Calibre 2 73 – Complete E Book Library Management System

Contents

• Calibre 2 73 – Complete E Book Library Management System Using Php
• Calibre 2 73 – Complete E Book Library Management Systems

E-books come in all shapes and sizes and more often than not, their metadata (things like title/author/series/publisher) is incomplete or incorrect.The simplest way to change metadata in calibre is to simply double click on an entry and type in the correct replacement.For more sophisticated, 'power editing' use the edit metadata tools discussed below.

Click the book you want to edit and then click the Edit metadata button or press the E key. A dialog opens that allows you to edit all aspects of the metadata. It has various features to make editing faster and more efficient. A list of the commonly used tips:

Topaz sharpen ai 1 4 21. Bulk convert: Allows you to specify options only once to convert a number of e-books in bulk. Create a catalog of the books in your calibre library: Allows you to generate a complete listing of the books in your library, including all metadata, in several formats such as XML, CSV, BiBTeX, EPUB and MOBI.

BIBLIO is a simple library management freeware, that is quite feature rich. Here you can add new items and provide their different details like index number, catalog number, subject, language, title, authors, publisher, collection, ISBN, and printed year.Links, notes, and any other details can also be provided. In case you don't want to enter the complete details yourself, you can download. 64bit calibre can be installed at the same time as 32bit calibre. The two calibre installs will use the same book library, plugins and settings. If you are using Windows 7 or Vista please, use calibre 3.48, which works with all Windows 7/Vista machines, from here.

• You can click the button in between title and authors to swap them automatically.

• You can click the button next to author sort to have calibre automatically fill it in using the sort values stored with each author. Use the Manage authors dialog to see and change the authors' sort values. This dialog can be opened by clicking and holding the button next to author sort.

• You can click the button next to tags to use the Tag editor to manage the tags associated with the book.

• The 'Ids' box can be used to enter an ISBN (and many other types of id), it will have a red background if you enter an invalid ISBN. It will be green for valid ISBNs.

• The author sort box will be red if the author sort value differs from what calibre thinks it should be.

The nicest feature of the edit metadata dialog is its ability to automatically fill in many metadata fields by getting metadata from various websites. Currently, calibre uses isbndb.com, Google Books, Amazon and Library Thing. The metadata download can fill in Title, author, series, tags, rating, description and ISBN for you.

Calibre 2 73 – Complete E Book Library Management System Using Php

To use the download, fill in the title and author fields and click the Fetch metadata button. calibre will present you with a list of books that most closely match the title and author. If you fill in the ISBN field first, it will be used in preference to the title and author. If no matches are found, try making your search a little less specific by including only some key words in the title and only the author last name.

In calibre, a single book entry can have many different formats associated with it. For example you may have obtained the Complete Works of Shakespeare in EPUB format and later converted it to MOBI to read on your Kindle. calibre automatically manages multiple formats for you. In the Available formats section of the Edit metadata dialog, you can manage these formats. You can add a new format, delete an existing format and also ask calibre to set the metadata and cover for the book entry from the metadata in one of the formats.

You can ask calibre to download book covers for you, provided the book has a known ISBN. Alternatively you can specify a file on your computer to use as the cover. calibre can even generate a default cover with basic metadata on it for you. You can drag and drop images onto the cover to change it and also right click to copy/paste cover images.

In addition, there is a button to automatically trim borders from the cover, in case your cover image has an ugly border.

First select the books you want to edit by holding Ctrl or Shift and clicking on them. If you select more than one book, clicking the Edit metadata button will cause the Bulk metadata edit dialog to open. Using this dialog, you can quickly set the author/publisher/rating/tags/series etc of a bunch of books to the same value. This is particularly useful if you have just imported a number of books that have some metadata in common. This dialog is very powerful, for example, it has a Search and Replace tab that you can use to perform bulk operations on metadata and even copy metadata from one column to another.

The normal edit metadata dialog also has Next and Previous buttons that you can use to edit the metadata of several books one after the other.

The Bulk metadata edit dialog allows you to perform arbitrarily powerful search and replace operations on the selected books. By default it uses a simple text search and replace, but it also support regular expressions. For more on regular expressions, see All about using regular expressions in calibre.

