Someone reviewed v on Jul 5, 2022

Pros: 555

Cons: 555

Bottom Line: 555

cyberguy reviewed v2.62.0 on Jul 17, 2016

Calibre (and its plugin contributors) have managed to fix the drm issues I had with earlier versions of this program. That alone gives it a 5 in my books, but I will subtract a star for the same reason most of the others have - way too many incremental updates.

I mostly use the program for organizing & managing my library while dedicated readers and tablets are used to actually read them. For those tasks I use them for this program is the best out there with no noticed bugs.

cyberguy reviewed v2.62.0 on Jul 17, 2016

Calibre (and its plugin contributors) have managed to fix the drm issues I had with earlier versions of this program. That alone gives it a 5 in my books, but I will subtract a star for the same reason most of the others have - way too many incremental updates.

I mostly use the program for organizing & managing my library while dedicated readers and tablets are used to actually read them. For those tasks I use them for this program is the best out there with no noticed bugs.

Antichrist reviewed v2.29.0 on May 29, 2015

There is a 64-bit version available now: http://calibre-ebook.com/download_windows64

Also here's a tutorial you may find helpful:

http://dearauthor.com/eb...ew-library-with-calibre/

balanceinmotion reviewed v2.2.0 on Sep 24, 2014

aewsome!

VelvetElvis reviewed v2.2.0 on Sep 7, 2014

Updated way too much? Seriously?? You aren't *required* to update, so what's the big deal? I applaud the developers for their weekly enhancement and bug-fix releases, and have donated to this great app.

DKDude reviewed v1.45.0 on Jul 19, 2014

The best EBook organizer, non of the other come even close.

5* if I could give it 10* I would, thank you for a great program, and thank you for taking the time to care about updating it.

Some people whine when there is no updates, and they whine when there is updates, I guess some people think the meaning of life is whining, tools you can never please, sadly enough, they think they are the one single point the world is revolving around.

DannyVeyt reviewed v1.33.0 on Apr 20, 2014

Indeed, the author should keep more updates internally and release fewer updates, especially when an application takes ages for the installation process to finish.

Young Strider reviewed v1.33.0 on Apr 18, 2014

Good app but gets updated way too much imho.

mikebratley reviewed v1.27.0 on Mar 11, 2014

good

chrispaul reviewed v1.24.0 on Feb 17, 2014

good stuff

barrytbutler reviewed v1.21.0 on Jan 29, 2014

great tool without a doubt! 5 stars for this.

DKDude reviewed v1.20.0 on Jan 17, 2014

Hands down, the best tool for ebooks.
Keep up the good work.

olivergiving reviewed v1.4.0 on Sep 25, 2013

4 stars

Wintings reviewed v1.0.0 on Aug 24, 2013

So, after all those dozens of 0.9x versions, version 1.0 has at long last arrived.! A Red Letter Day indeed!

tomkelly reviewed v0.9.43 on Aug 22, 2013

great tool!

crosseyedlemon reviewed v0.9.43 on Aug 17, 2013

This is a well conceived program that has pretty much all the key features E-book users would require. With holding one star because the included user guide tends to get too technical for the average user with it's explanation of using news feeds.

wuahn reviewed v0.9.24 on Mar 23, 2013

Loved this until my wife started complaining about missing double-L's in the conversions. Did some research and the Calibre authors just throw blame around and are apparently refusing to fix it. If I can't trust the program it has zero usefulness to me. Amazon has since come out with a series of free tools that do the same job but without corrupting the data and without all the bloat.

ejanzzen reviewed v0.9.5 on Nov 17, 2012

I still rate this app 5star ... but this release has the most crashes on my win7 machines ...

VelvetElvis reviewed v0.8.66 on Aug 26, 2012

@Blaxima, these new releases come out, almost without fail, weekly. You can check the change log to see if there's anything that floats your boat. If not, keep the version you're using. To b**** about too many updates is insane.

And BTW, "incremental updates" are applied to a base product. These aren't incremental updates. For those that don't realize, every release is the complete product.

Blaxima reviewed v0.8.66 on Aug 24, 2012

Great program, like I've said. But as I've mentioned before, some prettying up of the UI wouldn't hurt and I don't mean crApple pretty, simpler and cleaner is just as good if not better.

