Q&A on Calibre

[RagdollvX]

Recently i had quite a bit of trouble with Calibre and could not figure out for the life of me how to operate it
i have come to find out its quite easy
and so i'd like to take what i learned from that thread and put it here

as well as give you the opprotunity to ask your own questions in this thread
now we have a lot of people like me on here that like to
throw in a OH i hope someone fixes it for you
OR an i don't know anything about that topic

if we could keep everything but the question and answers out of this thread i'd really appreciate that

i'm a thread jacker by nature so i know that it's hard

[RagdollvX]

Q: What is Calibre

A: It is ebook managment software that can be used for you "my docs" (or similar) folders on your device

Q: Where can i download Calibre

A: All version are available http://sourceforge.net/projects/calibre/files/ here

Q: How Do I Get Calibre To Find The Metadata In Bulk?

A: Simply by selecting (highlighting) all of your books
Which you can do by selecting the top one holding the SHIFT key and scrolling to the very last one and clicking it
VOILA! all highlighted

then you simply hold the CTRL key and the D key at the same time and it will start searching for your metadata

Q: What Is Metadata?

A: It is all the information about your book including:
Title
Author
Rating (your rating of the book)
Publisher
Tags (things that you can remember the book by)
Series (the names of a series you like to keep together
ISBN (the number for this particular book so the computer knows what it is)
Date Received
Date Published
Book Cover

Q: What if Calibre doesn't give a book the right information?

A: Well there is an option to manually go in and edit the metadata
select your book that you'd like to edit the metadata for
you can RIGHT CLICK this book, hit EDIT METADATA
then select EDIT INDIVIDUALLY
or
you can highlight and select the button on the top that says
EDIT METADATA it will open up a new screen with all the information on it and you can edit everything
right down to the book cover you want to see from there

Q: How Do I Convert Books With Calibre

A: Select all the books by highlighting the first one scrolling to the bottom one hitting the SHIFT key and selecting the bottom one
all your books will be selected. then you can either hit the button up top that says CONVERT BOOKS

or

Right click go into this menu over CONVERT BOOKS a new menu opens and hit BULK CONVERT

Q: What If I Don't Want to Bulk Convert What If I Have Three Seperated Books That Need To Be Converted

A: there are two ways to handle this question

First you can just bulk convert all books every time and see a message that asks if you'd like to RECONVERT the same books
simply select no and your books will get converted fine

Second you can select your first book hold the CTRL key and select the next book and so on holding CTRL until you have them all selected
then right click CONVERT BOOKS BULK CONVERT and your done

Q: How Do I Get A Different Cover To Show?

A: First you find and save the cover art you would like to be displayed when you look at the book i personally prefer
to just type it in a google image search and select my cover that way save it to a folder and go ahead and open calibre

you first select your book then you hit EDIT METADATA
there will be print somewhere that says CHANGE COVER IMAGE
select the BROWSE button next to that find your cover art that you would prefer
double click and your cover should pop right up

Q: I have Calibre Showing Me Two Files PDF and EPUB. I No Longer Need The PDF to Show, How Do i Delete it from Calibre

A: Select your book
hit EDIT METADATA
Select the file (in this case PDF) that you would like to remove
and simply hit the RECYCLE symbol next to the box

[Enigma75]

Re: How Do I Get A Different Cover To Show?

Another way to change the cover:

1. Have the EDIT METADATA screen open in Calibre.

2. Have your image up on your browser screen (like you mentioned with google).

3. Make your browser screen smaller then the Calibre screen (by clicking the button to the left of the red X button that closes the screen) I make is to the internet browser takes up the left of my screen and Calibre is on the right.

4. Drag the image to the Calibre screen where the image I want replaced is. And it'll replace your image.

[RagdollvX]

thank you so much for you input

[Dkelly701]

Here is a little tip to clean up your library. I get books in lots of different formats, but I always convert them to epub in Calibre and I don't want to keep them in the other formats. If you have lots of books, Calibre allows you to automate the clean up of these other formats. First, you need to make sure that you don't have any books that aren't in epub. To do this go to the search box and type in not format:epub . This search will return a list of books that do not have an epub format. Click on the small white box above the number column and this will select all of the books in your list and then click on the Convert button. Change any settings you would like and make sure that your output in the upper right corner is set to epub. Click on the OK button and wait for Calibre to finish converting the books. This can take awhile depending on how many your are converting. Once it has finished, do the not format:epub search again and if everything worked, there will be no books found. Clear the not format:epub from the search box so that all of your books reappear.

Now that you are sure that all of your books have at least an epub format, you can get rid of the other formats if you don't want them. Click on the small white box above the number column again and this will select all of the books in your library. Click on the down arrow in the Remove books button and select Remove all formats from selected books,except.... A window will pop up to allow you to choose which format to KEEP. Remember, you are choosing which format to keep, not delete. Select EPUB and then click OK. Give it a few seconds to finish. Now you know that all of your books are in epub and you don't have other formats cluttering up your library.

Just a final word of warning. You should always back up your library before doing tasks this this.

[Ahmose]

Dkelly~

wow, Nice!
That's an awesome tip!
Works great to!
Thank you!

[Klaatu]

I forgot to post this earlier when I moved a couple of random comments out of the thread...

Amber would like to try to keep this thread focused directly on Q&A/Tips about Calibre. So at her request I'm going to be removing any random chatter from the thread. PM Amber and me if anyone feels I'm getting to aggressive, though.

Regards,
Michael

[kenny097]

One great thing to note: I have found a way to use Calibre to hack LendMe books you get from your friends, so you have them as well.

[ItsMe]

Oh! I have one! I'm pretty sure this might have been answered somewhere else on the board, but it would be very convenient to have the answer here in this thread...So!

How do I get the books in a series to show up in numerical order on the Nook?

[RagdollvX]

when you type in your series name a drop down box appears un-greyed and you just select it and it'll pop up as book 1 book 2 etc. that's something i think you'll have to do individually though

that was what it looked like on the older version i had some issues and just downloaded the newer version
in this version under the series name in the metadata it say BOOK 1