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Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Books The iTunes for eBooks

Posted by on Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 1:14 PM

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Last night, in preparation for "Read an eBook Week," I downloaded Calibre, which is an open-source iTunes for ebooks. Bearing in mind that I've just played around with it for a few hours, I have to say: This is a nifty interface for managing your DRM-free ebooks on your computer.

The best part of Calibre is that it makes it easy to export your ebooks to your ereading devices: Kindles, Sony Readers, iPhones, and Android phones are all supported, and you can apparently access your books from the internet, too. You can transfer files easily from PDFs to .epub to whatever format you need, you can send RSS feeds and magazine articand it also supports comic formats like .cbr and .cbz, too.

I'm sure there will be some glitches along the way, but I'm in a serious honeymoon period with Calibre right now. It's elegant, simple, and non-proprietary.

 

Comments (8) RSS

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Will in Seattle 1
may the best open-source music s/w win.

even if it won't. the industry measures winning in terms of market share, so the pay-for-play players will always win that rigged game.
Posted by Will in Seattle http://www.facebook.com/WillSeattle on March 9, 2010 at 1:19 PM
2
Do I need to jailbreak my iphone in order to use Calibre? There's no real benefit for me to do that at this point in my contract.
Posted by j.lee on March 9, 2010 at 1:42 PM
3
@2, no

For the iPhone, you get the app "Stanza". On your computer, you tell Calibre to start it's server, and then Stanza can download the books from your computer wirelessly.
Posted by diane b on March 9, 2010 at 2:00 PM
Paul Constant 4
Thanks, @diane b, for answering. I should've made that clearer in the post.
Posted by Paul Constant http://paulconstant.tumblr.com/ on March 9, 2010 at 2:39 PM
Supreme Ruler Of The Universe 5

If that's the iTunes for eBooks, what is the YouTube for iTunes for eBooks. And what is its blog ?
Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe http://yrihf.com on March 9, 2010 at 2:40 PM
Will in Seattle 6
@5 - most likely it will be something that works with HTML5, since that moves beyond Flash, which doesn't work well on eBooks.
Posted by Will in Seattle http://www.facebook.com/WillSeattle on March 9, 2010 at 3:35 PM
7
For sure, best book manager around. Don't know what I'd do without Calibre's feed features (podcasts for written content!).
Posted by thename on March 9, 2010 at 5:11 PM
Jigae 8
Thank you Paul, you're awesome.
Posted by Jigae on March 9, 2010 at 5:35 PM

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