calibre supports the conversion of many input formats to many output formats. It can convert every input format in the following list, to every output format.
Input Formats: AZW, AZW3, AZW4, CBZ, CBR, CB7, CBC, CHM, DJVU, DOCX, EPUB, FB2, FBZ, HTML, HTMLZ, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ
Output Formats: AZW3, EPUB, DOCX, FB2, HTMLZ, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PMLZ, RB, PDF, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ, ZIP
PRC is a generic format, calibre supports PRC files with TextRead and MOBIBook headers. PDB is also a generic format. calibre supports eReader, Plucker (input only), PML and zTxt PDB files. DJVU support is only for converting DJVU files that contain embedded text. These are typically generated by OCR software. MOBI books can be of two types Mobi6 and KF8. calibre fully supports both. MOBI files often have .azw or .azw3 file extensions. DOCX files from Microsoft Word 2007 and newer are supported.
In order of decreasing preference: LIT, MOBI, AZW, EPUB, AZW3, FB2, FBZ, DOCX, HTML, PRC, ODT, RTF, PDB, TXT, PDF
PDF is a terrible format to convert from. For a list of the various issues you will encounter when converting PDF, see: Convert PDF documents .
The first thing to realize is that most e-books have two tables of contents. One is the traditional Table of Contents, like the ToC you find in paper books. This Table of Contents is part of the main document flow and can be styled however you like. This ToC is called the content ToC.
Then there is the metadata ToC. A metadata ToC is a ToC that is not part of the book text and is typically accessed by some special button on a reader. For example, in the calibre E-book viewer, you use the Show Table of Contents button to see this ToC. This ToC cannot be styled by the book creator. How it is represented is up to the viewer program.
In the MOBI format, the situation is a little confused. This is because the MOBI format, alone amongst mainstream e-book formats, does not have decent support for a metadata ToC. A MOBI book simulates the presence of a metadata ToC by putting an extra content ToC at the end of the book. When you click Go to Table of Contents on your Kindle, it is to this extra content ToC that the Kindle takes you.
Now it might well seem to you that the MOBI book has two identical ToCs. Remember that one is semantically a content ToC and the other is a metadata ToC, even though both might have exactly the same entries and look the same. One can be accessed directly from the Kindle’s menus, the other cannot.
When converting to MOBI, calibre detects the metadata ToC in the input document and generates an end-of-file ToC in the output MOBI file. You can turn this off by an option in the MOBI Output settings. You can also tell calibre whether to put it at the start or the end of the book via an option in the MOBI Output settings. Remember this ToC is semantically a metadata ToC, in any format other than MOBI it cannot not be part of the text. The fact that it is part of the text in MOBI is an accident caused by the limitations of MOBI. If you want a ToC at a particular location in your document text, create one by hand. So we strongly recommend that you leave the default as it is, i.e. with the metadata ToC at the end of the book. Also note that if you disable the generation of the end-of-file ToC the resulting MOBI file may not function correctly on a Kindle, since the Kindle’s use the metadata ToC for many things, including the Page Flip feature.
If you have a hand edited ToC in the input document, you can use the ToC detection options in calibre to automatically generate the metadata ToC from it. See the conversion section of the User Manual for more details on how to use these options.
Finally, I encourage you to ditch the content ToC and only have a metadata ToC in your e-books. Metadata ToCs will give the people reading your e-books a much superior navigation experience (except on the Kindle, where they are essentially the same as a content ToC).
The newer AZW3 format has proper support for a metadata ToC. However, the Kindle firmware tends to malfunction if you disable the generation of the end-of-file inline ToC. So it is recommended that you leave the generated ToC alone. If you create an AZW3 file with a metadata ToC and no end-of-file generated ToC, some features on the Kindle will not work, such as the Page Flip feature.
In order to convert a collection of HTML files in a specific order, you have to create a table of contents file. That is, another HTML file that contains links to all the other files in the desired order. Such a file looks like:
html> body> h1>Table of Contentsh1> p style="text-indent:0pt"> a href="file1.html">First Filea>br/> a href="file2.html">Second Filea>br/> . . . p> body> html>
Then, just add this HTML file to the GUI and use the Convert button to create your e-book. You can use the option in the Table of Contents section in the conversion dialog to control how the Table of Contents is generated.
