Task 5: Interacting with e-book readers

In my mind the reason people start reading e-books as opposed to physical books (p-books) is due to e-book readers. That’s precisely why I started collecting e-books. Calibre has full support for a wide variety of e-book readers. In total, calibre currently supports over 40 e-book readers. Yep, over 40. Everything from eInk devices like the Kindle, Kobo and Nook to cell phones and tablets.

5.1: Putting an e-book on your e-book reader

Connect your e-book reader to your computer, and start calibre if it’s not already running. If your device is supported by calibre a ‘Device’ icon will appear next to the ‘Library’ button in the tool bar. Clicking the ‘Device’ icon will switch the book list from your library to a listing of e-books on your connected device. If you want to send an e-book to your device just switch back to your library, select the ‘Library’ and click ‘Send to device’ in the top tool bar. It really is that simple. Another often-used feature is removing e-books from the device by selecting a book on the device and click the ‘Remove books’ button in the top tool bar.

Once you’ve finished managing the e-books stored on your device, click the down arrow next to the ‘Device’ button. You will see an eject icon (upward-pointing triangle inside a circle). Clicking the eject icon disconnects your e-book reader from the computer. Always eject your device before disconnecting it. Bad things can happen if you don’t do this.

5.2: E-book reader optional configuration

There are a number of different ways you can configure calibre to interact with your device, but I’m only going to touch on the two most commonly changed options.

Open up ‘Preferences’ and click ‘Sending books to devices’. Here you can customize the save template to change where e-books are saved on your device. If you have experience with music tagging programs where you can create custom save locations this should look very familiar. If you have a device like the Kindle or Kobo this isn’t very useful and can safely be left with the default settings. If you have a device, like the Cybook Gen 3, that supports folders this is extremely useful. There are a number of variables (descriptions under the template) which can be used to change where the books are saved. Lets look at a basic example, “favorites/{title} – {authors}”. {title} will be replaced with the title of the book, {authors} will be replaced with its author and the book will be put into the favorites folder. All of the replacements that can be made in the save template are listed with descriptions under template field.

Another useful configuration change is disabling and reorganizing the supported formats. Let’s use the Cybook Gen 3 again as an example. In ‘Preferences’, click ‘Plugins’, then go to ‘Device Interface plugins’, select the ‘Cybook Gen 3 / Opus Device Interface’ and click ‘Customize plugin’. In the configuration for the device you will see a e-book format list. Here you can uncheck formats you don’t want sent to your e-book reader. You can also reorder the formats. The format at the top of the list (must be checked) will be the one used for automatic conversion when sending an e-book in an unsupported (or unchecked) format to the device.