Calibre is free and open source e-book computer software that organizes, saves and manages e-books, supporting a variety of formats. It also supports e-book syncing with a variety of popular e-book readers and will, within DRM restrictions, convert e-books between differing formats.
Calibre supports all the currently commercially relevant file formats and reading devices. Most of these e-book formats can be edited, for example, by changing the font or the font size and by adding an auto-generated table of contents. Conversion and editing is only possible after digital rights management restrictions have been removed from commercially purchased e-book files. calibre does not natively support this removal, but the capability can be added to the program by installing freely available plug-ins.
calibre helps to organize the personal e-book library by allowing the user to sort and group e-books by metadata fields. Metadata can be pulled from many different sources (ISBNdb.com,Google Books, Amazon, LibraryThing). Full-text search, including the whole library, is possible.
E-books can be imported into the calibre library, either by adding files manually, or by syncing an e-book reading device. On-line content-sources can be harvested and converted to e-books. This conversion is facilitated by so-called "recipes", short programs written in a Python-baseddomain-specific language. E-books can then be exported to all supported reading devices viaUSB or via the integrated mail-server. Mailing e-books enables, for example, sending personal documents to the Amazon Kindle family of e-book readers.
The content of the library can be remotely accessed by a web browser, if the hosting computer is running. In this case, pushing harvested content from content sources is supported on a regular interval (subscription). If the hosting computer is not always on, a hosted calibre solution can help. In this case, the library is not accessible, but the subscriptions are pushed to the reading device on schedule.
