calibre
calibre (always spelled lower case) is a tool to manage your e-book collection. It can organize your e-books, convert them to different formats (for instance EPUB to MOBI), and copy them to an e-reader like the Kindle.
You can get versions of calibre for Windows, Linux, and the Macintosh. calibre comes with many Linux distributions. If you're using Windows or the Mac you can download it here:
The most useful thing calibre can do for us is to create a quick and easy website for publishing an e-book collection.
To do this all you need to do is add all your e-books to calibre using the Add button, correct the Author and Title information as needed, and open the Preferences dialog shown below:
Push the Start Server button on this dialog and you're in business. The website will be at your computer's IP Address, port 8080 (or whatever port you choose). The website will look like this:
The e-books in the illustration are all MOBI, because I'm using calibre for my Amazon Kindle. However, the book server of calibre can serve any book format that Sugar supports, including Plain Text files, EPUB's, PDF's, DjVu's, RTF's and CBZ's.
If all you need to do is publish an e-book library on a local network calibre is the only software you need to look at. In the next two chapters we'll look at some other options that require more technical expertise but may be better suited for advanced needs.