Computer software for e-books. I love Calibre!

 I love my e-book reader. It's a Sony PRS T1 and it works very well for me. However the software that comes with it for using on your computer is atrocious. It works well enough when you only have 10 or 20 books, but when you have more than 100 it simply can't cope.

It's alphabetical sorting is flawed. It has no search facility. It has no way of correcting faulty data. I can't change the covers on books. There is no way of checking whether I have the same books on the reader as I have on the computer. It also has a bug in the software that means it tries to autosync everytime I plug in my e-book reader to charge. In short, it's a horrible piece of software and quite stressful to use.

I decided to try using Calibre instead. I hit some initial problems. If you use Chrome, you can't get Calibre to function properly after downloading it, you just get an error message. This can be resolved by using Internet Explorer to download Calibre – that's the only thing I've used Internet Explorer for this whole year.

Getting it to work with the Sony e-book reader presented some initial problems as well. Fortunately, there's a good forum for Calibre and people there are very helpful.

The solution is firstly to disable the Sony e-book reader software for the computer by changing the name of it to something else – this stops it automatically loading when an e-book reader is connected.
Secondly, always connect the ebook reader BEFORE starting Calibre.  Give it about a minute to convince it that it really can't find the Sony computer programme, and then it will work happily with Calibre.

This may sound like effort, but it's worth it. Calibre does everything that the Sony software cannot.  It's also easy to use and has a wonderfully clear and short user manual.  It's helping me to enjoy all my ebooks all over again. I don't have lots of books with a blank cover any more (and no text to say what the title is...).  I can sort and easily find books.  I can get metadata from Amazon and Google books.  'Alfre' the author of Idylls of the King has now been corrected to 'Alfred, Lord Tennyson'.  Robert A. Heinlein is now one author instead of three.  I have covers for my fan novels. I can delete books I don't want.  I can compare what I have on my reader and computer without writing out a list by hand...

Try Calibre - you'll love it!