Tag: Calibre

I recently installed Calibre using their binary installer for linux, and found out that it doesn’t come with .desktop files, so Calibre doesn’t appear in the GNOME menu. To remedy this I installed the following desktop files in ~/.local/share/applications/ (modified from the Debian Sid package):

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=E-Book Viewer
Comment=E-Book Viewer
TryExec=/home/user/.local/calibre/ebook-viewer
Exec=/home/user/.local/calibre/ebook-viewer %F
Icon=/home/user/.local/calibre/resources/images/viewer.png
MimeType=application/x-mobipocket-ebook;application/epub+zip;
Categories=Office;Graphics;Viewer;

and

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Calibre
GenericName=E-book library management
GenericName[de]=E-Book Bibliotheksverwaltung
Comment=E-book library management
Comment[es]=aplicación para la gestión de libros electrónicos
Comment[de]=E-Book Bibliotheksverwaltung
TryExec=/home/user/.local/calibre/calibre
Exec=/home/user/.local/calibre/calibre %f
Icon=/home/user/.local/calibre/resources/images/lt.png
Categories=Office;Database;FileTools;Viewer;Qt;
MimeType=x-content/ebook-reader;

You may need to adjust the paths for TryExec, Exec and Icon to match where you installed Calibre.

You can do it with Calibre and specifically with the ebook-viewer program that comes with it. However, for some reason the packagers didn’t ship a desktop file to accompany it, so you can’t just double-click on eBooks and have them opened correctly. This can be corrected by placing a ebook-viewer.desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Ebook Viewer
Comment=Display .epub files and other e-books formats
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Icon=calibre
Exec=ebook-viewer %f
StartupWMClass=ebook-viewer
MimeType=application/x-mobipocket-ebook;application/epub+zip;
Categories=Graphics;Viewer;