Due to Mum’s recent purchase of a Kindle, I downloaded the Calibre ebook reader/converter software. Its very good and the only way you could possibly catalogue 4,000 ebooks.

Unfortunately the version supported by Ubuntu Lucid (Dad’s PC) is very old – 0.6.x, so I found this PPA which installs the latest version.

The version suppported by Fedora 13 (my PC) is also pretty old – 0.7.38, so I found some SRPM’s for 0.7.45 and rebuilt them, it looks like the last version F13 could support as it doesn’t have Python 2.7 or SIP 4.12. However it seems pretty unstable – if you try to update metadata or convert an epub to mobi format it just sits there using 100% CPU doing nothing!

The author says this is a packaging bug, so I decided to try his binary installer which seems to be the only “platform” he supports:

python -c "import urllib2; exec urllib2.urlopen('http://status.calibre-ebook.com/linux_installer').read(); main()"

This downloads and installs the latest version 0.7.49, which somehow works on F13 (statically linked perhaps?) and fixes the CPU usage bug and manages to download metadata/covers for more books than before, and is much faster overall.