- Library Management – Calibre manages e-books stored in it for you, including options to sort, tag, comment, etc. Supports the downloading of metadata.
- E-Book Conversion – Supports all major formats(full list here) including EPUB and MOBI. The conversion program supports rescaling font sizes, automatic detection/creation of chapters/table of contents, and insertion of metadata at the start of the book.
- Syncing to E-Book Readers – Supports a list of devices it can sync to(Full list here) and automatically chooses the best format for the device.
- News Ripper – Downloads news from websites/RSS feeds, formats it into an e-book and sends it to the device. Supports full versions of articles, not just summaries. Pre-supported sites include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc. You can create custom ‘recipes’ for other sites and use them, even upload them to share with others.
- Built in E-Book Viewer
- Content Server – Calibre supports acting as a web server to access your collection using a web browser. Supports email and mobile devices.
Now, this is great if you have an E-Book Reader. Let’s go back to our recent discussion of the Amazon Kindle, with Wi-Fi. Many papers are available for free online. Let’s take the Wall Street Journal, which does charge. The cost of an Amazon Subscription to the WSJ is $14.99 a month. The cost of getting the newspaper is $2.29 per week($9.16 a month) and online only at $1.99 per week(7.96 a month). Personally, while we think charging more on the Kindle is wrong, here’s a way to extract the information using your login and send it to your Kindle.
We did a little test of this feature, and picked a few of their over 200 English news sources(They have additional foreign language offerings). We were able to program it to autogenerate a few choice news sources and send them on a custom frequency to our device as long as Calibre was running in the background. Next, it seems to have a command-line interface, and we’ll have to see if it can run as a cron job on our server.
We have yet to test it, but according to the Calibre forums, the following should work…
ebook-convert <calibreroot>/resources/recipes/nytimes.recipe todays_nytimes.mobi
That should work if set up as a cron job, but e-book conversion, we gather, can be resource intensive. We’ll have more on these experiments later.
Either way, Calibre is available for PC, Mac, and Linux. Why not give it a try?
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