New in calibre 2.0

It has been a year since calibre 1.0 and lots has changed in calibre-land. The biggest new feature is an e-book editor, capable of editing e-books in both the EPUB and AZW3 (Kindle) formats. Click on the items in the list below to learn more about each new feature.

Note that because of the move to Qt 5, calibre no longer supports either Windows XP or versions of macOS older than 10.7 (Lion). If you are using either of these operating systems, you should stay with calibre 1.48.

The e-book editor calibre now has an e-book editor capable of editing books in the EPUB and AZW3 (Kindle) formats, with many powerful tools and features, specially designed for making editing e-book easier. Watch the video below for a tour of the new e-book editor. You can also read about the various features of the editor in detail in the User Manual. Click to watch the new e-book editor

Download video: [MP4] [WEBM]

Comparing books Now that we have the ability to edit books, it would be nice to also have the ability to compare them. Fortunately, calibre 2.0 also has a new "Compare books" tool that you can use to see all the differences between two books, highlighted, side-by-side. To use it, open the first book in the calibre e-book editor and click File->Compare to another book .

Support for Android phones and tablets on macOS calibre has long supported connecting to Android phones and tablets on all operating systems, except macOS. This lacuna has now been remedied. You can just plugin any Android phone or tablet on macOS and calibre should automatically detect and connect to it, just as it already does on Windows and Linux.

Now uses Qt 5 calibre uses the Qt graphical toolkit. In version 2.0, calibre has migrated to Qt 5. This brings with it several important bug fixes for the rendering of text in the E-book viewer. Fallback fonts now work, embedded fonts whose names inside the font file do not match the names in the @font-face rule work, hyphenation is greatly improved and so on. Qt 5 also allows the calibre command line tools to be run on Linux without needing a running X server. This has led to significant memory usage and performance improvements when running some command line tools, such as the standalone content server and ebook-convert . The move to Qt 5 meant that many calibre plugins needed to be updated to work with Qt 5. Thanks to the efforts of calibre's enthusiastic community, most plugins have already been ported. For a detailed list is maintained at the porting page.

Support for touchscreen Windows tablets The calibre E-book viewer now supports touch screen Windows 8 tablets, such as the Surface Pro. You can use finger gestures to turn pages and navigate around the book in the viewer, allowing the viewer to be used effectively on these tablets.

Improvements to library organisation You can now define simple rules to make emblems (little icons) appear next to book covers in the Cover grid. For example, a heart next to books you have rated highly or a tick mark next to books you have read and so on. To setup emblems, go to Preferences->Look & feel->Cover grid->Emblems . There is a new tool Mark books that can be used to mark books temporarily. The mark appears as a little pushpin icon next to the book and all marks are automatically cleared by restarting calibre. Go to Preferences->Toolbars and add the Mark books tool to your main toolbar to begin using it.

This is an appropriate time to throw out a big thank you to the calibre community who have contributed selflessly of their energy and enthusiasm — without which many of the features above would never have seen the light of day.

Note that many of these features were actually introduced during the lifetime of the 1.x series. This document describes new features as compared to 1.0

See what was new in previous major calibre releases: 1.0, 0.9, 0.8, 0.7.