By default, when adding HTML files, calibre follows links in the files in depth first order. This means that if file A.html links to B.html and C.html and D.html, but B.html also links to D.html, then the files will be in the order A.html, B.html, D.html, C.html. If instead you want the order to be A.html, B.html, C.html, D.html then you must tell calibre to add your files in breadth first order. Do this by going to Preferences → Advanced → Plugins → File type and customizing the HTML to ZIP plugin.
calibre does not guarantee that an EPUB produced by it is valid. The only guarantee it makes is that if you feed it valid XHTML 1.1 + CSS 2.1 it will output a valid EPUB. calibre tries hard to ensure that EPUBs it produces actually work as intended on a wide variety of devices, a goal that is incompatible with producing valid EPUBs, and one that is far more important to the vast majority of its users. If you need a tool that always produces valid EPUBs, calibre is not for you. This means, that if you want to send a calibre produced EPUB to an online store that uses an EPUB validity checker, you have to make sure that the EPUB is valid yourself, calibre will not do it for you – in other words you must feed calibre valid XHTML + CSS as the input documents.
You can get help on any individual feature of the converters by mousing over it in the GUI or running ebook-convert dummy.html .epub -h at a terminal. A good place to start is to look at the following demo file that demonstrates some of the advanced features html-demo.zip.
calibre can directly connect to all the major (and most of the minor) e-book reading devices, smartphones, tablets, etc. In addition, using the Connect to folder function you can use it with any e-book reader that exports itself as a USB disk. Finally, you can connect wirelessly to any device that has a web browser using the calibre Content server.
If your device appears as a USB disk to the operating system, adding support for it to calibre is very easy. We just need some information from you:
Once you send us the output for a particular operating system, support for the device in that operating system will appear in the next release of calibre. To send us the output, open a bug report and attach the output to it. See how to report bugs.
Follow these steps to find the problem:
In addition to the Connect to folder function found under the Connect/share button, calibre provides a User defined device plugin that can be used to connect to any USB device that shows up as a disk drive in your operating system. Note: on Windows, the device must have a drive letter for calibre to use it. See the device plugin Preferences -> Plugins -> Device plugins -> User defined and Preferences -> Miscellaneous -> Get information to setup the user defined device for more information. Note that if you are using the user defined plugin for a device normally detected by a builtin calibre plugin, you must disable the builtin plugin first, so that your user defined plugin is used instead.
An easy way to browse your calibre collection from your Apple device is by using The calibre Content server , which makes your collection available over the net. First perform the following steps in calibre
The Content server allows you to read books directly in Safari itself. In addition, there are many apps for your iDevice that can connect to the calibre Content server. Examples include: Marvin, Mapleread and iBooks itself.
Start the Safari browser and type in the IP address and port of the computer running the calibre server, like this:
http://192.168.1.2:8080/
Replace 192.168.1.2 with the local IP address of the computer running calibre. See The calibre Content server for details on running the server and finding out the right IP address to use.
You will see a list of books in Safari, tap on any book and you will be given the option to either download it, or read it in the browser itself. If you choose to download it, Safari will ask you if you want to open it with iBooks.
Many reading apps support browsing the calibre library directly via its OPDS support. In such apps you can go to the online catalog screen and add the IP address of the calibre server to browse and download books from your calibre library within the app.
There are two ways that you can connect your Android device to calibre. Using a USB cable – or wirelessly, over the air. The first step to using an Android device is installing an e-book reading application on it. There are many free and paid e-book reading applications for Android: Some examples (in no particular order): FBReader, Moon+, Mantano, Aldiko, Kindle.
Simply plug your device into the computer with a USB cable. calibre should automatically detect the device and then you can transfer books to it by clicking the Send to device button. Note that on macOS and Linux only a single program can connect to an Android device at a time, so make sure the device is not opened in the OS File manager, or the Android File Transfer utility, etc.