@VelvetElvis
4 out of 5 stars is slamming a product? Time to switch to cotton Elvis, the velvet is making you too sensitive

DKDude reviewed v0.8.65 on Aug 17, 2012

If you have an E-Book, this is a must have, absolutely a brilliant piece of software.

Thank you, and please keep up the good work.

VelvetElvis reviewed v0.8.58 on Jun 30, 2012

Just keeps getting better. I can't imagine trying to manage a huge ebook collection without Calibre. The recent interface tweaks are welcome too.
Unbelievable to read a whine about "too many incremental updates". The author responds quickly to issues. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. Skip updating to whatever schedule suits you, but don't slam a product because it's updated too often.

Blaxima reviewed v0.8.52 on May 18, 2012

Great program but I have a gripe. It has too many incremental updates. I hate when software does this. I would much rather they include them in monthly updates.

UI could use some prettying up too

stisev reviewed v0.8.18 on Sep 16, 2011

Calibre is the GOD of all book organizing apps ever written.
It is the GOLD STANDARD against all other apps written are compared against.

Kovid, you are the man!

roj reviewed v0.8.10 on Jul 18, 2011

To the author:

You are a Godsend.

I thank you and my iPad thanks you (as do my wife's and my son's).

As to DRM, p*** on it. Books have been lent around since time immemorial and damn the publishing industry for thinking that should change.

FIVE stars.

mikefeuer reviewed v0.8.10 on Jul 15, 2011

Thank you once again for your ongoing development and continuous improvement of Calibre. I have a large library of commercial ebooks, w/drm and free, magazines, pdf, etc. and Calibre keeps everything organized and humming with my Kindle.

cyberguy reviewed v0.8.9 on Jul 9, 2011

Apologies to the author but this application is crippled for me. I use my eReader to store and read commercial eBooks and have built up quite a library in it. 95% of these books, being commercial eBooks are protected by DRM. That means I can not use the reading functions of this application with them. While I rarely actually do that, the reading portion of this application is 33% of its function - which I can't use.

I appreciate the open-source and free nature of this application. I also understand the legalities involved with DRM and opensource applications. But the fact remains that as my library consists of purchased eBooks, I can only use the program's device access and organizational facilities. I cannot use the conversion or reading capabilities. I did not tyry the metadata updating simply because I am afraid of damaging my eBooks, but I suspect they will not work either.

Thanks for the effort, It is a cool concept and execution looks good, but for me it only gets a 3.

Assirius reviewed v0.8.5 on Jun 14, 2011

Great work!!!

bobad reviewed v0.8.2 on May 23, 2011

The Author just keeps on improving and cleaning up the program. I didn't like the program at first,,, I was just looking for a converter. But who knew my wife would collect so many books, and the excellent sorting and wrangling features would be needed? If she had a choice of me or Calibre, bye bye me! 5 stars!

wsitechnologies reviewed v0.7.59 on May 2, 2011

if you have more than just a few ebooks on your computer or ereader...than this is a must have program. Their forum is awesome and full of solutions to almost any issue you may encounter. If you have an idea on a new feature, let them know and if it is a good idea...you will probably find it included in the next release. Also if you like the program drop the guys a few bucks.

roj reviewed v0.7.59 on May 2, 2011

I love this. it makes my iPad 2 the reader I wanted it to be. I can convert books to ePub and store them on my server.

Absolutely sweet. The fact that I can put this on my Windows 7 box, my Lniux box and my son's MacBook Pro makes it even sweeter.

FIVE stars.

Raton reviewed v0.7.47 on Mar 6, 2011

Amazing software ! Not only converts to/from many formats, but also D/L's news from the Web, and itself serves as an e-book reader.

The DataRat

LRN reviewed v0.7.45 on Feb 14, 2011

I've started with FBreader for my e-book reading, but then i've discovered that FBreader developers are considering releasing a proprietary version with DRM support, so i've looked for alternatives. And found Calibre.
-1 for its habit of eating away free memory, but otherwise it does everything i wanted. And the part that allows you to read books is separate from the library manager, so you do not need to keep it open just to read.

netean reviewed v0.7.43 on Jan 31, 2011

What a stunning piece of software.

It's not a huge download, but has so many features. the cataloging tool, the search, the book converter, the sync with devices, the webpage to ebook news downloader.

The interface is simple, attractive and usable
it starts quickly, and just "works"

If it could strip out the drm from ebooks it would nothing but perfection, as it is, it's damn close!

