Chapter 20. Managing Your ebooks with Calibre
I have a huge library of ebooks. Because I get my ebooks from many different sources, they are spread out all over my hard drive. My ADE books are in one folder, books I’ve bought from Kobo are in another folder, and so on. All my files on my computer are backed up, so I’m not concerned about losing them, but it sure is easier to manage them when they are all in one location.
A while back, I discovered Calibre, a free application for managing an ebook library. Calibre is incredibly powerful, but it’s also easy to use. In this chapter, you learn to use Calibre to manage your library, edit the metadata for your ebooks so they show up correctly on your NOOKcolor and NOOK, get cover art when covers are missing, and sideload books to your NOOKcolor and NOOK quickly and easily.
Configuring Calibre
You can download Calibre from calibre-ebook.com. There’s a version for practically every type of computer on the market today. After you install Calibre, you need to specify a location for your Calibre library. When you add books to Calibre, it copies the ebook to your Calibre library. That way, all your ebooks are kept in one location.
To set up your Calibre library, simply launch Calibre, and it starts the Welcome Wizard. In the first step of the wizard, specify where you want Calibre to store your ebooks. You can choose any disk location you want, or you can leave it at the default setting.
In the next step of the Welcome Wizard, select Barnes & Noble from the list of manufacturers and then select Nook from the list of devices. (Don’t worry if you have a NOOKcolor because Calibre treats both as a generic Nook.) Calibre uses your choice here for the default conversion settings. In other words, because you are choosing a NOOK as your reading device, Calibre knows it needs to convert ebooks to EPUB format when it sideloads ebooks onto your NOOK.
In the final step of the Welcome Wizard, Calibre displays links for tutorial videos and the Calibre user’s guide. The videos are an excellent way to learn all the features of Calibre, but if you just want information you need to manage your library and sideload ebooks onto your NOOKcolor or NOOK, you can skip them for now. (You can also access them at calibre-ebook.com/help.)
Adding Books to Your Calibre Library
When you first start using Calibre, your library is empty. To add books to your library, click the Add Books button on the toolbar. Select the books you want to add, and then click Open.
Tip
You can select multiple ebooks before you click Open; all the ebooks you select are added to your Calibre library.
When adding ebooks protected with DRM, you need to make sure that they are in either eReader or EPUB format. However, unprotected ebooks can be in any format. When you sideload unprotected ebooks to your NOOKcolor or NOOK, Calibre automatically converts them into the correct format.
Note
If you use a NOOKcolor, it cannot read eReader (PDB) formatted ebooks. Those books need to be converted to EPUB format, which you cannot do if they are secure eReader files.
Editing Metadata
As you add books to your library (see Figure 20.1), you might notice that some books have missing or incorrect metadata. For example, the book’s title might not be formatted correctly or the listing in Calibre might be missing the author’s name. You can edit the information Calibre uses for the book’s listing by editing the book’s metadata. You’ll almost certainly want to be sure that your metadata is correct for all your ebooks because your NOOKcolor and NOOK also uses metadata to display information about the ebooks.
Figure 20.1. The Calibre main window.
To edit metadata for an ebook, first select the ebook in Calibre, and then click Edit Metadata on the toolbar. Calibre displays the current metadata for the book you selected (see Figure 20.2). At this point, you can manually change the metadata or let Calibre retrieve metadata from either Google or ISBNdb.com.
Figure 20.2. The Calibre Metadata Information screen.
To let Calibre automatically retrieve metadata for your ebook, click the Fetch Metadata from the Server button at the bottom of the Edit Meta Information dialog. Calibre uses the metadata shown in the dialog box to attempt a lookup on the book. If the metadata that already exists isn’t sufficient, Calibre lets you know.
If Calibre cannot retrieve metadata for a particular book, enter the ISBN number (you can usually get it from BN.com or Amazon) for the book and try again. I’ve never experienced a problem when the ISBN number was entered first.
By default, Calibre searches only Google for metadata. In most cases, Google has the metadata you need, but if it doesn’t, you can also use ISBNdb.com as mentioned previously. To use ISBNdb.com, you need to sign up for a free account at ISBNdb.com/account. After you create your account, you must generate an access key that you can use in Calibre to authorize it to use ISBNdb.com. Here’s how you do that:
- Create an account at ISBNdb.com/account.
- After you create your account, click Developer Area in the upper-left corner of the page.
- Click the Manage Access Keys link.
- Click Generate a New Key.
- Enter a comment for your key. I entered “Calibre” so I know that’s what this key is for.
- Leave the Daily Use Limit blank, which sets the limit to unlimited.
- Click the Generate New Key button to generate your key.
After you generate your key, copy it to your Clipboard. Switch over to Calibre and click the Fetch Metadata from the Server button. Enter your access key in the textbox, and click Fetch. From then on, Calibre will look up metadata in both Google and ISBNdb.com.
Note
If it seems like too much work to create an ISBNdb.com account and generate a key, don’t worry about it. Google almost always has complete metadata for most books.
Tip
If you need to edit the title or author of an ebook, you can double-click the title or author name (and other metadata as well) in the Calibre library, type the new information, and press Enter.
Adding Covers
Because books you sideload onto your NOOK are kept in My Documents, you can’t browse them by cover. However, you can see the cover on the touchscreen while you’re reading the book—assuming a cover image is available. Sideloaded books on your NOOKcolor, however, do show the cover when you view them in the Library.
Note
Recall that sideloaded books and content are ebooks and documents you have from sources other than B&N (for example, Fictionwise, Project Gutenberg, and so on).
Calibre can download covers for your ebooks automatically. You can even add covers to ebooks protected with DRM from the B&N NOOKstore or from another ebook store.
