Calibre - an awesome ebook manager regardless of your reader

I was looking for some thing to manage my ebooks. I have several PDFs that I wanted to read on my new Nook (see previous entries about that). Sure, I could open up the microSD card I have placed in my Nook and use the USB cable to upload to it. But I noticed my PDFs did not have pretty covers when I looked at them on my reader. At first I thought this was because they were PDFs instead of ePubs, but in reality, the PDFs just didn't have the appropriate metadata. So at first I was Googling ™ ™
to find a way to turn a PDF into an ePub document. Many of the options cost money and I prefer to find an open source or freeware method that sort of works than to spend money on something I will not use very often. That is when I came across Calibre. It will convert books from PDF to ePub format. But in my experimentation it did a horrendous job with images in PDFs so I gave up. (On a side note, I have Adobe CS3 Design Suite, which includes inDesign. So I looked to see if I could import a PDF into inDesign and create an ePub document. This particular version doesn't give me the option so bummer.) So I gave up on this tangent.
I played around with Calibre more and discovered it was an awesome ebook manager. It can edit metadata on PDFs (though strangely not consistently), import metadata from Barnes and Nobel and Amazon for books it can parse the titles of, and add "covers" to your books so they show the thumb nails on your reader.

Take a look at the interface.

Notice the drop down to allow access to move files to the microSD card in my Nook. It even recognizes my Nook when I plug it up. It has support for Kindle, Nook, Sony's eReader, and others.

(Soapbox) Also notice the book, Head First PMP (Second Edition) from O'Reilly And Associates. I love that O'Reilly doesn't put DRM on their books so when I buy a book from them, I can read it on any device I want. DRM free doesn't mean sharing with others, but supports the fact that once you buy a book, you own it. It is yours to use until you lose it. (/Soapbox).

I am not going into log tutorials about Calibre as the author of the program has gone to great strides to provide great tutorials on his site. The software is available for multiple OSes and even has a portable version you can take anywhere on your Thumb drive.