Centos 6/RHEL install & uninstall Calibre Ebook Reader


Calibre is a fine cross platform Desktop Ebook reader developed by Kovid Goyal, available both from repos and as source files, although compiling from source is not recommended due to the large dependency requirement. 

Some of it's features include


Calibre supports many file formats and reading devices. The e-book formats can be edited by changing the font or the font size and by adding an auto-generated table of contents.

Conversion and editing is only possible after DRM restrictions have been removed from commercial e-book files. It doesn’t natively support this removal, but you can add plugins to accomplish this.


Calibre helps to organize the personal e-book library by allowing the user to sort and group e-books by metadata fields which can be pulled from many different sources such as ISBNdb.com,

Google_Books, Amazon.com, LibraryThing.

You can search for author, title or keyword in the whole library and you can import e-books either by adding files manually, or by syncing an e-book reading device. On-line content-sources can be harvested and converted to e-books. E-books can then be exported to all supported reading devices via USB or via the integrated mail-server.

Mailing e-books enables, for example, sending personal documents to the Kindle family of e-book readers.
The content of the library can be remotely accessed by a web browser, if the hosting computer is running and pushing content from content sources is supported on a regular interval.
 
So with Calibre you can not only read ebooks, but also convert .html documents into ebooks that can be published through both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

It is straighforward to install using the supplied binaries on your Centos 6/RHEL box, first install the required dependencies.

$ sudo yum -y install glibc xdg-utils python

although it is likely that you have these already if you followed this tutorial to install your minimal Centos 6.

Now issue the command to download and install Calibre

$ sudo python -c "import sys; py3 = sys.version_info[0] > 2; u = __import__('urllib.request' if py3 else 'urllib', fromlist=1); exec(u.urlopen('http://status.calibre-ebook.com/linux_installer').read()); main(install_dir='/opt')"

Changing the install_dir and the end of the line from /opt to the one you require if necessary.

At the end of the download and install process you will simply see a message saying 'run with calibre'

$ calibre                      


You will find a Calibre library in your home directory and a sample Ebook to which you can add more.

To uninstall Calibre you can run the uninstaller script

$ sudo python /usr/bin/calibre-uninstall

Then delete the remaining files

$ sudo rm -rf /opt/calibre

For an Ebook program with a smaller footprint try FBReader.

Fluxbox users see Fluxbox key bindings for more information.

More repos.


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