Calibre – New in Calibre 7.0(calibre-ebook.com)
calibre-ebook.com
Calibre – New in Calibre 7.0
https://calibre-ebook.com/new-in/sixteen
137 comments
Calibre is seriously good. I used their cli tools for a project, and it just chews through weird ebooks and metadata without a hitch or a glitch
Calibre is outstanding - really one of my most important research tools. Fulltext search over the content of an entire library is a killer feature. I maintain a couple of hundreds books in PDF format and sync them automatically with a Samsung tablet.
Version 7.0 crashes on my Ubuntu 23.10, unfortunately. Had to return to 6.29.0.
Version 7.0 crashes on my Ubuntu 23.10, unfortunately. Had to return to 6.29.0.
Wait, full text including into PDFs? I didn't know that, that's really big!
Yep! In the search field above the library window, press the "FT" button on the very left. You have to create the index the first time you use the feature. It takes a while and from there on new books are indexed automatically.
FT search has word and phrase search, boolean operators and NEAR search abilities. And there is a really cool match list, giving some context of the match before you actually go to it in the PDF file.
You cannot search across libraries, though.
FT search has word and phrase search, boolean operators and NEAR search abilities. And there is a really cool match list, giving some context of the match before you actually go to it in the PDF file.
You cannot search across libraries, though.
Note: AS far as I know, Calibre does not do OCR, so a PDF with only scanned content will not work.
I've had good luck using Tesseract [0] for scanned PDFs. If you're not CLI-inclined, there are several GUIs for it available [1]. I have had good luck downloading scanned PDFs from archive.org and running them through Tesseract.
Did not know about Calibre for this - I was relying on opening each search and searching it individually.
[0]: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract [1]: https://www.opait.com/tessstudio/
Did not know about Calibre for this - I was relying on opening each search and searching it individually.
[0]: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract [1]: https://www.opait.com/tessstudio/
OCRmyPDF is a tool using Tesseract, specifically designed for PDFs. I would recommend that over pure Tesseract.
https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
I recommend running any such PDFs through OCRmyPDF.
https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
Oh, lol, I never knew that.
I created a script that dumped my library of 1000s of books to .txt and then grepped them.
I created a script that dumped my library of 1000s of books to .txt and then grepped them.
If you want even faster search across different formats, you can try ripgrep-all ( https://github.com/phiresky/ripgrep-all ). It can search across epub, docx, pdf, zip, mp4 etc. If you are handy with the tool, you can write custom adaptor to search across images using OCR with tesseract.
If you run it from the terminal you can see the error. For me on 22.04 it was missing a dependency:
sudo apt install libxcb-cursor0Yess, thanks! Stupid me.
Installer is also hinting for the missing dependency now before installation.
Installer is also hinting for the missing dependency now before installation.
Could you tell me what software you are using for syncing?
I am using "Calibre Sync" on Android (Payware: US$ 5,49 and worth every penny).
For viewing/annotating on Android I use Flexcil.
For viewing/annotating on Android I use Flexcil.
Why not just use something like syncthing? Does it offer more advanced features than just syncing files?
> Does it offer more advanced features than just syncing files?
Yes! Covers, Metadata (searchable and including custom columns and comments), reading progress, filters (important for me: tags), different layouts, virtual views.
And it can use the full text search of Calibre (but only when connected to the Calibre content server).
Yes! Covers, Metadata (searchable and including custom columns and comments), reading progress, filters (important for me: tags), different layouts, virtual views.
And it can use the full text search of Calibre (but only when connected to the Calibre content server).
I utilise zotero for this. Was unaware that calibre could do this; the search bit.
Curious on "as research tools" - do you use it to manage research papers?
Great news, time to do another donation.
I use calibre as well and it's excellent. The only thing I think should have some attention is the awful interface.
That’s the first thing I always check and think about when I see an update. It’s an amazing tool otherwise though.
Yes I cringe whenever I see the logo. I use it too and it works well enough but it’s so inelegant.
I wish visual designers involved themselves more in open source development.
If you meant the splash screen when it starts up, this can be turned off in the settings.
Otherwise the core app's UI looks fine to me personally, though some of the plugins make some, unusual, choices.
Otherwise the core app's UI looks fine to me personally, though some of the plugins make some, unusual, choices.
The UI is a mess of buttons and menus strewn about everywhere. I'm not complaining, Calibre is a great project, but let's not kid ourselves that the UI is even mediocre.
Use an icon pack, and it is very likely it has something different already there for Calibre. I use candy icons, and I like the Calibre "logo" in this icon pack.