As noted above, there are two search and replace modes: character match and regular expression. Character match will look in the Search field you choose for the characters you type in the search for box and replace those characters with what you type in the replace with box. Each occurance of the search characters in the field will be replaced. For example, assume the field being searched contains a bad cat. If you search for a to be replaced with HELLO, then the result will be HELLO bHELLOd cHELLOt.

If the field you are searching on is a multiple field like tags, then each tag is treated separately. For example, if your tags contain Horror, Scary, the search expression r, will not match anything because the expression will first be applied to Horror and then to Scary.

If you want the search to ignore upper/lowercase differences, uncheck the Case sensitive box.

You can have calibre change the case of the result (information after the replace has happened) by choosing one of the functions from the Apply function after replace box. The operations available are:

• Lower case – change all the characters in the field to lower case

• Upper case – change all the characters in the field to upper case

• Title case – capitalize each word in the result.

The Your test box is provided for you to enter text to check that search/replace is doing what you want. In the majority of cases the book test boxes will be sufficient, but it is possible that there is a case you want to check that isn't shown in these boxes. Enter that case into Your test.

Regular expression mode has some differences from character mode, beyond (of course) using regular expressions. The first is that functions are applied to the parts of the string matched by the search string, not the entire field. The second is that functions apply to the replacement string, not to the entire field.

The third and most important is that the replace string can make reference to parts of the search string by using backreferences. A backreference is n where n is an integer that refers to the n'th parenthesized group in the search expression. For example, given the same example as above, a bad cat, a search expression a (…) (…), and a replace expression a 2 1, the result will be a cat bad. Please see the All about using regular expressions in calibre for more information on backreferences.

One useful pattern: assume you want to change the case of an entire field. The easiest way to do this is to use character mode, but lets further assume you want to use regular expression mode. The search expression should be (.*) the replace expression should be 1, and the desired case change function should be selected.

Finally, in regular expression mode you can copy values from one field to another. Simply make the source and destination field different. The copy can replace the destination field, prepend to the field (add to the front), or append to the field (add at the end). The ‘use comma' checkbox tells calibre to (or not to) add a comma between the text and the destination field in prepend and append modes. If the destination is multiple (e.g., tags), then you cannot uncheck this box.

Search and replace is done after all the other metadata changes in the other tabs are applied. This can lead to some confusion, because the test boxes will show the information before the other changes, but the operation will be applied after the other changes. If you have any doubts about what is going to happen, do not mix search/replace with other changes.

If you want to download the metadata for multiple books at once, right-click the Edit metadata button and select Download metadata. You can choose to download only metadata, only covers, or both.

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) provides access to alllibrary management and e-book format conversion features. The basic workflowfor 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 themto its internal database. Once they are in the database, you can perform variousActions on them that include conversion from one format to another,transfer to the reading device, viewing on your computer, and editing metadata.The latter includes modifying the cover, description, and tags among other details.Note that calibre creates copies of the files you add to it. Your original files are left untouched.

The interface is divided into various sections:

The actions toolbar provides convenient shortcuts to commonly used actions. If you right-click the buttons, you can perform variations on the default action.Please note that the actions toolbar will look slightly different depending on whether you have an e-book reader attached to your computer.

The Add books action has seven variations accessed by doing a right-click on 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 e-book reader device, the books will be uploaded to the device, and so on.

2. Add books from directories and sub-directories: Allows you to choose a directory. The directory and all its sub-directories are scanned recursively, and any e-books found are added to the library. You can choose whether to have calibre add all files present in a single directory to a single book record or multiple book records. calibre assumes that each directory contains a single book. All e-book files 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 in single book per directory mode, with no lost information except for the date (this assumes you have not changed any of the setting for the Save to disk action).

3. Add multiple books from archive (ZIP/RAR): Allows you to add multiple e-books that are stored inside the selected ZIP or RAR files. It is a convenient shortcut that avoids having to first unzip the archive and then add the books via one of the above two options.

4. Add empty book (Book Entry with no formats): Allows you to create a blank book record. This can be used to then manually fill out the information about a book that you may not have yet in your collection.

