Calibre is a free multiplatform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) software that allows to manage own ebooks collections. It has an easy interface so it’s simple to use.
The program menu allows to do various tasks:
Add books allows to import ebooks stored in your pc and various extensions are supported (EPUB, MOBI, PDF, AZW etc…) and comics too (CBR, CBZ, CBC)
Edit metadata allows to edit ebooks metadata (title, author, cover, etc…)
Convert books allows to convert imported ebooks in other formats by specifying the output (many extensions supported such EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, PDF, RTF, TXT etc…). In the conversion windows you can also specify many other options.
View it shows ebook content, you can increase/decrease font, place bookmarks, print, etc…
Get books perform search in commercial and public ebooks sites
Remove books it allows to delete previously added ebooks
x ebooks show you the total number of ebooks actually in your Calibre library
Save to disk it allows to save the ebooks of your library in any folder of your pc
Preferences where you can change the program’s settings
Calibre is like a kind of iTunes for ebooks. During installation the setup asks a path where will store all the info (Calibre metadata and database).
You can find that ebooks are protected by DRM (Digital Rights Management), most common protections are Kindle ebooks DRM, Adobe Digital Editions DRM and Barnes & Noble ebooks.
Within Calibre and using some plugins you can remove these protections.
Download DRM Removal Tools for Ebooks zip package and decompress in a folder you like. From Calibre preferences click Plugin then load plugin from file. Point to the Calibre_plugins folder and choose a zip, then confirm the installation. Repeat these steps for every zip.
Now if you import DRMed ebooks in Calibre the protection will be automatically removed and they can be converted.
Note: to read ebooks protected by Adobe DRM you need to download and installa Adobe Digital Edition free software, some online book stores allows to download directly the EPUB ebooks, other ones provides an .acsm file that, once opened with Adobe Digital Edition, allows the download of the buyed ebook.
Once opened with Adobe Digital Edition, the ebook is stored inside Documents->My Digital Editions.