Calibre is advertised as the one stop solution for all your e-book needs. But as one famouse person said 'I suppose you could design a car that flies and floats, but I don't think it would do all of those things very well.' That's why though Calibre is free, there are a lot of people that are not happy with this software and are looking for alternatives. Not for alternatives that also can fly and float, but for smaller and easier alternatives that can either fly or float and do it better than Calibre. We have picked 5 interesting apps in four categories that can replace Calibre on your desktop.
1. Calibre alternatives for book management
Ebook management includes e-library visulization, parsing and editing ebook metadata, searching and sorting books in the database, managing ebook files, etc. In this category we recommend two programs: Alfa Ebooks Manager for PC and Delicious Library for Mac.
Alfa Ebooks Manager features a lot of templates and options for beautiful library vizualization. Besides, it allows to update book data from multiple web sources (like Amazon, Google Books, Barnes & Nobel, etc). It's also good at file management and metadata extraction. And the main thing, that it's much more easy-to-use than Calibre.
Delicious Library is not just the Mac alternative for Alfa Ebooks Manager or Calibre. It's a bit different. Actually it's a software not just for books but for managing all stuff at your home. It's greates feature - entering books via webcam shot (it recognizes ISBN code). This feature makes Delicious Library the best software for collecting paper books.
2. Calibre alternatives for ebook conversion
As usual we need to convert books in order to read them on the e-reading device. Except Calibre there is another free tool for this purpose - Hamster. It allows you to convert eBook files in proprietary formats for more than 200+ devices (Kindle, iPad, iPhone, iRiver, Sony, Nook, Kobo, etc). Hamster converts ebooks to TXT, Adobe PDF, FB2, LIT, HTMLZ, PDB, LRF, PUB. It also allows to move eBooks between devices and convert multiple files in the batch mode.
3. Calibre alternatives for e-reading device management
Those e-reading devices that use SD-cards for book storing can be easily managed by one of gereral-purpose ebook organizers, but some popular e-readers need specific treatment. Of course, the first in this line is Kindle, that doesn't support folders, but supports own collections. We've found the great third-party tool for managing Kindle - called Kindlian. It's a paid app, but it's very easy and beautiful and unlike Calibre allows to manage Kindle Touch.
4. Calibre alternatives for ebook reading
Calibre can open most of ebook formats. But it's more a tool for opening books, rather than for reading them. There are a lot of much more comfortable desktop ebook reading apps. One of them is KooBits. It's also compatible with almost every book format (like PDF, EPUB, XML, HTML, KBJ, and more) and provides more comfortable reading experience. It also allows to personalize your ebook with the Highlight and Stamp tools to mark important sections or use the Extraction tool to copy content and piecing them however you like in the scrapbook.
Calibre is a free and open source macOS application specially designed by e-books users for users of e-books, that provides a plethora of features. Powerful e-books library manager. Calibre comes with a user-friendly and intuitive interface from where you can easily handle your e-book collection. Calibre is an eBook manager that helps you organize your eBook collection, perform conversions between different eBook formats and synchronize the content of the program's database with that of some eBook reading devices. As an eBook manager, Calibre lets you sort your eBook collection by title, author, date, publisher, rating, size, and series.
The calibre Portable build can be run on any Windows computer running at least Windows 8. It is self contained, your calibre libraries and settings are all kept together in one place.
The 5.14 version of calibre for Mac is available as a free download on our software library. This program's bundle is identified as net.kovidgoyal.calibre. The most popular versions of the tool are 2.16, 2.1 and 0.9. This free Mac application is an intellectual property of Kovid Goyal. The software is included in Productivity Tools.
To use, just run the portable installer and select the location where you would like the Calibre Portable folder. To launch calibre, double click the 'calibre-portable.exe' program inside the Calibre Portable folder.
Version: 5.16.1 What's new
Alternate download location #1
Alternate download location #2
While you wait for the download to complete, please consider contributing to support the developmentof calibre.
Previous releases of calibre are available here.
Upgrading
If you want to upgrade a previous version of calibre Portable, download the latest version of the installer from here and run it, choosing the location of your previous calibre Portable install. The installer will automatically update calibre Portable.
Precaution
Portable media can occasionally fail so you should make periodic backups of your calibre library. This can be done by making a copy of the 'Calibre Library' folder and all its contents.
Automated install
You can prevent the installer from asking for an install location by running it with a command line argument pointing to the directory for the install. For example:
Calibre Reader App
Multiple libraries
Calibre For Mac 10.12.6
calibre Portable only remembers libraries that are placed inside the portable folder. So while you can open any library located anywhere on your computer with calibre Portable, it will not be remembered on restart unless it is located in the portable folder (i.e. in the same place as the 'Calibre Library' folder).