The libre in calibre stands for freedom, indicating that calibre is a free and open source product, modifiable by all. The name calibre was chosen by my wife, Krittika. libprs500 was renamed to calibre in mid-2008. This became calibre, in its present form, as a comprehensive e-book management tool. It was picked up and used by various publishing houses and content digitizers to produce the first generation of books in the LRF format.Īs my e-book collection grew, I realized that managing it was quickly becoming unwieldy, so I decided to write a graphical interface to libprs500 to make it easier. This converter proved to be wildly popular and far better than the (mostly non-existent) offerings from SONY. This was accomplished with the help of the fine folks over at and calibre was born, albeit named libprs500.Īt the time there were no satisfactory tools to convert content into the LRF format, used by the SONY reader, so I decided to implement a converter to convert the most popular e-book formats to LRF. The PRS-500 did not work at all with Linux, my operating system of choice, so I decided to reverse engineer the USB protocol that it used, to get it working on Linux. At the time, I was a graduate student, with a lot of time on my hands. The main calibre interface, showing books in your library image source : Ĭalibre started life on 31 October, 2006, soon after the release of the SONY PRS-500, the first e-ink based reader to be sold commercially in the US. Satisfy every e-book need and get support.Save time on managing your e-book collection.

It’s also completely free and open source and great for both casual users and computer experts. It’ll allow you to do nearly everything and it takes things a step beyond normal e-book software. Users say it’s outstanding and a must-have. Calibre is a powerful and easy to use e-book manager.

What is calibre ebook management