With newer Android devices, you might have to jump through a few hoops to get the connection working, as Google really does not want you to be independent of its cloud. First, unlock the screen before plugging in the USB cable. When you plugin in the USB cable you will get a popup notification. Make sure it says some thing like “Transferring Media files” or “MTP (Media Transfer mode)”. If it does not, tap the notification, and change the mode to Media Transfer (MTP). You may need to restart calibre at this point in order for your device to be recognized. Finally, you might get a popup on the device every time calibre or the operating system actually tries to connect to it, asking for permission, tap OK.
With the Kindle Fire 8 or newer there is an icon that shows up when the USB cable is plugged in, showing that the device is charging. Tap that and switch the device to data transfer mode, and then start calibre, it should then be detected.
calibre has a builtin web server, the calibre Content server . It makes your calibre collection available over the net. You can browse it on your device using a simple browser or a dedicated application. First perform the following steps in calibre:
Now on your Android device, open the browser and browse to
Replace 192.168.1.2 with the local IP address of the computer running calibre. See The calibre Content server for details on running the server and finding out the right IP address to use.
You can now browse your book collection and download books from calibre to your device to open with whatever e-book reading software you have on your Android device.
Many reading apps support browsing the calibre library directly via its OPDS support. In such apps you can go to the online catalog screen and add the IP address of the calibre server to browse and download books from your calibre library within the app.
calibre has a Content server that exports the books in calibre as a web page. See The calibre Content server for details.
Some devices, like the Kindle (1/2/DX), do not allow you to access port 8080 (the default port on which the content server runs). In that case, change the port in the calibre Preferences to 80. (On some operating systems, you may not be able to run the server on a port number less than 1024 because of security settings. In this case the simplest solution is to adjust your router to forward requests on port 80 to port 8080).
Also some devices do not have browsers advanced enough to run the app-like interface used by the Content server. For such devices, you can simply add /mobile to the server URL to get a simplified, non-JavaScript interface.
Because of the large amount of spam in email, sending email can be tricky, as different mail servers use different strategies to block email. The most common problem is if you are sending email directly (without a mail relay) in calibre. Many servers (for example, Amazon) block email that does not come from a well known relay. The most robust way to setup email sending in calibre is to do the following:
Even after doing this, you may have problems. One common source of problems is that some poorly designed antivirus programs block calibre from opening a connection to send email. Try adding an exclusion for calibre in your antivirus program.
Microsoft/GMX can disable your account if you use it to send large amounts of email. So, when using these services to send mail calibre automatically restricts itself to sending one book every five minutes. If you don’t mind risking your account being blocked you can reduce this wait interval by going to Preferences → Advanced → Tweaks in calibre.
Google recently deliberately broke their email sending protocol (SMTP) support in an attempt to force everyone to use their web interface so they can show you more ads. They are trying to claim that SMTP is insecure, that is incorrect and simply an excuse. Use some other email provider instead.
If you are concerned about giving calibre access to your email account, simply create a new free email account with GMX or Outlook and use it only for calibre.
Linux kernels mount devices read-only when their filesystems have errors. You can repair the filesystem with:
sudo fsck.vfat -y /dev/sdc
Replace /dev/sdc with the path to the device node of your device. You can find the device node of your device, which will always be under /dev by examining the output of:
mount
Neither the Kindle nor the Nook provide any way to manipulate collections over a USB connection. If you really care about using collections, I would urge you to sell your Kindle/Nook and get a Kobo. Only Kobo seems to understand that life is too short to be entering collections one by one on an e-ink screen 😇
Note that in the case of the Kindle, there is a way to manipulate collections via USB, but it requires that the Kindle be rebooted every time it is disconnected from the computer, for the changes to the collections to be recognized. As such, it is unlikely that any calibre developers will ever feel motivated enough to support it. There is however, a calibre plugin that allows you to create collections on your Kindle from the calibre metadata. It is available from here.
Amazon have removed the ability to manipulate collections completely in their newer models, like the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire, making even the above plugin useless, unless you root your Kindle and install custom firmware.
