calibre

What is calibre?

Calibre was created in 2006 by Kovid Goyal and has grown into a mature, feature‑rich tool that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It replaces a handful of Windows utilities—Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre’s own reader, and even some conversion scripts—by offering a single application for all e‑book tasks.

The target users are readers who own multiple e‑readers, librarians who need bulk conversion, and power users who want to tweak metadata or format books. Calibre’s interface is dense but consistent; once you learn the menu hierarchy, most tasks are a few clicks.

Compared with Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre feels more flexible: it can export to EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, PDF, and many others, while ADE is limited to EPUB and PDF. The built‑in reader is lightweight but lacks the advanced annotation tools of some Windows readers. Overall, Calibre is a pragmatic, no‑frills solution that prioritises functionality over polish.

Best for: Users who need a single, versatile tool to manage, convert, and distribute e‑books across multiple devices.

Key features of calibre

• Catalog books with automatic metadata lookup
• Convert between over 30 e‑book formats
• Send books to devices via USB or Wi‑Fi
• Built‑in e‑book reader with basic annotation
• Edit book metadata and content with a dedicated editor
• Host a local content server for network access
• Download news and periodicals in e‑book format

Tips for Windows users

When moving from Adobe Digital Editions, export your library to a CSV or directly copy the Calibre database folder (calibre/library) to preserve metadata. Calibre uses its own shortcut scheme (Ctrl+O to open a book, Ctrl+S to save edits). The conversion feature replaces the separate format‑conversion utilities you might have used; just select a book, click Convert, and choose the target format. For device syncing, Calibre’s ‘Send to device’ button replaces the manual USB transfer process. Remember that DRM‑protected books cannot be imported; you’ll need to remove DRM before adding them to Calibre.

Recent releases

• 9.14.0 — August 28, 2026

  New features: - Allow generating book covers using AI with different cover styles such as romance, sci-fi, pulp fiction etc. (To use it select a book and click Edit metadata and then the "AI Generate" button. Note that you will have to configure an image…

• 9.13.0 — August 7, 2026

  New features: Bug fixes: - PDF Output: Fix a regression in calibre 9 which caused links in PDF to scroll to a target location minus the top margin, thus ending up a few lines above the target - Content server: Fix an error when uploading a data file to a book…

• 9.12.0 — July 31, 2026

  New features: - macOS: Add sharing of books via AirDrop to the Connect/Share button - Content server: Add support for plugins that can add new endpoints to the server backend - Edit book: Compress images: Add an option to convert GIF images to JPEG/WebP - ToC…

• 9.11.0 — July 2, 2026

  New features: - Allow exporting annotations in the HTML format as a standalone web page that can be viewed in any browser with support for light/dark themes, searching and filtering by highlight style - E-book viewer: Ask AI: Allow using the {selected}…