The Graphical User Interface

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) provides access to all library management and ebook format conversion features. The basic workflow for using calibre is to first add books to the library from your hard disk. calibre will automatically try to read metadata from the books and add them to its internal database. Once they are in the database, you can perform a various Actions on them that include conversion from one format to another, transfer to the reading device, viewing on your computer, editing metadata, including covers, etc.

The interface is divided into various sections:

Actions

The actions toolbar provides convenient shortcuts to commonly used actions. Most of the action buttons have little arrows next to them. By clicking the arrows, you can perform variations on the default action.

Add books

The Add books action has three variations, accessed by the arrow next to the button.

1. Add books from a single directory: Opens a file chooser dialog and allows you to specify which books in a directory should be added. This action is context sensitive, i.e. it depends on which catalog you have selected. If you have selected the Library, books will be added to the library. If you have selected the ebook reader device, the books will be uploaded to the device, and so on.
2. Add books recursively (One book per directory): Allows you to choose a directory. The directory and all its sub-directories are scanned recursively and any ebooks found are added to the library.The algorithm assumes that each directory contains a single book. All ebook files in a directory are assumedto be the same book in different formats. This action is the inverse of the Save to disk action, i.e. you can Save to disk, delete the books and re-add them with no lost information (except date).
3. Add books recursively (Multiple books per directory): Allows you to choose a directory. The directory and all its sub-directories are scanned recursively and any ebooks found are added to the library.The algorithm assumes that each directory contains many books. All ebook files with the same name in a directory are assumed to be the same book in different formats. This action is the inverse of the Save to disk action, i.e. you can Save to disk, delete the books and re-add them with no lost information (except date).

The Add books action can read metadata from the following ebook formats: LRF, EPUB, LIT, MOBI, RTF, PDF, PRC, HTML. In addition it tries to guess metadata from the filename. See the Guessing metadata from file names section, to learn how to configure this.

To add a new format to an existing book, use the Edit meta information action.

Remove books

The Remove books action deletes books permanently, so use it with care. It is context sensitive, i.e. it depends on which catalog you have selected. If you have selected the Library, books will be removed from the library. If you have selected the ebook reader device, the books will be removed from the device. To remove only a particular format for a given book use the Edit meta information action.

Edit meta information

The Edit meta information action has two variations, accessed by the arrow next to the button.

1. Edit metadata individually: This allows you to edit the metadata of books one-by-one, with the option of fetching metadata, including covers from the internet. It also allows you to add/remove particular ebook formats from a book. For more detail see Editing E-book Metadata.
2. Edit metadata in bulk: This allows you to edit common metadata fields for large numbers of books simulataneously. It operates on all the books you have selected in the Library view.

Send to device

The Send to device action has two variations, accessed by the arrow next to the button.

1. Send to main memory: The selected books are transferred to the main memory of the ebook reader.
2. Send to card: The selected books are transferred to the storage card on the ebook reader.

Save to disk

The Save to disk action has two variations, accessed by the arrow next to the button.

1. Save to disk: This will save the selected books to disk organized in directories. The directory structure looks like:

   Author
       Title
           Book Files

2. Save to disk in a single directory: The selected books are saved to disk in a single directory.

All available formats as well as metadata is stored to disk for each selected book. Metadata is stored in an OPF file.

Saved books can be re-imported to the library without any loss of information by using the Add books action.

Fetch news

The Fetch news action downloads news from various websites and converts it into an ebook that can be read on your ebook reader. Normally, the newly created ebook is added to your ebook library, but if an ebook reader is connected at the time the download finishes, the news is uploaded to the reader directly.

The Fetch news action uses simple recipes (10-15 lines of code) for each news site. To learn how to create recipes for your own news sources, see Adding your favorite news website.

Convert e-books

Ebooks can be converted from a number of formats into the LRF format (for the SONY Reader). Note that ebooks you purchase will typically have Digital Rights Management (DRM). calibre will not convert these ebooks. For many DRM formats, it is easy to remove the DRM, but as this is illegal, you have to find tools to liberate your books yourself and then use calibre to convert them.

For most people, conversion should be a simple 1-click affair. But if you want to learn more about the conversion process, see E-book Conversion.

