[Mike D. aka jmiked]

I've been following the improvements to Calibre, a library-management tool that works on the Mac as well as Windows (and Linux, I think).

It can now detect your Kindle send books to it via the USB connection, as well as edit metadata and do conversions from other formats. It's also a library-management program that can keep track of all your ebooks on your computer. It appears that you can keep your ebooks on your computer and then send them to the Kindle when you want to read them, then you can delete them (manually) from the Kindle when you are through.

This morning I took an HTML file, opened it with Calibre, converted it to MOBI, added title and author metadata (as well as ISBN) and sent it to my Kindle. On a cursory examination, everything looks pretty good.

It might be worth a look. I need to play around with it a bit more to see if it will make the things I need to do any easier on my Mac.

http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/wiki

http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/wiki/Features

Mike

 

[ninjapanzer]

I love this. Gunna test it out now.

 

[marianneg]

Looks very interesting!  Thanks for posting about it.

 

[pidgeon92]

I downloaded it today, and it has a lot of potential. I converted one PDF, which came out quite nicely. It does reasonably OK with metadata. I think for converting files this surpasses Stanza, as it has more options. I like that it catalogs the e-books, very nice for keeping them on the computer vs. cluttering the home screen on the Kindle.

 

[kindlevixen]

oh cool!  I have been waiting for this to be compatible with the kindle.

 

[pidgeon92]

Well, it's not exactly Kindle compatible.... However, it does export to MobiPocket.

 

[Mike D. aka jmiked]

How is it not Kindle compatible?

Mike

 

[pidgeon92]

It has an interface where it can upload directly to one of the Sony devices.... It has no similar interface for the Kindle yet.

 

[kindlevixen]

hmm and it isn't finding my kindle at all....  *sigh*

Someone needs to come up with a library/organizer program that is compatible with kindle... I need organization darn it LOL

 

[Neversleepsawink;)]

Sounds really cool, I wish I could only understand.  This is one of my "D'oh" moments.  Geesh, why am I not educated enough in technology?  Arggghhhhh!!!! 

 

[Mike D. aka jmiked]

The current version uploads directly to my Kindle. I just hook up the USB cable and tell it to send to the device, and it copies it right over.

Both the Kindle main memory and the SD card showed up as devices in Calibre. I didn't take notice of which had to be done first: starting Calibre or mounting the Kindle's partitions. It may make a difference.

Note that I'm using a Mac. I saw some indication that there may still need to be some minor work done on the Windows drivers. I read that the Windows version did work with Kindle, but got broken in the last update. Updates seem to happen at least once a week, so keep trying. At any rate, Version 0.4.131 (26 Jan, 2009) currently works fine with a Mac.

Right now I'm loading a directory with over 5,000 books and short stories into Calibre, and it's so busy with that task that the program is ignoring all other input. I hope it's finished by morning, heh. Calibre copies all the books you load into it into its own directory structure.

Mike

 

[pidgeon92]

I just tried it again, closing Calibre, then attaching the Kindle and re-opening Calibre. It does detect the Kindle now, so it would appear the Kindle needs to be mounted prior to opening the application.

I am also using the Mac version 0.4.131. They don't mention Kindle compatibility in their Wiki entry:

Syncing to E-reader Devices

calibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding support for different e-reader devices easy. At the moment, it has support for the SONY PRS 500/505/700, Cybook Gen 3 and the iPhone (with the stanza reader software). Syncing supports updating metadata on the device from metadata in the library and the creation of collections on the device based on the tags defined in the library view. If an book has more than one format available, calibre automatically chooses the best format when uploading to the device.

 

[pidgeon92]

Ooh, this works nice..... I downloaded this free e-book in the MobiPocket format:



Imported it into Calibre, and uploaded it directly to the Kindle from there... A very nice interface.

This is the sort of thing Amazon ought to have done in the first place. A proper desktop client would have done a lot to quell the complaints from people who don't have WhisperNet access. They did such a nice job with the MP3 downloader, that drops MP3s right into iTunes... Perhaps this will be part of the announcement on 2/9/09.

 

[Chad Winters]

That sounds awesome!!

 

[Mike D. aka jmiked]

I think it is pretty nice, also. It didn’t do what I needed it to do for my existing collection...... It imported all my files such that the titles and author fields were switched, and the author name was reversed from the way I needed it (it gets sorted by First Name, Last Name) but that isn’t the fault of the program, it's the way the files were named. On files with correct metadata, it did fine.

And you are right, the documentation hasn't caught up with the features yet.

Mike

 

[kindlevixen]

I checked over in the mobileread forums and it does seem to not be working right, at least on the windows version.... so hopefully they will get that fixed so it finds the kindle.  I will keep working on organizing my library until its ready

 

[eclecticmama]

I'm on a mac and I've had no problems with it seeing my Kindle. You do have to have the Kindle hooked up before you open Calibre.

I've been using it to upload some things to my Kindle, and I've also uploaded some myself. Both ways work just fine.

I mostly tried Calibre out for its ability to convert files. I've successfully converted some .pdf, .txt and .r-something(?) files, but I've also come across the same files that won't convert. Not sure why?

Trish

 

[Chad Winters]

is there a way to batch import? I don't want to add my books one by one....i have hundreds!!

 

[Mike D. aka jmiked]

Re batch importing:

Click on "Add books," navigate to the directory where your books are, then select all of them and click on "choose" or whatever the button says. I use a Mac, so the exact words may not be the same on a Windows machine.

It does take a while to import books, I had 5,000 or so to do and along about the 8 hour mark I went to bed. It was done in the morning.

Mike

 

[Chad Winters]

Re batch importing:

Click on "Add books," navigate to the directory where your books are, then select all of them and click on "choose" or whatever the button says. I use a Mac, so the exact words may not be the same on a Windows machine.

It does take a while to import books, I had 5,000 or so to do and along about the 8 hour mark I went to bed. It was done in the morning.

Mike

I'm using a Mac too, but it seemed like I had to click on individual files.....I'll try again