Saturday, June 26, 2010

Calibre and the pad (updated)

The unique ebook (ePub) handling and news/articles-fetching app calibre (preferred spelling is with a lower-case c) is now updated to work automatically with uploads to the iPad, so I'm trying it again.

They also refined the logo. Old on the left, new on the right.  Very nice:


calibre is a very clever app. There are scripts for a ton of web sites, so it can extract just the articles and present them in readable form. I've had people make me custom scripts for my favorite sites like TOP and Luminous Landscape. And both those and other sorts of ebooks in the broadest sense, it will convert to a readable format for whatever e-reader you use, Sony, Kindle, iPad, etc.

(Update/explanation) You select what you want from its long list of news sites and magazines, and it fetches the content from the web as often as you like. And then when you plug in your preferred deviced, it's uploaded automatically to with each Update being an "ebook" of collated articles, with linked headlines, each publication separate. In the case of the iPad, it uploads to Apple's iBooks reader, which gives the best reading experience I've tried yet with calibre. 

1 comment:

Ray said...

You forgot to mention that it also has its own built-in viewer for letting you read anything that isn't DRM protected material - so you can check out a lot of 'freebies' even without a separate reader if you wish.

When setting its initial setup, when it asks for your preferred reader, just select 'Default'. Then when you find something you'd like to read, click on 'View' in the Taskbar. A new window opens with your selection.