The Kobo has very buggy firmware. Connecting to it has been known to fail at random. Certain combinations of motherboard, USB ports/cables/hubs can exacerbate this tendency to fail. If you are getting an error when connecting to your touch with calibre try the following, each of which has solved the problem for some calibre users.
This happens because of an Amazon bug. They try to download a cover for the book from their servers and when that fails, they replace the existing cover that calibre created with a generic cover. For details see this forum thread. As of version 4.17, calibre has a workaround, where if you connect the Kindle to calibre after the covers have been destroyed by Amazon, calibre will restore them automatically. So in order to see the covers on your Kindle, you have to:
Note that this workaround only works for books sent with calibre 4.17 or later. Alternately, simply keep your Kindle in airplane mode, you don’t really want Amazon knowing every book you read anyway. I encourage you to contact Amazon customer support and complain loudly about this bug. Maybe Amazon will listen.
If the workaround is not working for you make sure you Kindle firmware is at least version 5.12.5, released in April 2020.
This is caused by a bug in the Amazon software. You can work around it by going to Preferences → Conversion → Output Options → MOBI output and setting the Enable sharing of book content option. If you are reconverting a previously converted book, you will also have to enable the option in the conversion dialog for that individual book (as per book conversion settings are saved and take precedence).
Note that doing this will mean that the generated MOBI will show up under personal documents instead of Books on the Kindle Fire and Amazon whispersync will not work, but the covers will. It’s your choice which functionality is more important to you. I encourage you to contact Amazon and ask them to fix this bug.
The bug in Amazon’s software is that when you put a MOBI file on a Kindle, unless the file is marked as a Personal document, Amazon assumes you bought the book from it and tries to download the cover thumbnail for it from its servers. When the download fails, it refuses to fallback to the cover defined in the MOBI file. This is likely deliberate on Amazon’s part to try to force authors to sell only through them. In other words, the Kindle only displays covers for books marked as Personal Documents or books bought directly from Amazon.
If you send a MOBI file to an e-ink Kindle with calibre using a USB connection, calibre works around this Amazon bug by uploading a cover thumbnail itself. However, that workaround is only possible when using a USB connection and sending with calibre. Note that if you send using email, Amazon will automatically mark the MOBI file as a Personal Document and the cover will work, but the book will show up in Personal Documents.
Books sent to the Kindle only show up on the Kindle after they have been indexed by the Kindle. This can take some time. If the book still does not show up after some time, then it is likely that the Kindle indexer crashed. Sometimes a particular book can cause the indexer to crash. Unfortunately, Amazon has not provided any way to deduce which book is causing a crash on the Kindle. Your only recourse is to either reset the Kindle, or delete all files from its memory using Windows Explorer (or whatever file manager you use) and then send the books to it again, one by one, until you discover the problem book. Once you have found the problem book, delete it off the Kindle and do a MOBI to MOBI or MOBI to AZW3 conversion in calibre and then send it back. This will most likely take care of the problem.
When you first run calibre, it will ask you for a folder in which to store your books. Whenever you add a book to calibre, it will copy the book into that folder. Books in the folder are nicely arranged into sub-folders by Author and Title. Note that the contents of this folder are automatically managed by calibre, do not add any files/folders manually to this folder, as they may be automatically deleted. If you want to add a file associated to a particular book, use the top right area of Edit metadata dialog to do so. Then, calibre will automatically put that file into the correct folder and move it around when the title/author changes.
Metadata about the books is stored in the file metadata.db at the top level of the library folder. This file is a sqlite database. When backing up your library make sure you copy the entire folder and all its sub-folders.
The library folder and all its contents make up what is called a calibre library. You can have multiple such libraries. To manage the libraries, click the calibre icon on the toolbar. You can create new libraries, remove/rename existing ones and switch between libraries easily.
You can copy or move books between different libraries (once you have more than one library setup) by right clicking on a book and selecting the Copy to library action.
