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Calibre - A MUST HAVE if you read e-books

I used to read a lot books and I mean A LOT. Mostly in English as my most of my interests are in Sci Fi and Fantasy books. Dead tree books are nice, I love them but you have to admit they take up a lot of space and they are quite heavy to carry when you move from one place to another. Then you have to store them in shelves which take slightly more space.

After two moves (I’ll spare you the details on why and how I did), most of my books ended up in cardboards between two places and I lack the space to store all of them so a while ago I moved over to the digital format for books (aka e-books).

As my primary device for reading is an iPad (and iPhone sometimes), I use epub as my main format for books.

I manage to get hold of most of my dead tree library in epub format but not everything yet, many publishers do not have all their catalog in that format (or another), especially older books.

Enter Calibre

All these books, like their dead tree brothers, take some space (although not much compared to your average disk drive) and must be managed. Some of the ones you buy unfortunately have DRM attached (like Amazon’s) and that is something you REALLY do not want (but that is a discussion for another day and not there).

So I needed software to manage all of these, convert them if needed, upload them (and removing DRM).

I have not found anything even remotely close to Calibre. It is an AWESOME piece of software that does everything and more about e-book management.

I will grant you the UI (User Interface) is not great (especially on a Mac) but it got much better over the years and nothing beats it anyway.

Main features: