Sony Reader + Calibre = Kindle?
Yesterday I rediscovered the cross-platform open source app Calibre, an incredible ebook management tool. I like to say it’s like iTunes, but for ebooks. First of all, for those of you who don’t know, Sony Reader’s official software only works for Windows and from what I’ve read it’s quite unintuitive to use. Calibre has all the features you would want to manage your ebooks.
Remember that it will manage your library, so don’t tell it to use the directory that you currently use for ebooks as its default as this will drive you mad. Make an empty directory and then drag your ebooks into it. This will also effectively create a backup on your hard drive in case you accidentally delete books using Calibre. Once you have your books in your library, insert your Sony Reader (or other favorite eReader device) and Calibre will automatically recognize it and now you can simply highlight which books you want and click Send to Device. It will also show you the reader’s internal memory as well as any memory cards you have in your device and how much free space they have. By clicking on the arrow next to Send to Device, you can Set it to send to the device or card by default.
One issue that plagues everyone with eReaders is the plethora of ebook formats out there. Fortunately, Calibre deals with this nicely. You set your default output option, and I have chosen the standard ePub format and when you highlight a non-ePub book, you can just click Convert E-books and it will convert them to ePub format for you! Note that this does not work with DRM files.
However, the killer feature I found yesterday is Fetch News. Calibre comes with 100+ news sources in 10+ languages. As well as “ordinary news sources”, you can also use this to fetch your Instapaper or Google Reader by entering your username and password of that service. If Calibre doesn’t have the news source you want, you can add it yourself by creating a simple recipe. If you need something advanced, there is even a place where you can write a Python script to make it as customized as necessary! They encourage you to send them your recipes, so they can add them to future versions of Calibre, which is updated frequently indeed!
So, you can schedule Calibre to autofetch news feeds for you at a certain time of the day or every certain number of days. Then, when you connect your eReader device, it will automatically copy the latest news to your device in your preferred format. I have yet to see if it will also delete the old news files.
For those who are true open source purists, you might want to wait for the Txtr Reader which should also have integrated WiFi, 3G and bookstore… and it runs on Linux. In any case, whatever your device, Calibre should greatly improve your ebook management experience.