In that post about instapaper, ebooks and kindles I mentioned Calibre. So here’s the follow-up.
In a nutshell I use Calibre to move ebooks, pdfs and newspapers to my Kindle. It’s like a non-fancy version of iTunes you tell it where your books are and you can sync your stuff with your e-reader.
So you may ask, why would you do that if the Kindle has built-in wireless and you can get your books by buying them online? Because I already had a bunch of ebooks. I didn’t have a ton of them, but enough to keep me reading for a while. So how does Calibre help me with this?
Here’s how I use the program:
1) Make my “library”- I let it created a db of my books in whatever format I already had them.
2) Get my stuff in the right format- Calibre has an excellent format converter. I then use it to convert the books I want to the correct format- for me, this is .mobi since I use a Kindle. If you use a Sony reader (which I wanted before they decided to mess with how great their screens were).
3) Sync the books – load ‘em up and go read. Note: I could do this via kindle-email and get charged a small fee per MB, but I prefer to use the wired cable
But there’s a lot of extra stuff I do too:
4) Use Calibre to automatically pull some newspaper and magazine feeds- Calibre has a bunch of pre-loaded newspaper and magazine feed links, all you need to do is schedule them to download when you want them to. It’ll even create a table of contents and article list to make it reader-friendly. I don’t do this as much as I used to though because I’m not on the bus as I was before so I’m not reading the periodicals as much.
5) Organize my library- I’m sure I could do a better job of this, but I use Calibre to grab the book meta-data like publishing dates, plot summaries (and tags), and some other things. I try to make sure I’m up to date. Oh, it’ll also grab a cover image too.
6) I don’t do this but it works- You can use calibre as a content server to download your books to your smartphone or other device.
So that’s about it- I still dig my Kindle, I know there are other devices out there that may work for you a bit better, but what I’ve listed works for me.
