I have discovered and installed the free ebook reader and management application named Calibre to read books and stuff!
Apart from reading ebooks, Calibre can also manage your digital book library, search for ebooks in various locations from the Amazon Kindle store to Feedbooks.com and synchonize with a mobile reader such as my smartphone. Seeing that I’m pretty OCD about book cataloguing, I’ve used Calibre to ensure all the books’ metadata, cover image and such are meticulously entered.
Thanks to Feedbooks and Project Gutenberg, I now have quite a lot of books in the queue to be read. Calibre also has a list of DRM-free ebooks on its website here
Below is the ebook management interface screencap. Click on the thumbnails to view larger images.
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Here is the interface used to edit the ebooks’ metadata, displaying E.E. Doc Smith’s Triplanetary. Calibre could search the metadata and cover image online or you could edit the metadata and upload the cover image yourself.
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The reader window here is displaying a page from Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular, a delightful transhuman romp – to put it mildly. Calibre is able to read a number of ebook formats, including EPUB, MOBI, LIT, RTF, TXT and PDF. I prefer to download EPUB files.
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Thanks to its syncing feature, all the books on the desktop version is also duplicated in my smartphone for quick and easy reading if I’m caught needing to stay put away from bookshelves. I love living in the future.