5. Add from ISBN: Allows you to add one or more books by entering their ISBNs.

6. Add files to selected book records: Allows you to add or update the files associated with an existing book in your library.

7. Add an empty file to selected book records: Allows you to add an empty file of the specified format to the selected book records.

The Add books action can read metadata from a wide variety of e-book formats. 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 an additional format for an existing book you can do any of three things:

Calibre 2 73 – Complete E Book Library Management Systems

1. Drag and drop the file onto the Book details panel on the right side of the main window

2. Right click the Add books button and choose Add files to selected books.

3. Click the Add books button in the top right area of the Edit metadata dialog, accessed by the Edit metadata action.

The Edit metadata action has four variations which can be accessed by doing a right-click on the button.

1. Edit metadata individually: 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 or remove particular e-book formats from a book.

2. Edit metadata in bulk: Allows you to edit common metadata fields for large numbers of books simultaneously. It operates on all the books you have selected in the Library view.

3. Download metadata and covers: Downloads metadata and covers (if available) for the books that are selected in the book list.

4. Merge book records: Gives you the capability of merging the metadata and formats of two or more book records. You can choose to either delete or keep the records that were not clicked first.

For more details see Editing e-book metadata.

E-books can be converted from a number of formats into whatever format your e-book reader prefers.Many e-books available for purchase will be protected by Digital Rights Management(DRM) technology.calibre will not convert these e-books. It is easy to remove the DRM from many formats, but as this may be illegal,you will have to find tools to liberate your books yourself and then use calibre to convert them.

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

The Convert books action has three variations, accessed by doing a right-click on the button.

1. Convert individually: Allows you to specify conversion options to customize the conversion of each selected e-book.

2. Bulk convert: Allows you to specify options only once to convert a number of e-books in bulk.

3. Create a catalog of the books in your calibre library: Allows you to generate a complete listing of the books in your library, including all metadata,in several formats such as XML, CSV, BiBTeX, EPUB and MOBI. The catalog will contain all the books currently showing in the library view.This allows you to 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, MOBI or AZW3,the next time you connect your e-book reader the catalog will be automatically sent to the device.For more information on how catalogs work, read the Creating AZW3 • EPUB • MOBI catalogs.

The View action displays the book in an e-book viewer program.calibre has a built-in viewer for many e-book formats. For other formats ituses the default operating system application. You can configure which formatsshould open with the internal viewer viaPreferences → Interface → Behavior. If a book has more than oneformat, you can view a particular format by doing a right-click on the button.

The Send to device action has eight variations, accessed by doing a right-click on the button.

1. Send to main memory: The selected books are transferred to the main memory of the e-book reader.

2. Send to card (A): The selected books are transferred to the storage card (A) on the e-book reader.

3. Send to card (B): The selected books are transferred to the storage card (B) on the e-book reader.

4. Send specific format to: The selected books are transferred to the selected storage location on the device, in the format that you specify.

5. Eject device: Detaches the device from calibre.

6. Set default send to device action: Allows you to specify which of the options, 1 through 5 above or 7 below, will be the default action when you click the main button.

7. Send and delete from library: The selected books are transferred to the selected storage location on the device and then deleted from the Library.

8. Fetch Annotations (experimental): Transfers annotations you may have made on an e-book on your device to the comments metadata of the book in the calibre library.

You can control the file name and folder structure of files sent to the device by setting up a template inPreferences → Import/export → Sending books to devices. Also see The calibre template language.

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

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.

The Fetch news action has three variations, accessed by doing a right-click on the button.

1. Schedule news download: Allows you to schedule the download of your selected news sources from a list of hundreds available. Scheduling can be set individually for each news source you select and the scheduling is flexible allowing you to select specific days of the week or a frequency of days between downloads.

2. Add a custom news source: Allows you to create a simple recipe for downloading news from a custom news site that you wish to access. Creating the recipe can be as simple as specifying an RSS news feed URL, or you can be more prescriptive by creating Python-based code for the task. For more information see Adding your favorite news website.

3. Download all scheduled news sources: Causes calibre to immediately begin downloading all news sources that you have scheduled.

