Skip to content
OpenSourceSoftware.ai

Personal & Lifestyle

An open-source alternative to Adobe Digital Editions

calibre is the one project in our catalog listed as a replacement for Adobe Digital Editions. It is entertainment software with 26.3K GitHub stars. Below is how it measures against the questions people usually ask first.

calibre

Entertainment

Organise, convert and read your ebook library on your own computer.

calibre keeps all your ebooks in one library on your own computer, with the details you need to find any book quickly. It converts books into the format your e-reader needs and sends them to the device for you. It is free and open source and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

  • Converts books from formats such as DOCX, PDF and HTML into EPUB, AZW3 or MOBI.
  • Includes an ebook viewer with highlights, bookmarks, search and read aloud.
  • Content server shares your library with phones and tablets through a browser.

What people use it for

Organise a large ebook collection

Drag book files into calibre or use the Add books button, then download metadata for them from the internet. Edit metadata for one book or many at once, and use saved searches, full-text search, the tag browser and virtual libraries to find books quickly. The cover grid and bookshelf views give a visual overview of the collection.

Send books to an ebook reader

Connect the reader and wait for calibre to detect it, then select books and click Send to device. If a book is not yet in a format the reader supports, calibre converts it first. The welcome wizard sets calibre up for your reader the first time you start it.

Read your library from a phone or tablet

Click Connect/share and choose Start Content server, then open the address and port shown, port 8080 by default, in a browser on your home network. The browser viewer works with taps and swipes and remembers your reading position across devices. On a server without a desktop, run the standalone calibre-server program and turn on user accounts with --enable-auth.

26.3K starsGPL-3.0PythonLatest release 8 days agoWebsite ↗Full profile →

Fact checklist

The same questions the pages with more alternatives let you sort by, answered for calibre.

  • Does not meet: Permissive licence (MIT, Apache, BSD)Licence: GPL-3.0 (copyleft)
  • Open-source licence (copyleft or permissive)Licence: GPL-3.0 (copyleft)
  • Released in the last 90 daysLatest GitHub release Oct 23, 2026 (8 days ago)
  • Does not meet: Gaining stars this weekNot enough star history yet to tell
  • Written in PythonMain language on GitHub
  • Does not meet: Recommended in a stackNot in any of our stacks yet

Data from GitHub and our catalog. Every listing is hand-approved. List prices are what the vendor publishes, not a quote, and self-hosting has its own running costs.