Task 4: Downloading news
This feature of calibre is often overlooked. Integrated into calibre is the ability to download news from a variety of sources. As of this writing 1543 sources (‘recipes’) from all over the world, including both free and paid content, are supported. The real advantage of having calibre manage your news subscriptions is that once downloaded the content will be formatted for reading on your e-book reader. However, you can still read the news right on your computer. If you’re going to be reading the downloaded news on an e-book reader it’s best to go into ‘Preferences’, select ‘Behavior’ and set the ‘Preferred output format’ in General options to the preferred format for your e-book reader. This would be AZW3 for Kindle, and EPUB for the Kobo and Nook.
Click the ‘Fetch news’ button in the top tool bar to open the news download scheduler. With so many sources the best thing to do is find the ones you like and set them to automatically download at a time convenient for you. If you don’t want to schedule automatic downloads and would rather handle it manually, you can. Just use the ‘Download now’ button that appears when you have selected a news source.
In the news download scheduler you can expand the categories that are relevant to you (the ones in languages you can read) by clicking the disclosure triangles to the left of the language groupings. Look through the entries for something of interest. When you find one, select it and check the ‘Schedule for download’ check box on the right, or click ‘Download now’. You can also set how often and when you want it to download. Once downloaded the content will be converted to an e-book according to your conversion preferences.
By default when you connect your e-book reader calibre will automatically transfer the downloaded news to the device. If you don’t want this to happen, and would rather transfer manually go into the ‘Preferences’, select the ‘Behavior’ category, and uncheck ‘Automatically send downloaded news to ebook reader’. Also, if you do want it sent to the reader automatically it’s usually a good idea to check the ‘Delete news from library when automatically sent to reader’ option.