The Convert E-books action has three variations, accessed by the arrow next to the button.

1. Convert individually: This will allow you to specify conversion options to customize the conversion of each selected ebook.
2. Bulk convert: This allows you to specify options only once to convert a number of ebooks in bulk.
3. Create catalog: This action allows you to generate a complete listing with all metadata of the books in your library, in several formats, like XML, CSV, EPUB and MOBI. The catalog will contain all the books showing in the library view currently, so you can use the search features to limit the books to be catalogued. In addition, if you select multiple books using the mouse, only those books will be added to the catalog. If you generate the catalog in an e-book format such as EPUB or MOBI, the next time you connect your e-book reader, the catalog will be automatically sent to the device. For details on how catalogs work, see here.

View

The View action displays the book in an ebook viewer program. calibre has a builtin viewer for the LRF format. For other formats it uses the default operating system application. If a book has more than one format, you can view a particular format by clicking the arrow next to the View button.

Catalogs

A catalog is a collection of books. calibre can manage three different catalogs:

1. Library: This is a collection of books stored in a database file on your computers harddisk.
2. Reader: This is a collection of books stored in the main memory of your ebook reader. It will be available when you connect the reader to your computer.
3. Card: This is a collection of books stored on the storage card in your reader.

Search & Sort

The Search & Sort section allows you to perform several powerful actions on your book collections.

• You can sort them by title, author, date, rating etc. by clicking on the column titles. You can also sub-sort (i.e. sort on multiple columns). For example, if you click on the title column and then the author column, the book will be sorted by author and then all the entries for the same author will be sorted by title.

• You can search for a particular book or set of books using the search bar. More on that below.

• You can quickly and conveniently edit metadata by double-clicking the entry you want changed in the list.

• You can perform Actions on sets to books. To select multiple books you can either:

  • Keep the Ctrl key pressed and click on the books you want selected.
  • Keep the Shift key pressed and click on the starting and ending book of arange of books you want selected.

• You can configure which fields you want displayed by using the Preferences dialog.

The Search Interface

You can search all the metadata by entering search terms in the search bar. Searches are case insensitive. For example:

Asimov Foundation format:lrf

This will match all books in your library that have Asimov and Foundation in their metadata and are available in the LRF format. Some more examples:

author:Asimov and not series:Foundation
title:"The Ring" or "This book is about a ring"
format:epub publisher:feedbooks.com

Searches are by default ‘contains’. An item matches if the search string appears anywhere in the indicated metadata. Two other kinds of searches are available: equality search and search using regular expressions.

Equality searches are indicated by prefixing the search string with an equals sign (=). For example, the query tag:"=science" will match “science”, but not “science fiction” or “hard science”. Regular expression searches are indicated by prefixing the search string with a tilde (~). Any python-compatible regular expression can be used. Regular expression searches are contains searches unless the expression contains anchors. Should you need to search for a string with a leading equals or tilde, prefix the string with a backslash.

Enclose search strings with quotes (”) if the string contains parenthesis or spaces. For example, to search for the tag Science Fiction, you would need to search for tag:"=science fiction". If you search for tag:=science fiction, you will find all books with the tag ‘science’ and containing the word ‘fiction’ in any metadata.

You can build advanced search queries easily using the Advanced Search Dialog, accessed by clicking the button .

Available fields for searching are: tag, title, author, publisher, series, series_index, rating, cover, comments, format, isbn, date, pubdate, search, size and custom columns. If a device is plugged in, the ondevice field becomes available. To find the search name for a custom column, hover your mouse over the column header.

The syntax for searching for dates is:

pubdate:>2000-1 Will find all books published after Jan, 2000
date:<=2000-1-3 Will find all books added to calibre before 3 Jan, 2000
pubdate:=2009 Will find all books published in 2009

If the date is ambiguous, the current locale is used for date comparison. For example, in an mm/dd/yyyy locale, 2/1/2009 is interpreted as 1 Feb 2009. In a dd/mm/yyyy locale, it is interpreted as 2 Jan 2009. Some special date strings are available. The string today translates to today’s date, whatever it is. The strings yesterday` and thismonth also work. In addition, the string daysago can be used to compare to a date some number of days ago, for example: date:>10daysago, date:<=45daysago.