The last thing anyone needs is “visual” “designers” shitting up our useful applications.
Stick to your todo list apps and stay in your lane.
Stick to your todo list apps and stay in your lane.
This is such an aggressive way of saying something unhelpful. Visual/information/interaction. design -can- be an important part of an app team. I also think calibre is clunky and many of their interactions inelegant. That it’s also ugly is not irrelevant - reading is or can be an aesthetic experience too. I’m grateful it exists but like Anki I really wish someone with real design skills could help them polish the rough edges - that would make it a pleasure to use rather than just ok.
Some designers are definitely terrible (e.g. whoever made the mind numbing decision to use hamburger menus in Gnome), but plenty are good at their jobs. Go and watch some Tantacruul videos on YouTube.
Meh. I find it charming. It's a product of passion not the product of hyper-optimised marketing designed to trick you into thinking it's good.
With a bit of fiddling, it can be quite elegant:
- dark theme and switch the icon theme to monstre
- remove toolbar buttons you don't use like help/donate/news etc. so that it's quite minimal and streamlined
- edit the ebook reader css to add some padding / line-spacing to fit your taste and use a font like Libre Baskerville
- no splash-screen
The preference pages remain a bit of a headache to navigate but it's not like you are fiddling with those too often and importantly, it does have plentiful configuration to do what you want.
And if you run into a problem, you'll probably get a response from Kovid faster than any company. Overall, thank you Kovid for years of hard work!
- dark theme and switch the icon theme to monstre
- remove toolbar buttons you don't use like help/donate/news etc. so that it's quite minimal and streamlined
- edit the ebook reader css to add some padding / line-spacing to fit your taste and use a font like Libre Baskerville
- no splash-screen
The preference pages remain a bit of a headache to navigate but it's not like you are fiddling with those too often and importantly, it does have plentiful configuration to do what you want.
And if you run into a problem, you'll probably get a response from Kovid faster than any company. Overall, thank you Kovid for years of hard work!
Would love to see that upstream!
Thank you! That looks so much better withh these changes. I couldn't work out how to do this one though:
> - edit the ebook reader css to add some padding / line-spacing to fit your taste and use a font like Libre Baskerville
Where/how do I find those options? I found other CSS in the Preference pages, but not the ebook reader css.
> - edit the ebook reader css to add some padding / line-spacing to fit your taste and use a font like Libre Baskerville
Where/how do I find those options? I found other CSS in the Preference pages, but not the ebook reader css.
1. Open an ebook (epub/mobi etc.) in the viewer.
2. Click the top or hit escape to show the menu and open up the preferences.
My current settings are:
- Colors: off-white background and dark grey text - I tend to pick these per device given different brightness / temperature of the display
- Page Layout: margins - left/right: 100px, top/bottom: 75px
- Fonts: I get Libre Baskerville from Google Fonts. I believe I choose a different font on Windows because each OS's rendering is slightly different. For me it's a matter of getting the font-weight just right so that it's not oppressive to the eye, distracting or hard to read but just right and it's a combination of the font, colour, size and how the OS renders. My goal is that it feels like the words on the page just fall into my eyes without effort.
- Style: This is where you can write css. (complaints about how bad my css is will fall on deaf ears!) The hack job I have on this machine is:
Some ebooks have hardcoded styles that force ugly formatting. Fortunately Calibre lets you edit ebooks so you can just open them up and delete their custom css.
3. A few other things I remove are i) columns from the grid view like rating/publisher/series ii) categories on the left like language/format - I only use author/tags. Once you remove all the things you don't use, it's a neat minimal app.
2. Click the top or hit escape to show the menu and open up the preferences.
My current settings are:
- Colors: off-white background and dark grey text - I tend to pick these per device given different brightness / temperature of the display
- Page Layout: margins - left/right: 100px, top/bottom: 75px
- Fonts: I get Libre Baskerville from Google Fonts. I believe I choose a different font on Windows because each OS's rendering is slightly different. For me it's a matter of getting the font-weight just right so that it's not oppressive to the eye, distracting or hard to read but just right and it's a combination of the font, colour, size and how the OS renders. My goal is that it feels like the words on the page just fall into my eyes without effort.
- Style: This is where you can write css. (complaints about how bad my css is will fall on deaf ears!) The hack job I have on this machine is:
p
{
line-height: 1.5em !important;
font-size: 0.854em !important;
padding-bottom: 25px;
text-indent: 35.868px !important;
}
div
{
line-height:1.5em;
padding-top: 1em;
}
line-height: 1.5em;
Some ebooks have hardcoded styles that force ugly formatting. Fortunately Calibre lets you edit ebooks so you can just open them up and delete their custom css.