SoundMix reviewed v0.7.37 on Jan 3, 2011

Very easy to use. Author always responds quickly to problems and improvements. Speed improvements have been made all around.

VelvetElvis reviewed v0.7.35 on Dec 31, 2010

Love this program. The "organizing baggage" - the ebook database - is an incredibly helpful and powerful feature. You can download cover art, ratings, and synopsis, and use the powerful search and tagging features to keep track of your collection.
It handles most every format I throw at it, with the exception of the admittedly less popular ".imp" format, and lets me easily manage the books on my two e-readers, even deleting the "free" ebooks that came with the reader, which can't be removed by the reader's own software.
It's updated frequently too, recently averaging every week or two.
Oh, and starts up within 5 seconds on my 4 year old dual core box.

bobad reviewed v0.7.29 on Nov 29, 2010

I found Calibre while searching for an ebook converter. Unfortunately, it's the only game in town. It runs slowly, is a bit unstable, but it works. Too bad all that "organizing" baggage comes with the file conversion capabilities. I prefer to organize my files and folders with Windows Explorer, so I consider the whole organizer fluff. There is an unnecessarily steep learning curve because the GUI is quirky and unintuitive. I may like it better after playing with if for an hour or 10, but I'm not so happy with it just now.

Hilbert reviewed v0.7.28 on Nov 17, 2010

My reviews on FileForum are often critical to the extent that anyone who reads them might conclude that I've never anything good to say about any software. Well, they'd be wrong: good software deserve good reviews and calibre is a beauty--one of the best!

Even in its current pre-version-1 form, calibre is already wonderful software; and with further development, tweaks and additional plug-ins there's little doubt in my mind that it'll become truly great software. For knowledge workers calibre easily has the potential to become a killer app because it has the wherewithal to make a PC truly useful by making it easy for users to find and connect with all sorts of disparate information whether it's all on the user's PC or not.

Simply, calibre allows a user to easily find information whether it's an e-Book (Kindle etc.) or whether it's stored within files formatted as PDF, DOC or HTML etc.--to mention just a few of the many diverse file formats that it handles with ease. And it does this by using various methods including filenames, tag information and other forms of metadata.

calibre, however, is not disk word indexer (as say X1 etc. is) and should not be thought of that way. calibre is perhaps best thought of as carrying out the functions of a traditional librarian but doing so with information that's on your PC rather than with physical library books. Librarians not only know how to effectively use the library's catalog to find wanted titles then locate them quickly and efficiently but also they perform many other book-related management services such as obtaining new books, managing the lending, provide photocopying services etc. calibre does the equivalent thereof on your PC, and it does it very effectively, ergonomically, and with style and panache.

Some background and supporting arguments
-------------------------------------------------------------

Why do I consider calibre such important software you may well ask. Essentially because PC filing systems are so archaic and inefficient at finding user information and calibre significantly helps to overcome these file system limitations. It's outrageous that over 30 years after the introduction of the PC, that finding information on a PC can be more akin to potluck with a lucky dip than that of a systematized electronic filing and retrieval system. The filing functions of operating systems such as Windows and the supposedly more sophisticated Linux etc. just manage files and not their associated content--they find, store and launch files in the correct application etc. but they do so without reference to the information (data) that those files contain. In a way calibre can be perceived of as providing that connection, it bridges the gap to the file's actual data content by making efficient use of its metadata.

Filing systems within Windows, Linux etc., use only the most primitive of metadata, file size, create date etc., and O/S link information doesn't help much either as it does not usually travel with the file once it leaves the O/S to travel across the Net. For example, the text file 'hello_world.txt' does not leave one computer and arrive at another complete with an integrated file encapsulation system including integrated metadata and certificate compartments. (Sure there are schemes where metadata is integrated with the data prior to transmission, for instance many AV files use metadata to provide information about the performance etc., even MS DOC files fall into this category but such schemes are often both secret and proprietary and the metadata is only read by the application rather than by a universal metadata interface that is controlled by the operating system.)

Not only is this inefficient and stone age primitive but also it leads to all sorts of operating system security vulnerabilities, as files in such a systemless arrangement can and do roam around anywhere within the O/S's jurisdiction with impunity (from say an external memory stick to the inside of Window's \system32 directory yet they do not have to account to the operating system for their contents which perhaps may be viruses).

