Calibre (software)
Calibre (, stylised calibre) is a cross-platform open-source suite of e-book software. Calibre supports organizing existing e-books into virtual libraries, displaying, editing, creating and converting e-books, as well as syncing e-books with a variety of e-readers. Editing books is supported for EPUB and AZW3 formats. Books in other formats like MOBI must first be converted to those formats, if they are to be edited. History. On 31 October 2006, when Sony introduced its PRS-500 e-reader, Kovid Goyal started developing "libprs500", aiming mainly to enable use of the PRS-500 formats on Linux . With support from the MobileRead forums, Goyal reverse-engineered the proprietary Broad Band eBook (BBeB) file format. In 2008, the program, for which a graphical user interface was developed, was renamed "calibre", displayed in all lowercase. Features. Calibre supports many file formats and reading devices. Most e-book formats can be edited, for example, by changing the font, font size, margins, and metadata, and by adding an auto-generated table of contents. Conversion and editing are easily applied to appropriately licensed digital books, but commercially purchased e-books may need to have digital rights management (DRM) restrictions removed. Calibre does  not natively support DRM removal, but may allow DRM removal after installing plug-ins with such a function. Calibre allows users to sort and group e-books by metadata fields. Metadata can be pulled from many different sources, e.g., ISBNdb.com; online booksellers; and providers of free e-books and periodicals in the US and elsewhere, such as the Internet Archive, "Munsey's Magazine", and Project Gutenberg; and social networking sites for readers, such as Goodreads and LibraryThing. It is possible to search the Calibre library by various fields, such as author, title, or keyword; however , full-text search has not  yet been implemented. E-books can be imported into the Calibre library, either by sideloading files manually or by wirelessly syncing an e-book reading device with the cloud storage service in which the Calibre library is backed up, or with the computer on which Calibre resides. Also, online content can be harvested and converted to e-books. This conversion is facilitated by so-called "recipes", short programs written in a Python-based domain-specific language. E-books can then be exported to all supported reading devices via USB, Calibre's integrated mail server, or wirelessly. Mailing e-books enables , for example, sending personal documents to the Amazon Kindle family of e-readers and tablet computers. This can be accomplished via a web browser, if the host computer is running and the device and host computer share the same network; in this case, pushing harvested content from content sources is supported on a regular interval (called 'subscription'). Also, if the Calibre library on the host computer is stored in a cloud service, such as Box.net, Google Drive, or Dropbox, then either the cloud service or a third-party app, such as Calibre Cloud or CalibreBox, can remotely access the library . Since version 1.15, released in December 2013, Calibre also contains an application to create and edit e-books directly, similar to the more full-featured editor tools of the Sigil application, but without the latter's WYSIWYG editing mode.