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Calibre is advertised as the one stop solution for all your e-book needs. But as one famouse person said 'I suppose you could design a car that flies and floats, but I don't think it would do all of those things very well.' That's why though Calibre is free, there are a lot of people that are not happy with this software and are looking for alternatives. Not for alternatives that also can fly and float, but for smaller and easier alternatives that can either fly or float and do it better than Calibre. We have picked 5 interesting apps in four categories that can replace Calibre on your desktop.
1. Calibre alternatives for book management
Ebook management includes e-library visulization, parsing and editing ebook metadata, searching and sorting books in the database, managing ebook files, etc. In this category we recommend two programs: Alfa Ebooks Manager for PC and Delicious Library for Mac.
Alfa Ebooks Manager features a lot of templates and options for beautiful library vizualization. Besides, it allows to update book data from multiple web sources (like Amazon, Google Books, Barnes & Nobel, etc). It's also good at file management and metadata extraction. And the main thing, that it's much more easy-to-use than Calibre.
Delicious Library is not just the Mac alternative for Alfa Ebooks Manager or Calibre. It's a bit different. Actually it's a software not just for books but for managing all stuff at your home. It's greates feature - entering books via webcam shot (it recognizes ISBN code). This feature makes Delicious Library the best software for collecting paper books.
2. Calibre alternatives for ebook conversion
As usual we need to convert books in order to read them on the e-reading device. Except Calibre there is another free tool for this purpose - Hamster. It allows you to convert eBook files in proprietary formats for more than 200+ devices (Kindle, iPad, iPhone, iRiver, Sony, Nook, Kobo, etc). Hamster converts ebooks to TXT, Adobe PDF, FB2, LIT, HTMLZ, PDB, LRF, PUB. It also allows to move eBooks between devices and convert multiple files in the batch mode.
3. Calibre alternatives for e-reading device management
Those e-reading devices that use SD-cards for book storing can be easily managed by one of gereral-purpose ebook organizers, but some popular e-readers need specific treatment. Of course, the first in this line is Kindle, that doesn't support folders, but supports own collections. We've found the great third-party tool for managing Kindle - called Kindlian. It's a paid app, but it's very easy and beautiful and unlike Calibre allows to manage Kindle Touch.
4. Calibre alternatives for ebook reading
Calibre can open most of ebook formats. But it's more a tool for opening books, rather than for reading them. There are a lot of much more comfortable desktop ebook reading apps. One of them is KooBits. It's also compatible with almost every book format (like PDF, EPUB, XML, HTML, KBJ, and more) and provides more comfortable reading experience. It also allows to personalize your ebook with the Highlight and Stamp tools to mark important sections or use the Extraction tool to copy content and piecing them however you like in the scrapbook.