eBook manager

Calibre 3.0

Linux Voice produced an ePub version of each of its 32 editions, and the software we used to generate them was Calibre. It's complex and a little convoluted, but it's also powerful and crammed full of features. Not only does it enable you to write and publish your own digital publications, it's also brilliant at managing your entire collection and sending items to your devices. Thanks to its plugin system, those devices even include proprietary e-readers, such as Amazon's Kindle. For years, those digital editions of Linux Voice were created with Calibre 2.x, which is why the release of 3.0 is such a milestone.

The best thing about the new version is that it includes a new content server. Selecting one of your books and clicking Connect share from its context menu starts a new local server, and anyone with a browser on your network can now browse to your server and access your library. These users can browse by collection, see each of your titles, download the files, and even read their content within the browser window. The download option will help when people take their devices offline, as the file stays in local storage. This is brilliant for families, but it could be even more brilliant in an office environment where you want to share your own documentation set or knowledge base with a team, such as reference material for engineers or journals for researchers.

The second best thing about this release is its appearance. The icons look dramatically better and more professional, the user interface (UI) has been reorganized, and the UI now works with high DPI displays. Many people in publishing use high DPI screens, so this last feature is going to help with adoption – especially as it was a difficult application to hack into working with high resolutions, unlike many standard Gnome or KDE applications. And, if you need it, Calibre will also output to Microsoft's .docx format.

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