Calibre · a guide
Your Calibre library, on a shelf.
A lot of libraries live in Calibre. Here are the four ways one gets into Tomen, what each costs, where each works today, and what Tomen reads out of Calibre’s own files along the way.
Add the folder
Open Tomen, choose Add, then a folder, and pick your Calibre library folder. Every book in it is copied onto your shelf, covers and all, and read like any other title. This is the plain route: the files come along, and nothing needs an account.
Calibre shortens filenames to 31 characters, so two long titles can end up with the same name on disk. Where that happens, Tomen reads the metadata.opf Calibre keeps beside each book and gets the real titles back.
Keep it in Dropbox
If your Calibre library folder is in Dropbox, point Tomen at it from Settings › Sync. The whole shelf appears, sorted and searchable, and nothing downloads until you open a title: a 3 GB library is a few megabytes on the phone. Open a book on one device and it downloads there; the rest stay where they are.
The connection is read-only. Tomen can’t move, change or delete anything in your Dropbox, and it never uploads a file anywhere. Add books in Calibre as you always have; Refresh picks them up.
Calibre’s content server
In Calibre, open Connect/share › Start Content Server. In the Tomen app, choose Connect a catalog, pick Calibre content server and paste the address; Tomen finds the catalog feed from there. You browse the library from the shelf and download a title when you open it.
This route is for the apps: the Android app on Google Play, and the desktop app, which is on the way. A browser can’t reach a private server on your own network, so the web app doesn’t offer it.
Watch the folder
The desktop app can watch your Calibre folder directly. The titles appear on the shelf and open straight off your disk, with nothing copied and nothing uploaded. Refresh picks up anything you’ve added since.
What Tomen keeps from Calibre
- Titles, from
metadata.opf, where Calibre’s shortened filenames would otherwise leave two books with one name. - Calibre’s own book IDs, so a rescan of the same library sees the same books rather than duplicates.
- The books themselves, exactly as Calibre stored them. Tomen writes nothing back.
Not carried over: Calibre’s tags and collections. Tags in Tomen are its own, and part of Plus.
Open the reader Everything else Tomen does
Free to read. Tomen Plus is $49, once, with a 30-day trial and no card.