The Library action allows you to create, switch between, rename or remove a Library. calibre allows you to create as many libraries as you wish. You could, for instance, create a fiction library, a non-fiction library, a foreign language library, a project library, or any structure that suits your needs. Libraries are the highest organizational structure within calibre. Each library has its own set of books, tags, categories and base storage location.

1. Switch/create library…: Allows you to; a) connect to a pre-existing calibre library at another location, b) create an empty library at a new location or, c) move the current library to a newly specified location.

2. Quick switch: Allows you to switch between libraries that have been registered or created within calibre.

3. Rename library: Allows you to rename a Library.

4. Pick a random book: Chooses a random book in the library for you

5. Remove library: Allows you to unregister a library from calibre.

6. Export/import all calibre data: Allows you to either export calibre data for migration to a new computer or import previously exported data.

7. : Actions 7, 8 etc… give you immediate switch access between multiple libraries that you have created or attached to. This list contains only the 5 most frequently used libraries. For the complete list, use the Quick Switch menu.

8. Library maintenance: Allows you to check the current library for data consistency issues and restore the current library's database from backups.

Note

Metadata about your e-books, e.g. title, author, and tags, is stored in a single file in your calibre library folder called metadata.db. If this file gets corrupted (a very rare event), you can lose the metadata. Fortunately, calibre automatically backs up the metadata for every individual book in the book's folder as an OPF file. By using the Restore database action under Library Maintenance described above, you can have calibre rebuild the metadata.db file from the individual OPF files for you.

You can copy or move books between different libraries (once you have more than one library setup) by right clicking on the book and selecting the action Copy to library.

The Device action allows you to view the books in the main memory or storage cards of your device, or to eject the device (detach it from calibre).This icon shows up automatically on the main calibre toolbar when you connect a supported device. You can click on it to see the books on your device. You can also drag and drop books from your calibre library onto the icon to transfer them to your device. Conversely, you can drag and drop books from your device onto the library icon on the toolbar to transfer books from your device to the calibre library.

The Save to disk action has five variations, accessed by doing a right-click on the button.

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

You can control the file name and folder structure of files saved to disk by setting up a template inPreferences → Import/export → Saving books to disk. Also see The calibre template language.

1. Save to disk in a single directory: Saves the selected books to disk in a single directory.

For 1. and 2., all available formats, as well as metadata, are 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.

1. Save only ** format to disk: Saves the selected books to disk in the directory structure as shown in (1.) but only in your preferred e-book format. You can set your preferred format in Preferences → Interface → Behaviour → Preferred output format

2. Save only ** format to disk in a single directory: Saves the selected books to disk in a single directory but only in your preferred e-book format. You can set your preferred format in Preferences → Interface → Behaviour → Preferred output format

3. Save single format to disk…: Saves the selected books to disk in the directory structure as shown in (1.) but only in the format you select from the pop-out list.

The Connect/share action allows you to manually connect to a device or folder on your computer. It also allows you to set up your calibre library for access via a web browser or email.

The Connect/share action has four variations, accessed by doing a right-click on the button.

1. Connect to folder: Allows you to connect to any folder on your computer as though it were a device and use all the facilities calibre has for devices with that folder. Useful if your device cannot be supported by calibre but is available as a USB disk.

2. Start Content server: Starts calibre's built-in web server. When started, your calibre library will be accessible via a web browser from the Internet (if you choose). You can configure how the web server is accessed by setting preferences at Preferences → Sharing → Sharing over the net

3. Setup email based sharing of books: Allows sharing of books and news feeds by email. After setting up email addresses for this option, calibre will send news updates and book updates to the entered email addresses. You can configure how calibre sends email by setting preferences at Preferences → Sharing → Sharing books by email. Once you have set up one or more email addresses, this menu entry will be replaced by menu entries to send books to the configured email addresses.

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 e-book reader device, books will be removed from the device. To remove only a particular format for a given book use the Edit metadata action. Remove books also has five variations which can be accessed by doing a right-click on the button.