Author names are complex, especially across cultures, see this note for some of the complexities. calibre has a very flexible strategy for managing author names. The first thing to understand is that books and authors are separate entities in calibre. A book can have more than one author, and an author can have more than one book. You can manage the authors of a book by the edit metadata dialog. You can manage individual authors by right clicking on the author in the Tag browser on the left of the main calibre window and selecting Manage authors . Using this dialog you can change the name of an author and also how that name is sorted. This will automatically change the name of the author in all the books of that author. When a book has multiple authors, separate their names using the & character.
Now coming to author name sorting:
Note that you can set an individual author’s sort value to whatever you want using Manage authors . This is useful when dealing with names that calibre will not get right, such as complex multi-part names like Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra or when dealing with Asian names like Sun Tzu.
With all this flexibility, it is possible to have calibre manage your author names however you like. For example, one common request is to have calibre display author names LN, FN. To do this, and if the note below does not apply to you, then:
The whole point of calibre’s library management features is that they provide a search and sort based interface for locating books that is much more efficient than any possible folder scheme you could come up with for your collection. Indeed, once you become comfortable using calibre’s interface to find, sort and browse your collection, you won’t ever feel the need to hunt through the files on your disk to find a book again. By managing books in its own folder structure of Author -> Title -> Book files, calibre is able to achieve a high level of reliability and standardization. To illustrate why a search/tagging based interface is superior to folders, consider the following. Suppose your book collection is nicely sorted into folders with the following scheme:
Genre -> Author -> Series -> ReadStatus
Now this makes it very easy to find for example all science fiction books by Isaac Asimov in the Foundation series. But suppose you want to find all unread science fiction books. There’s no easy way to do this with this folder scheme, you would instead need a folder scheme that looks like:
ReadStatus -> Genre -> Author -> Series
In calibre, you would instead use tags to mark genre and read status and then just use a simple search query like tag:scifi and not tag:read . calibre even has a nice graphical interface, so you don’t need to learn its search language instead you can just click on tags to include or exclude them from the search.
To those of you that claim that you need access to the filesystem, so that you can have access to your books over the network, calibre has an excellent Content server that gives you access to your calibre library over the net.
If you are worried that someday calibre will cease to be developed, leaving all your books marooned in its folder structure, explore the powerful Save to disk feature in calibre that lets you export all your files into a folder structure of arbitrary complexity based on their metadata.
Finally, the reason there are numbers at the end of every title folder, is for robustness. That number is the id number of the book record in the calibre database. The presence of the number allows you to have multiple records with the same title and author names. It is also part of what allows calibre to magically regenerate the database with all metadata if the database file gets corrupted. Given that calibre’s mission is to get you to stop storing metadata in filenames and stop using the filesystem to find things, the increased robustness afforded by the id numbers is well worth the uglier folder names.
If you are still not convinced, then I’m afraid calibre is not for you. Look elsewhere for your book cataloguing needs. Just so we’re clear, this is not going to change. Kindly do not contact us in an attempt to get us to change this.
calibre is designed to have columns for the most frequently and widely used fields. In addition, you can add any columns you like. Columns can be added via Preferences → Interface → Add your own columns . Watch the tutorial UI Power tips to learn how to create your own columns, or read this blog post.
You can also create “virtual columns” that contain combinations of the metadata from other columns. In the add column dialog use the Quick create links to easily create columns to show the book ISBN or formats. You can use the powerful calibre template language to do much more with columns. For more details, see The calibre template language .
Yes, you can. Follow the instructions in the answer above for adding custom columns.
You can export all calibre data (books, settings and plugins) and then import it on another computer. First let’s see how to export the data:
This import/export functionality is only available from calibre version 2.47 onwards. If you have an older version of calibre, or if you encounter problems with the import/export, you can just copy over your calibre library folder manually, as described in the next paragraph.
Simply copy the calibre library folder from the old to the new computer. You can find out what the library folder is by clicking the calibre icon in the toolbar. Choose the Switch/create calibre library action and you will see the path to the current calibre library.