You can search for books that have a format of a certain size like this:

size:>1.1M Will find books with a format larger than 1.1MB
size:<=1K  Will find books with a format smaller than 1KB

Dates and numeric fields support the relational operators = (equals), > (greater than), >= (greater than or equal to), < (less than), <= (less than or equal to), and != (not equal to). Rating fields are considered to be numeric. For example, the search rating:>=3 will find all books rated 3 or higher.

Series indices are searchable. For the standard series, the search name is ‘series_index’. For custom series columns, use the column search name followed by _index. For example, to search the indices for a custom series column named #my_series, you would use the search name #my_series_index. Series indices are numbers, so you can use the relational operators described above.

The special field search is used for saved searches. So if you save a search with the name “My spouse’s books” you can enter search:"My spouse's books" in the search bar to reuse the saved search. More about saving searches, below.

You can search for the absence or presence of a field using the special “true” and “false” values. For example:

cover:false will give you all books without a cover
series:true will give you all books that belong to a series
comments:false will give you all books with an empty comment
format:false will give you all books with no actual files (empty records)

Yes/no custom columns are searchable. Searching for false, empty, or blank will find all books with undefined values in the column. Searching for true will find all books that do not have undefined values in the column. Searching for yes or checked will find all books with Yes in the column. Searching for no or unchecked will find all books with No in the column.

Advanced Search Dialog

Saving searches

calibre has a useful feature, it allows you to save a search you use frequently under a special name and then re-use that search with a single click. To do this, create your search, either by typing it in the search bar, or using the Tag Browser. Then, type the name you would like to give to the search in the Saved Searches box next to the search bar and click the plus icon next to the saved searches box to save the search.

Now, you can access your saved search in the Tag Browser under “Searches”. A single click will allow you to re-use any arbitrarily complex search easily, without needing to re-create it.

Preferences

The Preferences dialog allows you to change the way various aspects of calibre work. To access it, click the .

Guessing metadata from file names

In the Add/Save section of the configuration dialog, you can specify a regular expression that calibre will use to try and guess metadata from the names of ebook files that you add to the library. The default regular expression is:

title - author

i.e., it will assumes that all character up to the first - are the title of the book and subsequent characters are the author of the book. For example, the filename:

Foundation and Earth - Isaac Asimov.txt

will be interpreted to have the title: Foundation and Earth and author: Isaac Asimov

Tip

If the filename does not contain the hyphen, the regular expression will fail.

Book Details

The Book Details display shows you extra information and the cover for the currently selected book.

Jobs

The Jobs panel shows you the number of currently running jobs. Jobs are tasks that run in a separate process, they include converting ebooks and talking to your reader device. You can click on the jobs panel to access the list of jobs. Once a job has completed, by double-clicking it in the list, you can see a detailed log from that job. This is useful to debug jobs that may not have completed successfully.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Calibre has several keyboard shortcuts to save you time and mouse movement. These shortcuts are active in the book list view (when you’re not editing the details of a particular book), and most of them affect the title you have selected. The calibre e-book viewer has its own shortcuts, which can be customised by clicking the Preferences button in the viewer.

Note

Note: The Calibre keyboard shortcuts do not require a modifier key (Command, Option, Control etc.), unless specifically noted. You only need to press the letter key, e.g. E to edit.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard Shortcut	Action
A	Add Books
C	Convert selected Books
D	Send to device
Del	Remove selected Books
E	Edit metadata of selected books
I	Show book details
M	Merge selected records
O	Open containing folder
S	Save to Disk
V	View
Alt+V/Cmd+V in OS X	View specific format
Alt+Shift+J	Toggle jobs list
Alt+Shift+B	Toggle Cover Browser
Alt+Shift+T	Toggle Tag Browser
Alt+A	Show books by the Same author as the current book
Alt+T	Show books with the same tags as current book
Alt+P	Show books by the same publisher as current book
Alt+Shift+S	Show books in the same series as current book
/, Ctrl+F	Focus the search bar
Ctrl+D	Download metadata and shortcuts
Ctrl+R	Restart calibre
Ctrl+Q	Quit calibre