1. Remove selected books: Allows you to permanently remove all books that are selected in the book list.

2. Remove files of a specific format from selected books…: Allows you to permanently remove e-book files of a specified format from books that are selected in the book list.

3. Remove all formats from selected books, except…: Allows you to permanently remove e-book files of any format except a specified format from books that are selected in the book list.

4. Remove all formats from selected books: Allows you to permanently remove all e-book files from books that are selected in the book list. Only the metadata will remain.

5. Remove covers from selected books: Allows you to permanently remove cover image files from books that are selected in the book list.

6. Remove matching books from device: Allows you to remove e-book files from a connected device that match the books that are selected in the book list.

Note

Note that when you use Remove books to delete books from your calibre library, the book record is permanently deleted, but on Windows and macOS the files are placed into the recycle bin. This allows you to recover them if you change your mind.

The Preferences action allows you to change the way various aspects of calibre work. It has four variations, accessed by doing a right-click on the button.

1. Preferences: Allows you to change the way various aspects of calibre work. Clicking the button also performs this action.

2. Run Welcome wizard: Allows you to start the Welcome wizard which appeared the first time you started calibre.

3. Get plugins to enhance calibre: Opens a new window that shows plugins for calibre. These plugins are developed by third parties to extend calibre's functionality.

4. Restart in debug mode: Allows you to enable a debugging mode that can assist the calibre developers in solving problems you encounter with the program. For most users this should remain disabled unless instructed by a developer to enable it.

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

1. Library: This is a collection of books stored in your calibre library on your computer.

2. Device: This is a collection of books stored in your e-book reader. It will be available when you connect the reader to your computer.

Many operations, such as adding books, deleting, viewing, etc., are context sensitive. So, for example, if you click the View button when you have the Device catalog selected, calibre will open the files on the device to view. If you have the Library catalog selected, files in your calibre library will be opened instead.

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 selecting the entry you want changed in the list and pressing the E key.

• You can perform Actions on sets of 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 a range of books you want selected.

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

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

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

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 querytag:'=science' will match 'science', but not 'science fiction' or 'hard science'. Regular expression searches areindicated by prefixing the search string with a tilde (~). Any Python-compatible regular expression canbe used. Note that backslashes used to escape special characters in regular expressions must be doubled because single backslashes will be removed during query parsing. For example, to match a literal parenthesis you must enter (. 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 searchfor the tag ScienceFiction you would need to search for tag:'=sciencefiction'. If you search fortag:=sciencefiction you will find all books with the tag ‘science' and containing the word ‘fiction' in anymetadata.

You can build advanced search queries easily using the Advanced search dialog accessed byclicking the button .

Available fields for searching are: tag,title,author,publisher,series,series_index,rating,cover,comments,format,identifiers,date,pubdate,search,size,vl and custom columns. If a device is plugged in, the ondevice field becomes available, when searching the calibre library view. To find the search name (actually called the lookup name) for a custom column, hover your mouse over the column header in the library view.

The syntax for searching for dates is:

If the date is ambiguous, the current locale is used for date comparison. For example, in an mm/dd/yyyylocale 2/1/2009 is interpreted as 1 Feb 2009. In a dd/mm/yyyy locale it is interpreted as 2 Jan 2009. Somespecial date strings are available. The string today translates to today's date, whatever it is. Thestrings yesterday and thismonth (or the translated equivalent in the current language) also work.In addition, the string daysago (also translated) can be used to compare to a date some number of days ago.For example:

To avoid potential problems with translated strings when using a non-English version of calibre, the strings _today, _yesterday, _thismonth, and _daysago are always available. They are not translated.

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

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 3or higher.

You can search for the number of items in multiple-valued fields such as tags. These searches begin with the character #, then use the same syntax as numeric fields. For example, to find all books with more than 4 tags use tags:#>4. To find all books with exactly 10 tags use tags:#=10.

Series indices are searchable. For the standard series, the search name is ‘series_index'. Forcustom series columns, use the column search name followed by _index. For example, to search the indices for acustom 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:'Myspouse'sbooks' in the Search bar to reuse the savedsearch. More about saving searches below.