Now on the new computer, start calibre for the first time. It will run the Welcome wizard asking you for the location of the calibre library. Point it to the previously copied folder. If the computer you are transferring to already has a calibre installation, then the Welcome wizard won’t run. In that case, right-click the calibre icon in the toolbar and point it to the newly copied folder. You will now have two calibre libraries on your computer and you can switch between them by clicking the calibre icon on the toolbar. Transferring your library in this manner preserves all your metadata, tags, custom columns, etc.
In order to understand why that happened, you have to understand what a calibre library is. At the most basic level, a calibre library is just a folder. Whenever you add a book to calibre, that book’s files are copied into this folder (arranged into sub folders by author and title). Inside the calibre library folder, at the top level, you will see a file called metadata.db. This file is where calibre stores the metadata like title/author/rating/tags etc. for every book in your calibre library. The list of books that calibre displays is created by reading the contents of this metadata.db file.
There can be two reasons why calibre is showing a empty list of books:
Do not put your calibre library on a networked drive.
A filesystem is a complex beast. Most network filesystems lack various filesystem features that calibre uses. Some don’t support file locking, some don’t support hardlinking, some are just flaky. Additionally, calibre is a single user application, if you accidentally run two copies of calibre on the same networked library, bad things will happen. Finally, different OSes impose different limitations on filesystems, so if you share your networked drive across OSes, once again, bad things will happen.
Consider using the calibre Content server to make your books available on other computers. Run calibre on a single computer and access it via the Content server or a Remote Desktop solution.
If you must share the actual library, use a file syncing tool like DropBox or rsync instead of a networked drive. If you are using a file-syncing tool it is essential that you make sure that both calibre and the file syncing tool do not try to access the calibre library at the same time. In other words, do not run the file syncing tool and calibre at the same time.
Even with these tools there is danger of data corruption/loss, so only do this if you are willing to live with that risk. In particular, be aware that Google Drive is incompatible with calibre, if you put your calibre library in Google Drive, you will suffer data loss. See this thread for details.
Amazon have announced that they will stop accepting MOBI files emailed to @kindle.com email addresses. You can instruct calibre to send EPUB instead of MOBI by going to Preferences → Sharing books by email and then removing MOBI from the list of formats to send to your @kindle.com email address and adding EPUB instead.
Note however, that Amazon’s EPUB intake is very flawed, they will reject a number of EPUB files that work everywhere else. In such cases you can try the following trick:
This will remove all advanced formatting, embedded fonts, etc., but greatly increase the chances of Amazon accepting the EPUB.
If you were previously using email delivery of periodicals downloaded by calibre, you will be better off sending those by USB cable or downloading them from the calibre Content server via the Kindle’s built-in browser. However, if you want to continue using email delivery you can try changing the output format in Preferences->Behavior to EPUB, then calibre will download the news in EPUB format. Whether Amazon will accept the EPUB or not is a whole other question.
If you are reasonably proficient with computers, you can teach calibre to download news from any website of your choosing. To learn how to do this see Adding your favorite news website .
Otherwise, you can request a particular news site by posting in the calibre Recipes forum.
calibre is pronounced as cal-i-ber not ca-li-bre. If you’re wondering, calibre is the British/commonwealth spelling for caliber. Being Indian, that’s the natural spelling for me.
calibre embeds fonts in e-book files it creates. E-book files support embedding only TrueType and OpenType (.ttf and .otf) fonts. Most fonts on macOS systems are in .dfont format, thus they cannot be embedded. calibre shows only TrueType and OpenType fonts found on your system. You can obtain many such fonts on the web. Simply download the .ttf/.otf files and add them to the Library/Fonts folder in your home folder.
There can be several causes for this:
If it still won’t launch, start a command prompt (press the Windows key and R; then type cmd.exe in the Run dialog that appears). At the command prompt type the following command and press Enter:
calibre-debug -g
Post any output you see in a help message on the Forum.
There are several possible things I know of, that can cause this:
If none of the above apply to you, then there is some other program on your computer that is interfering with calibre. First reboot your computer in safe mode, to have as few running programs as possible, and see if the crashes still happen. If they do not, then you know it is some program causing the problem. The most likely such culprit is a program that modifies other programs’ behavior, such as an antivirus, a device driver, something like RoboForm (an automatic form filling app) or an assistive technology like Voice Control or a Screen Reader.
