Task 1: Organizing

The first part of organizing is getting your e-books into calibre’s library. Click the ‘Add books’ button in the tool bar at the top of the window, then select the e-books you would like calibre to import. When calibre imports your e-books it makes a copy of them in the storage location you specified during initial setup. Once you’ve added an e-book, calibre doesn’t need further access to the original file.

During an e-book import, calibre tries to read the metadata from the e-book. Metadata is information about the book that is stored within the e-book itself. Different formats support different information. Often the information is incomplete or just plain wrong. Don’t worry – calibre makes it easy to fix this. Select the book whose metadata you want to change by clicking the book title in the main window. Then click ‘Edit metadata’ on the top tool bar (to the right of the ‘Add books’ button) and the metadata editor will open.

The easy way to correct the metadata is to fill in the title and author, then click the ‘Download metadata’ button at the bottom, center of the Edit metadata dialog. Calibre will display possible matches for the information entered. If there is more than one result select the entry that looks like the best match. A lot of information should be filled in now.

Above the ‘Download metadata’ button and to the top, right of the cover image is the ‘Download cover’ button. If the book doesn’t have a cover showing or if you don’t like the cover, click it to try to have calibre download one from the internet.

Now that you have your e-books in calibre there are a few different ways to find specific e-books in your library. Direct Searching is one of the fastest ways. Above the book list there is a Search field. Think of it like having Google built into calibre. Just type a few key words into the Search field. Try the author, title, series, or anything else from the e-book’s metadata. E-books matching your search terms are shown as filtered results. The other e-books are still in your library, but they won’t be shown if the search expression doesn’t find them.

You can also use the tag browser to search your library. Along the left side of the window is the tag browser. If you don’t see anything to the left of the book list, click the luggage tag icon in the lower right of the main window; a list will appear to the left of the library. It allows you to see specific subsets of your library. Clicking the icon to the left of each tag allows you to display just the e-books matching that criteria. A plus searches for all books that match and a minus searches for all books that don’t match. Notice that as you enable items in the tag browser search queries are added to the Search field. The tag browser is really just an easy way to create search queries. You could type the query directly into the Search field and see the same result.