As the owner of several eReader devices and a large library of DRM-free, yet often oddly formatted, eBooks, it can be difficult to make sure that I have access to what I want to read on the device I want to read it on on a given day. Yeah, I know, this isn’t exactly going to be a common problem, but the software that solves it for me is going to be useful to just about anybody working with a large number of eBooks. Especially if many of them are from free book sources like Google Books, where you’re likely to get some really shoddy labeling and tagging.
Many of you may already have heard of Calibre, actually. If so, this may be a bit basic. For those who haven’t, it is a third party piece of software that allows you to manage all of your eBooks and the associated information, including file conversion and meta-data editing. It’s worked flawlessly for me for years now and can even handle converting things for the Kindle from Sony’s somewhat outdated BBEB formats. Just add your book file to the library, set the title and author properly, assuming they aren’t already, and download all the rest of the information right down to the cover art automatically. Really, couldn’t get much simpler. As far as the occasional DRM encumbered eBook, which we all have to settle for sometimes when there aren’t any options available, the Calibre library can include the files, it simply can’t alter them. Not that big a deal, usually, since if somebody went to the trouble of protecting their files I’ve usually found them to be fairly well labeled and tagged as well.
This is just one user’s review, of course. I’m not even getting into all the many features like building/editing eBook in-text formatting, plug-ins, etc. that many people like about it. The fact that it functions on a day to day basis with no problems across multiple devices and never causes me issues, however, makes this software invaluable to me more than any extra feature I can think to add.