Science and Inquiry discussion

I have been reading e-books for many years. The vast majority of these e-books have been downloads from my local library. My first e-book reader was a Barnes & Noble "Nook", and when that died, I replaced it with a Kobo e-reader. They both use the popular EPUB book format. More recently I've been using a Kindle, which uses the Kindle format.

There is a free piece of software called Calibre that helps to manage a collection of e-books. The software is compatible with Windows, Linux, IOS, Android, and macOS. (At least, compatibility is claimed on the Calibre web site.) And, it is compatible with all the most popular e-book formats (EPub, Kindle and many others). It is capable of translating between formats, so that no matter which format you have downloaded, you can translate into the format that is best-suited for your e-book reader. (PDF can also be translated, but this is always a problem.) Calibre also has a lot of advanced features that allow you to tweak formats if you are so-inclined.

I have no connection to Calibre--I don't know the developer; but it has proven to be very helpful for me.

I've been using it for quite a few years & highly recommend donating to the author. I especially like is the add-on that allows me to convert .azw (Amazon DRM locked) files to .mobi so I can keep a backup of all the books I buy. I've been burned too many times over the years by proprietary formats & licensing to trust my files to any company. They go out of business (Atari computers & Sony ereaders), drop the format (Microsoft .lit), or have fine print restricting files to a specific number of devices (Amazon).

I have used Calibre too. Definitely a very handy tool!

I do all my reading on kindle and seldom get books not already in the kindle format. But on those rare occasions, I just send it to my special e-mail address at Amazon and they convert it for me. At least that's what used to happen. I haven't had the need for a long time so I couldn't guarantee it still works.