The special field vl is used to search for books in a Virtual library. Forexample, vl:Read will find all the books in the Read Virtual library. The searchvl:Readandvl:'ScienceFiction' will find all the books that are in both the Read andScience Fiction Virtual libraries. The value following vl: must be the name of aVirtual library. If the Virtual library name contains spaces then surround it with quotes.

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

Yes/no custom columns are searchable. Searching for false, empty, or blank will find all bookswith undefined values in the column. Searching for true will find all books that do not have undefinedvalues 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. Note that the words yes, no, blank, empty, checked and unchecked are translated; you can use either the current language's equivalent word or the English word. The words true and false and the special values _yes, _no, and _empty are not translated.

Hierarchical items (e.g. A.B.C) use an extended syntax to match initial parts of the hierarchy. This is done by adding a period between the exact match indicator (=) and the text. For example, the query tags:=.A will find the tags A and A.B, but will not find the tags AA or AA.B. The query tags:=.A.B will find the tags A.B and A.B.C, but not the tag A.

Identifiers (e.g., ISBN, doi, lccn etc) also use an extended syntax. First, note that an identifier has the form type:value, as in isbn:123456789. The extended syntax permits you to specify independently which type and value to search for. Both the type and the value parts of the query can use equality, contains, or regular expression matches. Examples:

• identifiers:true will find books with any identifier.

• identifiers:false will find books with no identifier.

• identifiers:123 will search for books with any type having a value containing 123.

• identifiers:=123456789 will search for books with any type having a value equal to 123456789.

• identifiers:=isbn: and identifiers:isbn:true will find books with a type equal to ISBN having any value

• identifiers:=isbn:false will find books with no type equal to ISBN.

• identifiers:=isbn:123 will find books with a type equal to ISBN having a value containing 123.

• identifiers:=isbn:=123456789 will find books with a type equal to ISBN having a value equal to 123456789.

• identifiers:i:1 will find books with a type containing an i having a value containing a 1.

You can search using a template in the The calibre template language instead of ametadata field. To do so you enter a template, a search type, and the value tosearch for. The syntax is:

The template is any valid calibre template language template. The searchtype must be one of t (text search), d (date search), n (numericsearch), or b (set/not set (boolean)). The value is whatever you want.It can use the special operators described above for the various search types.You must quote the entire search string if there are spaces anywhere in it.

Examples:

• template:'program:connected_device_name('main')#@#:t:kindle' – is true when the kindle device is connected

  • template:'program:select(formats_sizes(),'EPUB')#@#:n:>1000000' – finds books with EPUB files larger than 1 MB

• template:'program:select(formats_modtimes('iso'),'EPUB')#@#:d:>10daysago' – finds books with EPUB files newer than 10 days ago

You can build template search queries easily using the Advancedsearch dialog accessed by clicking the button . You can test templates onspecific books using the calibre Template tester. This can be addedto the toolbars or menus via Preferences → Toolbars & menus. It canalso be assigned a keyboard shortcut via Preferences → Shortcuts.

calibre allows you to save a frequently used search under a special name and then reuse 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. 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 Savedsearches. A single click will allow you to reuse any arbitrarily complexsearch easily, without needing to re-create it.

A Virtual library is a way to pretend that your calibre library hasonly a few books instead of its full collection. This is an excellent way topartition your large collection of books into smaller, manageable chunks. Tolearn how to create and use Virtual libraries, see the tutorial:Virtual libraries.

Normally, calibre reads metadata from inside the book file. However, it canbe configured to read metadata from the file name instead, viaPreferences → Import/export → Adding books → Read metadata from file contents.

You can also control how metadata is read from the filename using regularexpressions (see All about using regular expressions in calibre). In the Adding Books section ofthe configuration dialog, you can specify a regular expression that calibrewill use to try and guess metadata from the names of e-book files that you addto the library. The default regular expression is:

that is, it assumes that all characters up to the first - are the title ofthe book and subsequent characters are the author of the book. For example, thefilename:

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

Tip

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

The Book details display shows the cover and all the metadata for the currentlyselected book. It can be hidden via the Layout button in the lowerright corner of the main calibre window. The author names shown in the Bookdetails panel are click-able, they will by default take you to the Wikipediapage for the author. This can be customized by right clicking on the authorname and selecting Manage this author.