As far back as when Vista was first mooted, Microsoft said it was going to integrate a database-based filing system into Vista called Win-FS but very unfortunately this MS promise turned out to be just much hot air. (Even back when Microsoft first proposed Win-FS, filing systems with integral relational database management, RDBMS, were not a new concept. Decades earlier, IBM used an integrated database scheme in OS/400, the O/S of its AS/400 minicomputers (now the iSeries).)

Suffice to say, calibre goes much of the way by providing a sophisticated environment that manages file metadata to a point far and beyond anything that Windows can do by itself including database replication/backup and a means for users to seamlessly integrate user-defined metadata. Moreover, in addition to core features, calibre integrates file format conversion utilities and also supports a plug-in subsystem infrastructure that allows for any number of functional extensions/additional features.

calibre is both very extensive and well thought out software. As such, to provide a comprehensive detailed review of its features is well outside the scope of this review, to attempt to do so would not do the software justice. My suggestion is that users set up a test environment and evaluate calibre's many options and features for themselves.

With respect to this version of calibre, my conclusions were reached using this test environment:

- Raw (input) data: 93.3GB (consisting of intermixed files HTML, PDF, TXT, MP3 etc., etc.)
- Total no. files: 92,391 spread over 3689 folders.

All files were imported in one contiguous operation by pointing calibre at a single directory in which all files and subdirectories were contained. calibre imported the files by copying and or converting copies to a new separate directory (all originals were left intact).

The only significant problem I encountered was when calibre tried to import damaged PDFs that previously had been rescued from a crashed drive. The damaged files caused calibre to stop importing (thus we've an on-error bug which fails to jump the fault).

All up, calibre is a remarkable package and I'd urge FileForum readers to try it.

dhry reviewed v0.7.28 on Nov 17, 2010

While this is probably the most bloated, sluggish program I've used in a long time, probably because it's been frankensteined up from ten million different opensource libraries and isn't developed primarily on Windows, there's no denying that it's the best converter and library manager of its type. Pretty much nobody uses anything else these days. As another reviewer said, it also gets very frequent updates, although I myself can't actually see what most of them do. I wish the interface and the responsiveness would be improved a little (more than 10 seconds to load up on an x64 core i7-920 with 6Gb PC12800 RAM, ayfkm?), but for the moment it works, and you can't beat free.

anomoly reviewed v0.7.28 on Nov 16, 2010

For anyone with a lot of ebooks in multiple formats this is THE prog to use as it can convert between them all so there's need to look for a way to read some format that you are unfamiliar with. Also has the ability to output to multiple handheld devices. Unnecessary with winmo or a proper os.
You can easily extract the entire program with uni extract and run it from anywhere though it does need a (more than likely static pre-scanned) library folder to work with. I have yet to even unpack my entire library.

Unfortunately it likes to open 9 (9!!) executables every time it starts; 4 instances of calibre-parallel with 4 instances of conhost and the main exe. I can archive the parallel preventing the other 8! instances from opening and the gui starts just fine. Regardless, no matter what, it is a huge resource hog. Great for converting or reading but the cpu issue is a problem for sure. I'll more than likely keep it around just for the conversion capabilities and never use it to actually manage my library. Especially if the 9 exe's with 50% cpu issue doesn't go away. Could be it's designed to only work with newer processors but that just sounds wrong.
Oh yeah, and it likes to connect the moment you start it as if that is it's main purpose.

The only way to use this program is to essentially have two libraries; one you already have that's alphabetized by author, and the one calibre creates after it scans your folder structure. Only problem is, it literally copies the data to a secondary location but then creates folders for every title instead of author. If you lose your original file structure and calibre is not available, all you have left is a bunch of folders with book titles for names. I tested it on my letter A folder with 3.5gb's of books categorized by subfolders for each author. It took hours!! just to get ~80% done. Apparently it's not actually smart enough to recognize what scanning the letter A means. I will try creating categories based upon my own folder structure and see if that helps. using v0729

jfmessier reviewed v0.7.28 on Nov 16, 2010

I use Calibre mainly to retrieve the RSS feeds from news sites such as BetaNews. I had some problems with the user interface, but this is mainly a UI issue, and the way I can enter the feed and manage them. Once, with a previous version, I had a problem where the device completely reset itself. But I am not ready to blame Calibre.

TwinsDad reviewed v0.7.28 on Nov 16, 2010

For any user of an e-book this is must-have software. Converts formats and manages pretty much any size e-library. Vry regular updates as well. Great stuff.