The easiest way to flip through cover images for your ebooks is to enable browsing by covers in Calibre. Click the Browse by Covers button shown in Figure 20.3 to enable this feature. You can then click either side of the current cover to flip to another cover or use the arrow keys on your keyboard to flip through your covers. To return to full library view, click the Browse by Covers button again.
Figure 20.3. The Browse by Covers button makes locating missing covers much quicker.
You can also browse ebooks by tags using the Browse by Tags button immediately to the right of the Browse by Covers button. Tags are part of the metadata for an ebook, so you can edit how an ebook is tagged by editing the metadata.
To add (or replace) the cover image for an ebook, select the ebook and then click Edit Metadata. Click the Download Cover button at the bottom of the dialog box to add a cover image.
You can add cover images to multiple books by selecting more than one book in the Calibre library. On Windows, you can press Ctrl+A to select all your books. If you want to select multiple books that are listed contiguously, click the first book and then hold the Shift key, and click the last book. If you want to select multiple books that are not contiguous, click the first book; then hold the Ctrl key as you select the other books.
After you select all the books to which you’d like to add covers, click the down arrow to the right of the Edit Meta Information button, and select Download Only Covers from the menu. Calibre automatically downloads covers for all the books you selected.
Sideloading Books with Calibre
Sideloading books onto your NOOKcolor or NOOK with Calibre is fast and easy. After you connect your NOOK to your computer, Calibre detects it and displays an icon for it in the area directly under the toolbar. If you have a microSD card installed in your NOOKcolor or NOOK, Calibre displays an icon for both your NOOKcolor and the microSD card.
Note
When you connect your NOOKcolor or NOOK to a Windows computer, Windows assigns drive letters to your NOOKcolor and to the microSD card if one is installed. Calibre assumes that the first drive letter assigned to your NOOKcolor is its main memory and the second drive letter is the microSD card. However, sometimes Windows assigns the first drive letter to the microSD card; when it does that, Calibre incorrectly identifies your NOOKcolor’s main memory and the memory card.
To resolve this problem, you need to explicitly assign drive letters to your NOOKcolor and its microSD card inside of Windows. For information on how to change drive letters in Windows, see www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/how-to-change-the-drive-letter-in-windows-xp-for-an-external-usb-stick-or-hard-drive/.
Sometimes Calibre, if it is already open when you plug in your NOOKcolor, won’t recognize the NOOKcolor as being installed. Close Calibre and restart it.
Note
At this point in time, Calibre treats the NOOKcolor and NOOK as the same device, so the image for your NOOKcolor in Calibre is the NOOK. This is cosmetic only, and Calibre correctly interacts with the NOOKcolor or NOOK.
To sideload one or more books onto your NOOKcolor, make sure your NOOK is connected to your computer. Select the books from your library, and click Send to Device on the toolbar. Calibre automatically converts any ebooks that are not already in a format compatible with your NOOKcolor and then transfers them to your NOOK. By default, Calibre transfers ebooks to your NOOKcolor’s main memory, but you can choose to transfer them to the microSD card if you want. Simply click the down arrow next to the Send to Device button, and select Send to Storage Card A from the menu.
Tip
You can also select Set Default Send to Device Action and select Send to Storage Card A. From then on, clicking the Send to Device button automatically sideloads any selected ebooks to your NOOK’s microSD card.
Depending on what action is necessary, Calibre might take a while to sideload books. Calibre indicates that it’s working and how many jobs it’s currently processing using the progress indicator in the lower-right corner of the main window. If you click the progress indicator, you can see details on what Calibre is doing.
Subscribing to News Content in Calibre
Calibre also has an excellent news subscription feature that makes it easy to subscribe to various news feeds that you can then sync to your NOOKcolor. To access this feature, click the Fetch News button, select a news feed, and set the subscription options that determine how often the feed is downloaded. Keep in mind that for feeds to download, Calibre must be running.
Tip
I particularly like this feature (subscribing to news content in Calibre). I have print subscriptions to The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, which I paid for long before I got my NOOKcolor. Although I could subscribe again to The New York Review of Books at BN.com, I’m paying for two subscriptions...so I use Calibre to fetch that news (using my account information from The New York Review of Books website). When my print subscription runs out, I will switch to the BN.com subscription...but for now, I only pay for one.
Calibre uses a collection of properties known as a “recipe” to subscribe to a particular news feed. If you don’t see a news feed that you’re interested in, you can find others and submit requests for new recipes by browsing to http://bugs.calibre-ebook.com/wiki/UserRecipes.
Converting ebooks in Calibre
Calibre can convert a wide variety of formats. Although your NOOKcolor can read Word, PDF, HTML, and text documents, these are not treated as “real” ebooks by the NOOKcolor. What that means is that you cannot add notes or highlights, bookmark pages, and so on. So although you can read those formats, you may want to convert them to the EPUB format so that they get the full ebook treatment.
Calibre’s conversion options are rich, and I won’t go into the details here. The standard default PDF to EPUB, HTML to EPUB, and such work quite well. To convert a document, follow these steps:
- Add the document to your Calibre library if you haven’t already.
- Select the book you want to convert.
- Click the Convert Books button.
- Click OK.
If you want more details about the vast number of options for conversion, go to calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/conversion.html.
Note
PDFs are the most problematic documents to convert because of the way they are created. So if the results are less than satisfactory, you might tweak some of the settings to see if you can get better results.
In this chapter, you’ve seen how powerful Calibre is for managing your ebook library. You’ve also seen how easily you can edit the metadata for your ebooks, add missing covers to your ebooks, and sideload ebooks onto your NOOK.
In “Accessing Your Calibre Library with Trook,” you see how to take this a step further so that you can sideload ebooks onto your NOOKcolor or NOOK from anywhere with Wi-Fi or a Fast & Free Wireless connection by accessing Calibre remotely.