News Updates

Calibre has another neat little feature that lets you keep up to date with the news (Figure 4). Click on the Fetch News icon. A pop-up box called Schedule News Download will now appear. On the left-hand side pane there is a list of all the different news sources arranged by language and country. For example, when you click on English you can see a list of English language news sources. When you click on a news source, you can either choose to download now or schedule a download. If you choose to schedule a download, you must leave Calibre running in order for this to take place.

Figure 4: Not just for books, Calibre lets you choose a news source and schedule article downloads.

Content Sharing

If you use several e-readers, syncing new content manually from Calibre will become tedious very quickly. You can make things much simpler by turning Calibre into a content server. This will make all your content available across all your devices. You can even upload new content to your Calibre library from each device.

To do this, click on the Connect/Share icon at the top right of the app. Select Start Content Server. Your IP address and port number will now be visible. Make a note of this and go to your device. In your device's browser, enter your IP address and port number. The contents of your Calibre library are now visible.

Splitting Large Volumes

You may have some rather voluminous novels, or some large reference books that you would rather have split into sections. Also, larger volumes take longer to download, and this can cause problems if you are using a slower connection or are not in a WiFi zone. Calibre has a solution to this, you can use the EpubSplit and EpubMerge plugins to split your books. To get started, click on Preferences, select Get plugins to enhance Calibre. Scroll to EpubSplit and choose Install. Select the toolbars/menus you want the plugin to be added to and click OK. Repeat the same process for EpubSplit.

Once this is completed, click on the book you want to split or merge and select the necessary plugin. After this, you just need to choose the sections you want split or merged. This feature can only be used on books in the EPUB format.