Calibre. Software e-book

Hoy traemos a Calibre ...

• You can see usage statistics for calibre here .
• You can see usage statistics for the various news sources in calibre here .
• You can see usage statistics for the calibre website here.

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. At the time, I was a graduate student, with a lot of time on my hands. 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. This was accomplished with the help of the fine folks over at mobileread.com and calibre was born, albeit named libprs500.

At 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. This converter proved to be wildly popular and far better than the (mostly non-existent) offerings from SONY. It was picked up and used by various publishing houses and content digitizers to produce the first generation of books in the LRF format.

As 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 became calibre, in its present form, as a comprehensive e-book management tool. libprs500 was renamed to calibre in mid-2008. The name calibre was chosen by my wife, Krittika. The libre in calibre stands for freedom, indicating that calibre is a free and open source product, modifiable by all. Nonetheless, calibre should be pronounced as cali-ber, not ca-libre.

The news downloading feature, one of calibre's most popular, has an interesting story behind it. I used to subscribe to Newsweek, back when it was still a real news magazine. But one fine day, Newsweek simply stopped being delivered to my house and no matter how much time I spent on the phone with various sales reps, it simply would not start again. Since I'd just got my first e-book reader at the time, I decided to add the ability to download and convert websites to calibre. From the beginning, I decided to make it as modular as possible, so that other people could contribute "recipes" for different news sites. The calibre cookbook has kept on growing and now calibre has recipes for over three hundred news sources in many different languages.

Today calibre is a vibrant open-source community with half a dozen developers and many, many testers and bug reporters. It is used in over 160 countries and has been translated into a dozen different languages by volunteers. calibre has become a comprehensive tool for the management of digital texts, allowing you to do whatever you could possibly imagine with your e-book library. Reading is very important to me and one of my goals has always been to prevent either the fragmentation or the monopolization of the e-book market by entities that care solely for short-term goals. As the calibre community continues to grow, driven by book lovers, for book lovers, hopefully it will always present an alternative for people that love to read e-books and want to be in control of their own digital libraries.

Kovid Goyal

November 2009

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Fuente: [calibre]