3. A few other things I remove are i) columns from the grid view like rating/publisher/series ii) categories on the left like language/format - I only use author/tags. Once you remove all the things you don't use, it's a neat minimal app.
You're talking about appearance, when Calibre's issue is almost entirely UX design. It's actively user-hostile software that is on a fundamental level not designed to do the things most users want to do.
Step a new user through setting up Calibre to do something as simple as syncing to a e-reader with the functionality a user would normally expect, like displaying/syncing their reading progress.
Or just watch Goyal tell a new user "you can't do that, use the builtin reader if you want reading progress synced, fuck off" and then a bunch of other folks get into the weeds describing the mess of plugins and shit you need to do it.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=296205
I managed to get my e-reader to sync reading position to Calibre but it required a lot of frustrating work trying to follow tutorials on mobiread...creating custom fields and code snippets and praying that the whole thing won't break some time in the future.
It's probably the single most commonly wanted feature for a user looking at an e-book library management tool. That and syncing to their e-reader's shelves.
God help you if you want to use Goodreads...
Step a new user through setting up Calibre to do something as simple as syncing to a e-reader with the functionality a user would normally expect, like displaying/syncing their reading progress.
Or just watch Goyal tell a new user "you can't do that, use the builtin reader if you want reading progress synced, fuck off" and then a bunch of other folks get into the weeds describing the mess of plugins and shit you need to do it.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=296205
I managed to get my e-reader to sync reading position to Calibre but it required a lot of frustrating work trying to follow tutorials on mobiread...creating custom fields and code snippets and praying that the whole thing won't break some time in the future.
It's probably the single most commonly wanted feature for a user looking at an e-book library management tool. That and syncing to their e-reader's shelves.
God help you if you want to use Goodreads...
People reading your comment would think that Goyal was actually super hostile to the user but the thread you linked doesn't seem nowhere as hostile as you claim it to be.
Truth is, Calibre is a hard project to run, the man has been doing it himself, and he is super responsive and helpful in forums.
Every thread about Calibre a has a comment like this shitting on Goyal based on one or two of his comments, and then there are some comments that talk about how helpful he is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32052669
Truth is, Calibre is a hard project to run, the man has been doing it himself, and he is super responsive and helpful in forums.
Every thread about Calibre a has a comment like this shitting on Goyal based on one or two of his comments, and then there are some comments that talk about how helpful he is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32052669
> God help you if you want to use Goodreads...
How could anyone support Goodreads seeing as their api is closed off? Thankfully calibre has the goodreads-sync plugin which still works as well as it does.
How could anyone support Goodreads seeing as their api is closed off? Thankfully calibre has the goodreads-sync plugin which still works as well as it does.
I was with you up until...
> watch Goyal tell a new user "you can't do that, use the builtin reader if you want reading progress synced, fuck off"
... which seems to be a quote that you just made up. I might be wrong (maybe you meant to link to another thread and mixed up your links, or maybe the link you provided wasn't supposed to actually be evidence for the quoted part), but it seems like not.
This is a horrible practice, and you should stop.* (It's actually against the rules on HN[1][2], but you shouldn't do it anywhere. It's lame.)
* Yes, even in circumstances where you profess to have no intent of misleading people and are just "paraphrasing"—that's not how paraphrasing works to begin with, and the person's own words should be sufficient[3] to indict if they are in fact sufficient to indict them.
1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13600284#13602947>
2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890551#15890822> (you'll need showdead turned on)
3. e.g. <https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/2011720#yui_3_10_3_1...>
> watch Goyal tell a new user "you can't do that, use the builtin reader if you want reading progress synced, fuck off"
... which seems to be a quote that you just made up. I might be wrong (maybe you meant to link to another thread and mixed up your links, or maybe the link you provided wasn't supposed to actually be evidence for the quoted part), but it seems like not.
This is a horrible practice, and you should stop.* (It's actually against the rules on HN[1][2], but you shouldn't do it anywhere. It's lame.)
* Yes, even in circumstances where you profess to have no intent of misleading people and are just "paraphrasing"—that's not how paraphrasing works to begin with, and the person's own words should be sufficient[3] to indict if they are in fact sufficient to indict them.
1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13600284#13602947>
2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890551#15890822> (you'll need showdead turned on)
3. e.g. <https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/2011720#yui_3_10_3_1...>
Screenshot?
Set "User interface style" to "system default".
Give thorium a try. Probably the best least bloated reader for windows there is. I guess on osx and linux too. I switched to it couple of months ago. Haven't looked back.
