A different Calibre of software

Back up your library, store your books online, identify and fix problems with your titles, and have Calibre read to you

Export/import your ebook library

If you’ve spent some time building up a library in Calibre, the last thing you’d want to happen is to lose it as a result of hard-drive failure or accidental deletion. You can back up your library for safe keeping (or copying to another location) by clicking the arrow next to Calibre Library in the top menu bar, then selecting ‘Export/import all calibre data’ (see screenshot below). The window that opens will give you the option to ‘Export all your Calibre data’ or ‘Import previously exported data’.

Store your library online

Should you wish to be able to access your books from anywhere, you can move your library to the folder you use for an online-storage service like Dropbox, Google Drive or Onedrive. First, make sure you have a folder for the service you use on your hard drive. Then move your library from its existing location to there by clicking the arrow next to Calibre Library and selecting ‘Switch/create library’. Navigate to your online drive. You have the option of using the previous library in the new location, creating an empty library there, or moving the current library to this new folder (see screenshot below left).

Fix covers and metadata

If your library is blighted with poor quality covers or incorrect metadata, you can use the Quality Check plug-in to fix this. Click the arrow next to Preferences, then select ‘Get plug-ins to enhance Calibre’. In the User Plug-ins window that opens, type quality into the ‘Filter by name’ box. Select Quality Check and then click Install. Click Yes and choose where to save the shortcuts. Restart Calibre, and then run the plug-in and choose the various checks you wish to perform, such as checking covers (see screenshot below). Some problems can be fixed automatically, but not all.

Create a catalogue of your entire library

Calibre can export details of all the books in your library into a catalogue in a choice of formats. The information the file contains includes book name, author name, comments, cover location on your hard drive, book format, ISBN, publisher, rating, and tags. To export this list, click the arrow next to ‘Convert books’ and select ‘Create a catalogue of the books in your Calibre library’. You can choose the catalogue format – AZW3, BIB, CSV (for opening in any spreadsheet program, see screenshot right) EPUB, MOBI or XML – and have the catalogue appear at the beginning of your library for easy access. It can be sent to a connected ebook reader, or saved to disk.