calibre — The Complete Guide: An Organised Digital Library for Textbooks and Technical Manuals
calibre is open-source (GPL-3.0) software for managing a digital library. Engineers usually have a scattered collection of textbooks, manufacturer manuals and technical booklets in different formats — calibre gathers them into one catalogue you can search and open from any device.
calibre
Kovid Goyal
Manage and convert e-books and technical manuals — EPUB, MOBI and PDF, and read them on any device.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Catalogue — sorting by author, subject and tags, with fast search.
- Format conversion — between EPUB, MOBI, PDF and other formats.
- Built-in reader — read directly inside the program.
- Book editor — fix the structure and content of e-books.
- Content server — reach the library from a phone or tablet on the network.
Organising an engineering library
Set up tags by field — structures, hydraulics, electrical, geotechnics — and by document type, such as textbook or manufacturer manual. That way you find the installation manual of a particular product, or an old textbook from your degree, in seconds. Worth knowing: converting a PDF full of equations, tables and drawings to another format does not always keep the layout, so such documents are best left as PDF.
Related tools
For managing papers and sources with citations — Zotero. For fast PDF reading — SumatraPDF. For BibTeX bibliography management — JabRef.
Zotero
Corporation for Digital Scholarship
Reference and bibliography manager — save papers and standards, annotate PDFs and cite automatically in Word.
Get it from the vendor
SumatraPDF
Krzysztof Kowalczyk
A tiny, very fast PDF reader for Windows — opens heavy drawings instantly, and reads ePub and DjVu too.
Get it from the vendor
JabRef
JabRef community
BibTeX and BibLaTeX reference manager — papers, standards and theses, working with LaTeX and LyX.
Get it from the vendor
Okular
KDE
KDE’s document viewer — read and annotate PDFs with highlights and notes, and verify digital signatures.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
calibre turns a heap of files into a tidy library. It is free for any use, including commercial, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.