Similarly, if you download metadata for the book, the Book details panel willautomatically show you links pointing to the web pages for the book on amazon,worldcat, etc. from where the metadata was downloaded.

You can right click on individual e-book formats in the Book details panel todelete them, compare them to their original versions, save them to disk, openthem with an external program, etc.

You can change the cover of the book by simply drag and dropping animage onto the Book details panel. If you wish to edit the cover image inan external program, simply right click on it and choose Open with.

You can also add e-book files to the current book by drag and dropping the filesonto the Book details panel.

Double clicking the Book details panel will open it up in a separate popupwindow.

Finally, you can customize exactly what information is displayed in the Bookdetails panel via Preferences → Interface → Look & feel → Book details.

The Tag browser allows you to easily browse your collection by Author/Tags/Series/etc. If you click on any item in the Tag browser, for example the author name Isaac Asimov, then the list of books to the right is restricted to showing books by that author. You can click on category names as well. For example, clicking on 'Series' will show you all books in any series.

The first click on an item will restrict the list of books to those that contain or match the item. Continuing the above example, clicking on Isaac Asimov will show books by that author. Clicking again on the item will change what is shown, depending on whether the item has children (see sub-categories and hierarchical items below). Continuing the Isaac Asimov example, clicking again on Isaac Asimov will restrict the list of books to those not by Isaac Asimov. A third click will remove the restriction, showing all books. If you hold down the Ctrl or Shift keys and click on multiple items, then restrictions based on multiple items are created. For example you could hold Ctrl and click on the tags History and Europe for finding books on European history. The Tag browser works by constructing search expressions that are automatically entered into the Search bar. Looking at what the Tag browser generates is a good way to learn how to construct basic search expressions.

Items in the Tag browser have their icons partially colored. The amount of color depends on the average rating of the books in that category. So for example if the books by Isaac Asimov have an average of four stars, the icon for Isaac Asimov in the Tag browser will be 4/5th colored. You can hover your mouse over the icon to see the average rating.

The outer-level items in the Tag browser, such as Authors and Series, are called categories. You can create your own categories, called User categories, which are useful for organizing items. For example, you can use the User categories editor (click the Configure button at the lower-left of the Tag browser and choose Manage authors, series, etc → User categories) to create a User category called FavoriteAuthors, then put the items for your favorites into the category. User categories can have sub-categories. For example, the User category Favorites.Authors is a sub-category of Favorites. You might also have Favorites.Series, in which case there will be two sub-categories under Favorites. Sub-categories can be created by right-clicking on a User category, choosing Add sub-category to…, and entering the sub-category name; or by using the User categories editor by entering names like the Favorites example above.

1. 'everything matching an item in the category' indicated by a single green plus sign.

2. 'everything matching an item in the category or its sub-categories' indicated by two green plus signs.

3. 'everything not matching an item in the category' shown by a single red minus sign.

4. 'everything not matching an item in the category or its sub-categories' shown by two red minus signs.

It is also possible to create hierarchies inside some of the text categories such as tags, series, and custom columns. These hierarchies show with the small triangle, permitting the sub-items to be hidden. To use hierarchies of items in a category, you must first go to Preferences → Interface → Look & feel and enter the category name(s) into the 'Categories with hierarchical items' field. Once this is done, items in that category that contain periods will be shown using the small triangle. For example, assume you create a custom column called 'Genre' and indicate that it contains hierarchical items. Once done, items such as Mystery.Thriller and Mystery.English will display as Mystery with the small triangle next to it. Clicking on the triangle will show Thriller and English as sub-items. See Managing subgroups of books, for example 'genre' for more information.

Hierarchical items (items with children) use the same four ‘click-on' searches as User categories. Items that do not have children use two of the searches: 'everything matching' and 'everything not matching'.

You can drag and drop items in the Tag browser onto User categories to add them to that category. If the source is a User category, holding the shift key while dragging will move the item to the new category. You can also drag and drop books from the book list onto items in the Tag browser; dropping a book on an item causes that item to be automatically applied to the dropped books. For example, dragging a book onto Isaac Asimov will set the author of that book to Isaac Asimov. Dropping it onto the tag History will add the tag History to the book's tags.

