this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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Because calibre also allows me to convert other formats into epub.
Some files are unreadable garbage because of bad OCR or bad formatting or whatever. I use calibre to preview files in its built-in viewer, to see how they would be rendered on my actual reader. Helps a ton.
Some files have messed up metadata. Calibre helps with fixing that. I have encountered files that would appear as documents on my Kindle rather than books, for example. Easy fix with calibre.
Even if it is not messed up per se, I still sometimes use calibre to sometimes edit metadata to tidy them up. So that the author information between different books of the same series is the same, for example. "Banks, Iain M." for all the Culture books, rather than a wild mess of various different variations of the same name. I have also added missing pieces of information to help group books in my library etc.
It's a super useful tool. I just wish it didn't spam so many system notifications though.
If you don't have a Kobo, the file conversion is also a lifesaver.
I have one of the old Kindle e-readers, and it doesn't support epub, for example. It does support pdf, in theory, but the age of the hardware means any decently large/complicated pdf bogs it down something fierce.
Being able to use calibre to convert my books to a format it does support is nice.