Calibre 0.6.0 released
By Paul Biba
This is important news for all Calibre users. Here is the MobileRead link. That’s Kovid’s picture, of course.
Hi All,
Finally, after a two month long beta process, I’ve released calibre 0.6.0. It has tons of new features and bug fixes, some of which you can read about here http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/new_in_6
A big thank you to all the calibre code contributors, translators and beta testers, without you, this release would not have been possible.
Now that I have 0.6.0 out of my hair, I should be going back to the one release per week development cycle you’ve come to know and love
There is also a nice video tour of calibre at http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/downloads/videos/
Enjoy!
Perhaps the most important improvement is the conversion engine. From the Calibre site:
All new conversion system
The E-book market suffers from fragmentation, with different vendors providing e-books in different formats. calibre’s conversion system allows for the seamless conversion of dozens of e-book formats from one to another. This is of great benefit to both end-users of e-books and publishers who want to make their catalogs available in multiple formats with a minimum of fuss. In 0.6, the conversion system has been completely redesigned. The new design is highly modular and makes adding new features and support for new formats very easy. The benefits of this redesign can be seen in the large number of new input and output formats calibre supports.
Input formats CBZ, CBR, CBC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TXT
Output formats EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, TXT
Thanks to the new conversion system, calibre can convert from any of the input to any of the output formats.
In addition, the conversion system now has several long requested features, like the ability to insert book metadata into a “jacket” page at the start of the book. The user interface for conversion has also been made more user firiendly with the addition of a wizard to aid in the creation of XPath expressions. calibre uses XPath as a very powerful way for the user to mark document structure like chapters, page-breaks, entries for the automatic creation of Table of Contents, etc.
New input and output formats can be easily added to calibre by means of writing simple input and output plugins.
July 25th, 2009 at 10:13 am
This is a very nice idea. I would have downloaded the program, but I’m using a 64-bit Windows machine.
Ideally, software like Calibre would be installed on all ebook devices so that it doesn’t matter what what format you download a book in — it will run on your device. Unfortuately, I don’t see companies like Amazon, which have a lot at stake in pushing their DRM and their own proprietary formats, integrating this sort of software any time soon. But maybe some of the lesser-known ebook reader makers will get on board.
July 25th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Calibre is OS independent - works on win/linux/mac. It was not made for installation on the e-reader device since it is a library/conversion program that depends on python and a processor which would overwhelm the hardware of a reader device. As for publishers getting on board, there are quite a few publishers who use calibre to make their ebooks already including fictionwise. Even authors such as Jeffrey A Carver have utilized calibre to convert their books. It is extremely powerful and elegant software that is free and continues based on the volunteer work of Kovid and several other developers.
July 25th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
JM: Calibre works on 64-bit Windows. What does not work in 64-bits is the USB module to support the Sony PRS-500.
The 3rd party Savory program uses Calibre installed on a Kindle 2 to convert DRM-free PDF and ePub to MOBI on the device. See http://blog.fsck.com/2009/04/savory.html
So this approach is certainly possible on any of the recent ebook readers. However, since you have to connect to a desktop via USB to transfer ebooks to most current readers, running Calibre on a desktop makes sense too.
July 26th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Thanks. Thanks a whole bunch.
bill