The only way to find the culprit is to eliminate the programs one by one and see which one is causing the issue. Basically, stop a program, run calibre, check for crashes. If they still happen, stop another program and repeat.
These two programs use hardware acceleration as they embed a version of the Chrome browser to render HTML. If they do not work it will be because of incompatibility with your system’s GPU (graphics) drivers. Try updating these first, and reboot. If that does not fix it, you can set the QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS environment variable to the value --disable-gpu to turn off hardware acceleration. See this page for details.
Something on your computer is preventing calibre from accessing its own temporary files. Most likely the permissions on your Temp folder are incorrect. Go to the folder file: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local in Windows Explorer and then right click on the file: Temp folder, select Properties and go to the Security tab. Make sure that your user account has full control for this folder.
Some users have reported that running the following command in an Administrator Command Prompt fixed their permissions. To get an Administrator Command Prompt search for cmd.exe in the start menu, then right click on the command prompt entry and select Run as administrator . At the command prompt type the following command and press Enter:
icacls "%appdata%\..\Local\Temp" /reset /T
Alternately, you can run calibre as Administrator, but doing so will cause some functionality, such as drag and drop to not work.
Finally, some users have reported that disabling UAC fixes the problem.
One common cause of failures on macOS is the use of accessibility technologies that are incompatible with the graphics toolkit calibre uses. Try turning off VoiceOver if you have it on. Also go to System Preferences->System->Universal Access and turn off the setting for enabling access for assistive devices in all the tabs. Another cause can be some third party apps that modify system behavior, such as Smart Scroll.
You can obtain debug output about why calibre is not starting by running Console.app . Debug output will be printed to it. If the debug output contains a line that looks like:
Qt: internal: -108: Error ATSUMeasureTextImage text/qfontengine_mac.mm
then the problem is probably a corrupted font cache. You can clear the cache by following these instructions. If that doesn’t solve it, look for a corrupted font file on your system, in ~/Library/Fonts or the like. An easy way to check for corrupted fonts in macOS is to start the “Font Book” application, select all fonts and then in the File menu, choose “Validate fonts”.
This will be because of an incompatibility between Qt WebEngine, which the viewer uses to render and the GPU drivers on your system. First try upgrading the GPU drivers. If that does not help, you can try turning off hardware acceleration in Qt WebEngine by setting the environment variable QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS to the value --disable-gpu . See Environment variables for how to change environment variables.
Downloading from the Internet can sometimes result in a corrupted download. If the calibre installer you downloaded is not opening, try downloading it again. If re-downloading it does not work, download it from an alternate location. If the installer still doesn’t work, then something on your computer is preventing it from running.
If you still cannot get the installer to work and you are on Windows, you can use the calibre portable install, which does not need an installer (it is just a ZIP file).
The first thing to check is that you are downloading calibre from the official website. Make sure you are clicking the download links on the left, not the advertisements on the right. calibre is a very popular program and unscrupulous people try to setup websites offering it for download to fool the unwary.
If you have the official download and your antivirus program is still claiming calibre is a virus, then, your antivirus program is wrong. Antivirus programs use heuristics, patterns of code that “look suspicious” to detect viruses. It’s rather like racial profiling. calibre is a completely open source product. You can actually browse the source code yourself (or hire someone to do it for you) to verify that it is not a virus. Please report the false identification to whatever company you buy your antivirus software from. If the antivirus program is preventing you from downloading/installing calibre, disable it temporarily, install calibre and then re-enable it.
The most important thing to backup is the calibre library folder, that contains all your books and metadata. This is the folder you chose for your calibre library when you ran calibre for the first time. You can get the path to the library folder by clicking the calibre icon on the main toolbar. You must backup this complete folder with all its files and sub-folders.
You can switch calibre to using a backed up library folder by simply clicking the calibre icon on the toolbar and choosing your backup library folder. A backed up library folder backs up your custom columns and saved searches as well as all your books and metadata.
