6 Answers2025-08-05
I have my ebook collection managed in much the same way I managed my music collection during the iPod era: as a central hub with manual transfers between the hub and other locations. So my ebook collection is managed by Calibre on my desktop. I sync my Kobo by plugging it in and transferring books. I sync a handful of books to my phone by saving a disk copy of them in Calibre and then copying the saved books to a Dropbox folder on my phone. Any edits made to books on one device do not get propagated to other devices. This approach has the big advantage of not causing any headaches, and no chance of ebook collection corruption. It also means that Calibre runs very fast on my desktop, because the hub for my ebook collection is on a local SSD. The only ‘cost’ is some manual work, which I find easy to manage for a collection of less than 10,000 books.
7 Answers2025-08-05
Fans of speculative fiction may be interested to know about the SFF Online Free Reading Library, a selective list of short stories and novels available legally online for free. The library is not a download site itself, but rather a index to stories available online at the authors’ sites and the sites of publications that carry speculative fiction. It is a great way to read samples of the work of award-winning authors such as Charles Stross, whose whole collection of Satan’s.hs Update, is available for download from his site as well as from his publishers’ site. I have also downloaded the whole of Catherynne M. Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Kitchen from her site and her publisher’s.
4 Answers2025-07-11
I just use a warm-ish background, make the text a little bigger, and call it a day. Never really messed with the settings much beyond that.
10 Answers2026-07-27
I find that Automation = Safety. Hence my backup is entirely automated and will thus not fail as it depends on no human memory. On Linux I wrote a small bash script that uses rsync to synchronize my ~/Calibre Library folder and the entire ~/.config/calibre folder to a large enough folder on a backup drive. This script first checks for the presence and then kills the ‘calibre’ process (with a friendly warning message). Then it does the actual work using rsync with the archive flag and verbose switching. The whole operation is logged with a timestamp in the end. I use cron to run this little script every Sunday at 3 AM. A second cron job then uses rclone to synchronize the contents of the above-mentioned backup folder with a Tresorit cloud folder once a month. The output of all operations is written to a log file which I then occasionally check. As rsync only synchronizes changed blocks (unlike a full copy) it is very fast and efficient. All in all I have perfectly reliable and completely automated backup of all my ebooks (which is what Calibre is for in the first place) – and this with minimal initial investment of time and completely invisible afterwards.
10 Answers2025-07-28
As far as the plugin ecosystem goes, it feels somewhat DIY. So you search up a plugin to add support for a new ebook format and you find a GitHub repository with 3 stars and a last commit from 2018. It works perfect for a while and then it breaks Calibre in an update. It’s a bit of a trade-off as the official Calibre plugin index is much safer but there are less plugins of a niche nature.
12 Answers2025-07-09
As a manga enthusiast who spends hours organizing and reading digital comics, I've experimented with countless Calibre plugins to enhance the experience. The absolute must-have is 'Kobo Touch Extended'—it optimizes manga for e-readers by adjusting page sizes and margins. 'FanFicFare' is another gem, allowing you to download webcomics and fan-translated manga directly into Calibre.
For metadata management, 'Manga Metadata' scrapes details from AniList and MyAnimeList, saving tons of manual input. If you read Japanese raw manga, 'DeDRM' helps bypass regional locks, though use it ethically. Lastly, 'Quality Check' ensures your files aren’t corrupted—vital for large manga collections. These plugins transform Calibre into a powerhouse for manga lovers.
5 Answers2026-03-28
Yeah, I pretty much gave up on trying to find a good plugin and just buy EPUBs from Kobo when they're on sale. The books are DRM-free if you request that they not be DRMed at checkout. I don't want to be a part-time project to support the use of purchased books on future devices. That's just not what I paid for.
Every few months, there’s another ‘OMG Plugin Broke’ post in the subreddit after an update and everyone frantically tries to find the new GitHub repo for their favorite plugin. I don’t get paid by the hour, and the hassle to read books I paid for in full is quite sufficient to make me sour on the whole thing. The best plugin is often another bookstore.
13 Answers2025-07-14
I've encountered this issue more than a few times. The main culprit is usually file format compatibility. Kindle supports MOBI, AZW, and PDF, but newer versions of Kindle don't support MOBI anymore, which Calibre defaults to sometimes. Another reason could be the email address you're using to send the ebook isn't registered to your Kindle account. Amazon has strict policies about which email addresses can send content to your device, and if it's not on the approved list, the transfer fails silently.
DRM protection is another common roadblock. If the ebook has DRM, Calibre can't send it directly unless you use plugins to remove the DRM first, which is a gray area legally. File size can also be an issue—Amazon imposes a 50MB limit for email transfers. Lastly, network issues or temporary Amazon server problems can interrupt the transfer process. It's frustrating when it happens, but checking these factors usually solves the problem.
8 Answers2025-07-13
I often download mobi files that are anthologies of short stories, etc. articles. Calibre’s viewer handles these type of files well. The Table of Contents is displayed in the sidebar and as long as the mobi was correctly constructed, each short story or article will be listed as a separate entry in the TOC. You can click on any of these to go to that story. This makes the Calibre viewer far superior to simple text viewers such as Notepad, etc. which would just display a huge amount of text. The search function (Ctrl+F) also searches the whole book and returns results in a split second. Ideal for finding a particular quote etc. Very useful for anthology type books.
6 Answers2025-07-04
Yes, theoretically speaking. In practical terms, however, conversion of Amazon eBooks requires a lot of persistence. For example, while Amazon continually updates its DRM, the code used by volunteers to enable conversion of eBooks to read on other devices also must be updated from time to time. At times, a small delay occurs until newly released eBooks can be converted for reading on other eReaders such as a Kobo. Nonetheless, despite occasional instances of temporaryproblems, actively maintained tools for eBooks with DRM that were placed for sale by Amazon are vital utilities, critical to book lovers seeking to ensure ownership of digital copies of their eBook purchases. And, because eBook conversion from an Amazon Kindle eBook to read on a Kobo eReader has long been possible (the ‘path’ having been established a long time ago), and is a very active area, in the vast majority of instances in which problems are encountered, they will be found to be transitory in nature and in due course a solution will be found, already described by users, in the extensive resources of software assistance that have evolved on MobileRead forums and in subreddits devoted to the topic of eBooks.