Calibre eBook Reader

Just yesterday a thought dawned on me. I wasn't reading books. The last book I read according to my memory was Tuesdays with Morrie last summer. However, it wasn't a new read. I was just rereading a book I've read before. I realized that I need to read new books, and since for a while I haven't been sure of what genre I liked I wanted to restart at the classics, and see how it would go. Now project gutenberg offers a whole collection of digitalized books, including many classics but to my dismay when I downloaded a file it was in the .txt format, and I really don't like reading books through textedit. I need an application that could convert and read ebook formats on my mac. I first read the news and saw that kindle reader for mac was out, but when I downloaded it I realized to my dismay that it only syncs your kindle ebook library with your kindle, which was not what I wanted.

So I searched and found an application called calibre. It's a free application for mac, windows, and linux, that allows you to read ebooks on your computer. With an added bonus, you can even send the formats to your ebook readers such as kindles, etc. The interface isn't the best especially since it's cross platform, but it works. Instead of downloading the books in txt format I used the epub format. That way the reader can display the books and I can read, for example Frankenstein for free. I'm going to include some screen shots as well to show you how the interface and reading experience is. I haven't fully tried out the software, but I can assure you that it works. And as I said before, even better, it's cross platform and free. Happy reading!

This is how the interface looks like when you want to see your library of books.


The ebook reader experience (as you can see I'm going to start Frankenstein first).