If you want to backup the calibre configuration/plugins, you have to backup the config folder. You can find this config folder via Preferences → Miscellaneous . Note that restoring configuration folders is not officially supported, but should work in most cases. Just copy the contents of the backup folder into the current configuration folder to restore.
Most purchased EPUB books have DRM . This prevents calibre from opening them. You can still use calibre to store and transfer them to your e-book reader. First, you must authorize your reader on a Windows machine with Adobe Digital Editions. Once this is done, EPUB books transferred with calibre will work fine on your reader. When you purchase an epub book from a website, you will get an “.acsm” file. This file should be opened with Adobe Digital Editions, which will then download the actual “.epub” e-book. The e-book file will be stored in the folder “My Digital Editions”, from where you can add it to calibre.
A permission denied error can occur because of many possible reasons, none of them having anything to do with calibre.
You will need to fix the underlying cause of the permissions error before resuming to use calibre. Read the error message carefully, see what file it points to and fix the permissions on that file or its containing folders.
Most readers do not support this. You should complain to the manufacturer about it and hopefully if enough people complain, things will change. In the meantime, you can insert the metadata, including comments into a “Jacket page” at the start of the e-book, by using the option to “Insert metadata as page at start of book” during conversion. The option is found in the Structure detection section of the conversion settings. Note that for this to have effect you have to convert the book. If your book is already in a format that does not need conversion, you can convert from that format to the same format.
Another alternative is to create a catalog in e-book form containing a listing of all the books in your calibre library, with their metadata. Click-and-hold the Convert button to access the catalog creation tool. And before you ask, no you cannot have the catalog “link directly to” books on your reader.
By default, calibre uses whatever proxy settings are set in your OS. Sometimes these are incorrect, for example, on Windows if you don’t use Microsoft Edge then the proxy settings may not be up to date. You can tell calibre to use a particular proxy server by setting the http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables. The format of the variable is: http://username:password@servername you should ask your network administrator to give you the correct value for this variable. Note that calibre only supports HTTP proxies not SOCKS proxies. You can see the current proxies used by calibre in Preferences->Miscellaneous.
For many reasons:
calibre is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (an open source license). This means that you are free to redistribute calibre as long as you make the source code available. So if you want to put calibre on a CD with your product, you must also put the calibre source code on the CD. The source code is available for download. You are free to use the results of conversions from calibre however you want. You cannot use either code or libraries from calibre in your software without making your software open source. For details, see The GNU GPL v3.
A portable version of calibre is available here.
First, you must install calibre onto your Linux server. If your server is using a modern Linux distribution, you should have no problems installing calibre onto it.
calibre needs GLIBC >= 2.31 and libstdc++ >= 6.0.28. If you have an older server, you will either need to compile these from source, or use calibre 3.48 which requires GLIBC >= 2.17 or 2.85.1 which requires GLIBC >= 2.13 or calibre 1.48 which requires only GLIBC >= 2.10. In addition, although the calibre command line utilities do not need a running X server, some of them do require the X server libraries to be installed on your system. This is because of Qt, which is used for various image processing tasks, and links against these libraries. If you get an ImportError about some Qt modules, you are likely missing some X libraries. Typical candidates are: libxcb-cursor0 , libxcb-xinerama0 , libegl1 , libopengl0 .
You can run the calibre server via the command:
/opt/calibre/calibre-server /path/to/the/library/you/want/to/share
You can download news and convert it into an e-book with the command:
/opt/calibre/ebook-convert "Title of news source.recipe" outputfile.epub
If you want to generate MOBI, use outputfile.mobi instead and use --output-profile kindle .
You can email downloaded news with the command:
/opt/calibre/calibre-smtp
I leave figuring out the exact command line as an exercise for the reader.
Finally, you can add downloaded news to the calibre library with:
/opt/calibre/calibredb add --with-library /path/to/library outfile.epub
Remember to read the Command Line Interface section of the calibre User Manual to learn more about these, and other commands.