eBook Lending Library Tutorial

The ebooks are offered through a relatively friendly web portal called Calibre-Web. This tutorial will show some tips for various ways to interact with the books.

Once logged in, the main landing page should look something like this:

In the center is a row of randomly selected books, and below that is an ordered list of every book in the library. The default sort is by New, but there are a few other options as well.

The sidebar to the left is mostly self-explanatory. Books brings you back to this page; Discover gives you a big selection of random books; and Categories gives you a list of tags. The tags are mostly auto-downloaded, but they might help you find something new.

If you know what you're looking for, your best bet is probably searching the Title or Author in the search bar at the top.

After clicking on a book, you get a book summary and some options up top for interacting with the book. If you want to read the book in your browser/on your phone, you can click Read in Browser.

If you have it properly set up, you can email the book to your eReader.

Or, you can download the file and manually transfer it to your device. If you have a Kindle and want to streamline the process as much as possible, download the .azw3 file (if available). See the following sections on using Calibre to do this option.

Using Calibre to manage your ebooks

Calibre is an app available for most standard operating systems that can manage your personal ebook library. It auto-magically manages a database of ebook files on your computer, can edit the metadata (e.g. Title, Author, tags, cover art), can convert between different file types (such as epub, azw3, mobi, and others), and can send ebooks to your Kindle or other device.

Downloads are available at:

https://calibre-ebook.com/download

This guide will be written for Windows; good luck everyone else.

Either during installation, or on first startup, Calibre will ask you for your ebook reader make & model. If you're pretty much only planning to use Calibre to move books onto your device, you're done after the initial setup. There are a ton of options, plugins, and settings you can play with, but they really only apply if you're adding/editing books in a library.

For more in-depth information about that, see these links for more:

https://calibre-ebook.com/help https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/

Otherwise, all you really need to know is the following workflow:

1. Add book to Calibre
2. Plug your ereader into your computer
3. Use Calibre to send a book to your device
4. Use Calibre to remove a book from your device (if you want)

Your local library will look a little different depending on whether your ereader is plugged in.

No device

Plugged in

When your device is plugged in, note the extra column (On Device) and the extra button up top (Send to Device with the blue arrow). The On Device column will have a big green check mark for any book currently on your device, and that button is a shortcut to send new books over to your reader.

To send books over, just click on them and click the Send to Device button.

To remove books, either do it on your device or right click on the book in your library:

Removing a book from your device

Make sure you click Remove matching books from device. If you click the top option (Remove selected book), you will only delete the book from your local library. It will still be on your reader. (And I don't even know - if the book isn't in your local library, it might not even show up in Calibre anymore)