I bought a Kindle 2 last month and joined the e-book revolution. I love e-books for various, practical reasons:
1. Books pile up around the house. I don’t have room to keep all of them. Selling, training, giving, or donating them is a pain. Throwing out books makes me sad.
2. Books deteriorate. I typically purchase used books, and I’ve had to pass a lot of good titles by because they were too musty, yellowed, or brittle to read (enjoyably, at least).
3. Books can be heavy. I have a number of large hardcover books that I don’t read simply because they are huge, heavy, and cumbersome to hold. On business trips and vacation, I can only take one or two books–and rarely the largest ones–or else I run out of space in my bags.
The best thing about e-books is that you can get many titles for free and read them on devices you already own (your computer, your smartphone). Dedicated e-book readers, such as the Kindle and the Nook, are now relatively cheap (about the price of 10-15 books) and offer better readability than cell phone and computer screens. I really like my Kindle, and find that I can read faster on it and focus my attention on the text far better than on non-dedicated e-readers.
Devices such as the Kindle have built-in or preferred e-book stores, but you don’t have to rely on them only to get books. Project Gutenberg, OpenLibrary, Internet Archive, Google Books, and even (if you’re inclined) BitTorrent offer a ton of free or low-cost books. Sometimes, however, the books you get from these secondary sources aren’t in the correct format to read on your device, so you’ll have to convert them (hopefully for free!) before you can read them. To convert them to a new format, I recommend using Calibre.
Calibre is a free and open source application which aims to be, for e-books, what iTunes is for music and video files. It does a little bit of everything, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux OSes.
Here is a list of its most prominent features:
• Organize and manage your e-book library
• Edit and automatically edit e-book metadata and assign covers images
• Convert e-books between formats (its killer feature)
• Syncing books to/from numerous hardware devices (Android phones, iPad, Kindle, Nook, etc.)
• Supports all e-book formats, including EPUB and MOBI (though it does not overcome DRM)
• Downloads news from web sites and transfers it to your e-reader device
• Allows you to run a content server to access your e-books via the web
• Read e-books (though its built-in reader is slow and kind of horrible)
Calibre isn’t the prettiest looking software. The icons are bright and clunky, though immediately decipherable. There are too few keyboard shortcuts and way too many right-click options. There is a lot of dead space in the main window, which is the main reason, in my opinion, that it looks amateurish compared to, say, iTunes.
That said, looks aren’t everything. Calibre is free, it’s updated and improved very frequently, and it does a heck of a lot. Its e-book conversion routines are probably the best available to date (and definitely the best available for free). It’s automatic metadata and cover download feature saves a ton of data entry time. The interface is very customizable, allowing you to change the window layout from wide to tall, and to select any number of data columns. Calibre supports user-defined tags, categories, saved searches, and even user-defined data fields, which allow you to organize your e-books in a myriad of ways. All in all, Calibre is extremely powerful. That said, most of the time you’ll spend in two windows (the library and the metadata windows), and use the handful of toolbar icons to navigate from function to function.
I love using Calibre to maintain my e-book library, and to convert e-books to the MOBI format, which is one of the few open formats that my Kindle supports. E-book conversion isn’t perfect, but it is very, very good, and represents Calibre’s killer feature. In the near future, I plan to post some recommendations on converting e-books from PDF to MOBI for reading on a Kindle.















