder is by clicking the calibre icon in the toolbar. Now on the new computer, start calibre for the first time.
It will run the Welcome wizard asking you for the location of the calibre library. Point it to the previously copied folder. If the computer you are transferring to already has a calibre installation, then the Welcome wizard wont run. In that case, right-click the calibre icon in the toolbar and point it to the newly copied directory. You will now have two calibre libraries on your computer and you can switch between them by clicking the calibre icon on the toolbar.
Transferring your library in this manner preserver all your metadata, tags, custom columns, etc. In order to understand why that happened, you have to understand what a calibre library is. At the most basic level, a calibre library is just a folder. Inside the calibre library folder, at the top level, you will see a file called metadata.
The list of books that calibre displays is created by reading the contents of this metadata. A filesystem is a complex beast. Most network filesystems lack various filesystem features that calibre uses. Additionally, calibre is a single user application, if you accidentally run two copies of calibre on the same networked library, bad things will happen.
Finally, different OSes impose different limitations on filesystems, so if you share your networked drive across OSes, once again, bad things will happen. Consider using the calibre Content server to make your books available on other computers. Run calibre on a single computer and access it via the Content server or a Remote Desktop solution. If you must share the actual library, use a file syncing tool like DropBox or rsync instead of a networked drive.
If you are using a file-syncing tool it is essential that you make sure that both calibre and the file syncing tool do not try to access the calibre library at the same time. In other words, do not run the file syncing tool and calibre at the same time. In particular, be aware that Google Drive is incompatible with calibre, if you put your calibre library in Google Drive, you will suffer data loss.
See this thread for details. If you are reasonably proficient with computers, you can teach calibre to download news from any website of your choosing. To learn how to do this see Adding your favorite news website. Otherwise, you can request a particular news site by posting in the calibre Recipes forum.
E-book files support embedding only TrueType and OpenType. Most fonts on macOS systems are in. You can obtain many such fonts on the web. Simply un-install calibre and then install version 1. If you get an error about calibre not being able to open a file because it is in use by another program, do the following:.
If you get an error about a Python function terminating unexpectedly after upgrading calibre, first uninstall calibre, then delete the folders if they exists C: Now re-install and you should be fine. If you get an error in the Welcome wizard on an initial run of calibre, try choosing a folder like C: If it still wont launch, start a command prompt press the Windows key and R; then type cmd.
At the command prompt type the following command and press Enter:. Post any output you see in a help message on the Forum. If none of the above apply to you, then there is some other program on your computer that is interfering with calibre. First reboot your computer in safe mode, to have as few running programs as possible, and see if the crashes still happen.
If they do not, then you know it is some program causing the problem. The only way to find the culprit is to eliminate the programs one by one and see which one is causing the issue. Basically, stop a program, run calibre, check for crashes.
HTML is the language e-books are written in. Any file you send to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, no matter what the format, eventually gets converted to. A Kindle book is just HTML and CSS. There are a couple of unique tags that are not standard HTML but you can use to add formatting to your.
If they still happen, stop another program and repeat. Something on your computer is preventing calibre from accessing its own temporary files. Most likely the permissions on your Temp folder are incorrect. Go to the folder file: Temp folder, select Properties and go to the Security tab. Make sure that your user account has full control for this folder. Some users have reported that running the following command in an Administrator Command Prompt fixed their permissions.
To get an Administrator Command Prompt search for cmd. Alternately, you can run calibre as Administrator, but doing so will cause some functionality, such as drag and drop to not work. One common cause of failures on macOS is the use of accessibility technologies that are incompatible with the graphics toolkit calibre uses. Try turning off VoiceOver if you have it on. Another cause can be some third party apps that modify system behavior, such as Smart Scroll.
You can obtain debug output about why calibre is not starting by running Console. Debug output will be printed to it. If the debug output contains a line that looks like:. You can clear the cache by following these instructions. Downloading from the Internet can sometimes result in a corrupted download. If the calibre installer you downloaded is not opening, try downloading it again. If re-downloading it does not work, download it from an alternate location.
If you still cannot get the installer to work and you are on Windows, you can use the calibre portable install , which does not need an installer it is just a zip file. The first thing to check is that you are downloading calibre from the official website: Make sure you are clicking the download links on the left, not the advertisements on the right. If you have the official download and your antivirus program is still claiming calibre is a virus, then, your antivirus program is wrong.
You can actually browse the source code yourself or hire someone to do it for you to verify that it is not a virus. Please report the false identification to whatever company you buy your antivirus software from. The most important thing to backup is the calibre library folder, that contains all your books and metadata. This is the folder you chose for your calibre library when you ran calibre for the first time. You can get the path to the library folder by clicking the calibre icon on the main toolbar.
You must backup this complete folder with all its files and sub-folders. You can switch calibre to using a backed up library folder by simply clicking the calibre icon on the toolbar and choosing your backup library folder. A backed up library folder backs up your custom columns and saved searches as well as all your books and metadata. Note that restoring configuration directories is not officially supported, but should work in most cases.
Just copy the contents of the backup directory into the current configuration directory to restore. This prevents calibre from opening them. You can still use calibre to store and transfer them to your e-book reader. First, you must authorize your reader on a windows machine with Adobe Digital Editions. Once this is done, EPUB books transferred with calibre will work fine on your reader. A permission denied error can occur because of many possible reasons, none of them having anything to do with calibre.
You will need to fix the underlying cause of the permissions error before resuming to use calibre.
Read the error message carefully, see what file it points to and fix the permissions on that file or its containing folders. Most readers do not support this. You should complain to the manufacturer about it and hopefully if enough people complain, things will change. The option is found in the Structure detection section of the conversion settings. Note that for this to have effect you have to convert the book.
If your book is already in a format that does not need conversion, you can convert from that format to the same format. Another alternative is to create a catalog in e-book form containing a listing of all the books in your calibre library, with their metadata. Click-and-hold the Convert button to access the catalog creation tool. By default, calibre uses whatever proxy settings are set in your OS.
The format of the variable is: This means that you are free to redistribute calibre as long as you make the source code available. So if you want to put calibre on a CD with your product, you must also put the calibre source code on the CD. The source code is available for download.
You are free to use the results of conversions from calibre however you want. You cannot use either code or libraries from calibre in your software without making your software open source. A portable version of calibre is available here. First, you must install calibre onto your Linux server. If your server is using a modern Linux distribution, you should have no problems installing calibre onto it. If you have an older server, you will either need to compile these from source, or use calibre 2.
In addition, although the calibre command line utilities do not need a running X server, some of them do require the X server libraries to be installed on your system. This is because of Qt, which is used for various image processing tasks, and links against these libraries. If you get an ImportError about some Qt modules, you are likely missing some X libraries. If you want to generate MOBI, use outputfile. Remember to read the Command Line Interface section of the calibre User Manual to learn more about these, and other commands.
Related Topics Documentation overview Previous: Editing e-book metadata Next: What are the best source formats to convert? I converted a PDF file, but the result has various problems? How do I convert my file containing non-English characters, or smart quotes? How do I use some of the advanced features of the conversion tools? Knowing the encoding of the source file: The command-line tools have an ebook-convert-txt-input --input-encoding option.
When adding HTML files to calibre, you may need to tell calibre what encoding the files are in. Now when you add HTML files to calibre they will be correctly processed. HTML files from different sources often have different encodings, so you may have to change this setting repeatedly. A common encoding for many files from the web is cp and I would suggest you try that first. Note that when converting HTML files, leave the input encoding setting mentioned above blank. Such a file looks like: How can I help get my device supported in calibre? My device is not being detected by calibre?