I’ve already mentioned Calibre quite a few times in this blog in the past; for example when I talked about my sustainable e-book strategy, or when I gave some Flatpak tips and tricks. But Calibre has become such an important part of my workflow and daily computing habit, I feel I need to publish a product review about it.
Calibre is an open source (GPL 3.0), cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux), multi-format (EPUB, PDF, CHM, DJVU, etc.), extensible (supports a wide variety of plugins) ebook management app.
But Calibre does much more than just being an iTunes of ebooks:
- It allows you to manage various separate ebook collections; in my case I have one for my personal books, another for books I use for work, and a third one with scanned magazines of all kinds.
- It connects to a wide variety of devices; in my case, it worked without issues with my Kobo Aura H2O (2016-2023) and my current Kobo Libra 2. You can upload ebooks with Calibre, and of course remove those you’ve already read.
- If you are also a Kobo device user, you might find this plugin useful.
- You can use it to automatically remove DRM from ebooks for personal use and backup, thanks to a special ad hoc plugin.
- It allows you to export your library on the local network, either from the UI or from the terminal:
$ calibre-server /path/to/library
$ flatpak --command="sh" run com.calibre_ebook.calibre \
-c "calibre-server /path/to/library"
What Kovid Goyal and his team have given to the world is truly extraordinary.
Update, 2025-08-29: Sioyek is the PDF reader that I was looking for all this time to complement the Calibre experience.