My vixen sistah – Fiction Vixen – offered up a kindlicious blog post about how to convert pdf files so they are viewable by your Kindle. I wanted to build upon this and share my absolute favorite software for all things Kindle.

Calibre is a one stop solution to all your e-book needs. It is free, open source and cross-platform in design and works well on Linux, OS X and Windows. Calibre 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 and an integrated e-book viewer.

I have to admit that I am not a calibre guru. There are those who know the ins and outs of creating your own blog and news feeds and recipes – that is not me. I read my blogs and news on the web, but I hear its possible to create them with calibre and have them automatically sent to your Kindle, thereby getting around the subscription fee amazon charges for them. If you are interested in this, you will have to check out the calibre webpage or the really awesome support forum over at MobileRead.

So, what do I use calibre for? I use it mostly for library management. It keeps all your ebooks on your computer in a folder that is specified by you. The books are sorted and placed in folders by author, and then sorted by title. Within the program itself you can input and sort by any of the following:

Title
Author
Date
Publisher
Rating
Size (Max size of all formats)
Series

You can also add comments and tags to your books that can be picked up using the search function. It will also pick up book metadata/book covers from the internet using IBSN or Title/Author search.

Once you have a book in your calibre library, you can do an amazing number of things with it.

First – calibre converts. It will take any of these ebook formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, TXT and output it to any of these formats: EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, TCR, TXT with just the push of a button. Obviously if you are using a Kindle, you will be outputting to the MOBI format.

Second – you can send your books to your Kindle device. You can do this by plugging your Kindle into your computer and clicking the “send to device” button OR you can set up wireless syncing where the program will send the file to your Kindle email address. Just be careful with this option as Amazon does have a small fee for documents send through your Kindle email address last I heard.

Third – Read. You can read any of your books in your library, no matter the format, with the built in book viewer.

Fourth – Browse your library on the web. I admit I haven’t fully figured out WHY you would need this feature, but it is darn nifty anyway! One aspect of this that does look neat is that you can use Stanza on your iphone to browse your library on your computer. Again, I don’t know why this is neat, but surely it must be!

So, if you are at all like me and must backup copies of all your books – I mean who knows what could happen to Amazon?!?! What if they had a server crash and lost records of all your purchases? Or what if they just up and decided to stop saving your purchases for you? What if birds attacked their headquarters and all of their digital library was destroyed by a mob of angry pigeons?

Anyway, if you are like me and like to have back ups and like them to be nice, neat, orderly, and searchable then you need this software! It is FREE by golly and incredibly useful so head on over to the Calibre website and download your copy! If you like it a whole bunch, consider donating to the developer (there is a button on the site). He is incredibly helpful and responds incredibly fast to problems and questions on the MobileRead – Calibre Forum.

Other posts you may like:

• Reading library books on your Kindle…
• Thursday Tips & Tricks ~ Backing Up Your Books
• Kindle for Mac – now available