You can easily find any item in the Tag browser by clicking the search button at the lower-right corner. In addition, you can right click on any item and choose one of several operations. Some examples are to hide it, rename it, or open a 'Manage x' dialog that allows you to manage items of that kind. For example, the 'Manage Authors' dialog allows you to rename authors and control how their names are sorted.

You can control how items are sorted in the Tag browser via the Configure button at the lower-left of the Tag browser. You can choose to sort by name, average rating or popularity (popularity is the number of books with an item in your library; for example, the popularity of Isaac Asimov is the number of books in your library by Isaac Asimov).

You can have calibre display a grid of book covers instead of a list of books,if you prefer to browse your collection by covers instead. The Covergrid is activated by clicking the Layout button in the bottomright corner of the main calibre window. You can customize the cover sizes andthe background of the Cover grid viaPreferences → Interface → Look & feel → Cover grid. You can even havecalibre display any specified field under the covers, such as title or authorsor rating or a custom column of your own devising.

In addition to the Cover grid described above, you can also have calibre displaycovers in the single row. This is activated via the Layout button in the lower rightcorner of the main window. In Preferences → Interface → Look & feel → Coverbrowser you can change the number of covers displayed, and even have theCover browser display itself in a separate popup window.

Sometimes you want to select a book and quickly get a list of books with the same value in some category (authors, tags, publisher, series, etc.) as the currently selected book, but without changing the current view of the library. You can do this with Quickview. Quickview opens either a second window or a panel in the book list showing the list of books matching the value of interest. For example, assume you want to see a list of all the books with the one or more of the authors of the currently-selected book. Click in the author cell you are interested in and press the ‘Q' key or click the Quickview icon in the Layout section of the calibre window. A window or panel will open with all the authors for that book on the left, and all the books by the selected author on the right.

• have some tag(s) applied to the currently selected book,

• are in the same series as the current book

• have the same values in a custom column as the current book

• are written by one of the same authors of the current book

• share values in a custom column

There are two choices for where the Quickview information appears:

1. It can open 'undocked': on top of the calibre window and will stay open until you explicitly close it.

2. It can open 'docked': as a panel in the book list section of the calibre main window.

You can move the window from docked to undocked as desired using the 'Dock/Undock' button.

The Quickview panel can be left open permanently, in which case it follows movements on the book list. For example, if you click in the calibre library view on a category column (tags, series, publisher, authors, etc.) for a book, the Quickview window contents will change to show you in the left-hand side panel the values in that category for the selected book (e.g., the tags for that book). The first item in that list will be selected, and Quickview will show you on the right-hand side panel all the books in your library that use that value. Click on an different value in the left-hand panel to see the books with that different value.

Double-click on a book in the Quickview window to select that book in the library view. This will also change the items display in the QuickView window (the left-hand panel) to show the items in the newly-selected book.

Shift- or Ctrl- double-click on a book in the Quickview window to open the edit metadata dialog on that book in the calibre window. The edited book will be Quickview'ed when you close the edit metadata dialog.

You can see if a column can be Quickview'ed by hovering your mouse over the column heading and looking at the tooltip for that heading. You can also know by right-clicking on the column heading to see of the 'Quickview' option is shown in the menu, in which case choosing that Quickview option is equivalent to pressing ‘Q' in the current cell.

Options (in Preferences → Look & feel → Quickview):

• Respect (or not) the current Virtual library. If checked then Quickview shows only books in the current Virtual library. Default: respect Virtual libraries

• Change the Quickview window contents when the column is changed on the book list using the cursor keys. Default: don't follow changes made with cursor keys

• Change the column being 'quickview'ed' when a cell in the Quickview window is double-clicked. Otherwise the book is changed but the column being examined is not. Default: change the column

• Change the column being 'quickview'ed' to the current column when the return key is pressed in the Quickview panel. Otherwise the book is changed but the column being examined is not. Default: change the column

• Choose which columns are shown in the Quickview window/panel.

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

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.