I used Calibre with my Kobo and while it made the Kobo so much more useful, the interface is somewhat complicated and gets worse as you add plugins. Didn't matter in the end because I stopped using the Cobo in favor of my phone (ReadEra is great in creating a good enough reading experience).
I love Calibre, and I am very thankful to the people who work on it. It's a shiny example of an open source project that creates a common good.
I just wish it didn't have updates so often. Since you have to do it manually, I feel that every time I start it, this little chore is imposed on me, without any reward. If you really must release updates at this rate for some reason, then I would say that an auto-updater that runs in the background would be a huge huge improvement to the overall experience.
I just wish it didn't have updates so often. Since you have to do it manually, I feel that every time I start it, this little chore is imposed on me, without any reward. If you really must release updates at this rate for some reason, then I would say that an auto-updater that runs in the background would be a huge huge improvement to the overall experience.
I update it with Brew on macOS and Scoop [1] on Windows (but I guess it is included in other package managers such as chocolatey).
Of course, a built-in auto-updater would be good, but a packaged version is a nice workaround for me.
[1]: https://scoop.sh/
Of course, a built-in auto-updater would be good, but a packaged version is a nice workaround for me.
[1]: https://scoop.sh/
It's also on the official microsoft package manager (winget).
https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
I think it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If releases weren't frequent people would have to build their own from the master branch. A system package manager makes updates really low friction. Ubuntu seems to be only a few months behind the upstream releases. IMO individual packages should not be reinventing the package manager wheel.
The main problem with Calibre is it's quite hard to package and many distros seem to have given up.
The main problem with Calibre is it's quite hard to package and many distros seem to have given up.
> If releases weren't frequent people would have to build their own from the master branch.
But why??? What in the world of Calibre demands such urgent updates? I use a variety of software (some quite complex) that do a great job with much less frequent updates. Why not Calibre?
But why??? What in the world of Calibre demands such urgent updates? I use a variety of software (some quite complex) that do a great job with much less frequent updates. Why not Calibre?
A big portion of what people use Calibre for is parsing, converting, and generating HTML. The epub file format, in practice, is zipped, poorly-specified and poorly-generated HTML. It is far from an exact science, and minor improvements to this can result in countless lives being saved slight amounts of discomfort from terrible HTML-handling or poorly-handled OCR.
To give an example, I once needed to reference a 2003 book that was out of print for a long-running project I was working on at the time, and the publisher who released it digitally had gone out of business, and the author's mailserver had gone dark. I checked the usual suspects for the PDF or hard copy of the book, but the only remaining copy of it I could find was a Calibre automated epub conversion from quite a few years in the past. A few years later, I once again looked for a better copy, only to find another Calibre epub conversion, but still no PDF in sight. This one, seemingly generated a few years later, was much higher in quality.
I was pleasantly surprised.
To give an example, I once needed to reference a 2003 book that was out of print for a long-running project I was working on at the time, and the publisher who released it digitally had gone out of business, and the author's mailserver had gone dark. I checked the usual suspects for the PDF or hard copy of the book, but the only remaining copy of it I could find was a Calibre automated epub conversion from quite a few years in the past. A few years later, I once again looked for a better copy, only to find another Calibre epub conversion, but still no PDF in sight. This one, seemingly generated a few years later, was much higher in quality.
I was pleasantly surprised.
The releases are frequent in part because Goyal refuses to separate all the content-based stuff (parsers for online news sources, for example) from the application.
This is an extra pain in the ass for users because if your favorite news site parser breaks, you have no choice but to upgrade Calibre itself instead of just updating a config file.
At a minimum the news-parsing stuff should have long ago been split out into a plugin. It has nothing to do with calibre's function as an ebook library tool.
This is an extra pain in the ass for users because if your favorite news site parser breaks, you have no choice but to upgrade Calibre itself instead of just updating a config file.
At a minimum the news-parsing stuff should have long ago been split out into a plugin. It has nothing to do with calibre's function as an ebook library tool.
This is something I often tell my friends who complain about Calibre: his project his rules. If you think there are genuine pain points you can address, fork it and make a better one no one is stopping you.
> This is something I often tell my friends who complain about Calibre: his project his rules.
It is hard to imagine that anyone would disagree with this. I certainly don't, nor did I say anything to the contrary.
> If you think there are genuine pain points you can address, fork it and make a better one no one is stopping you.
The only thing stopping me is common sense.
It is hard to imagine that anyone would disagree with this. I certainly don't, nor did I say anything to the contrary.
> If you think there are genuine pain points you can address, fork it and make a better one no one is stopping you.
The only thing stopping me is common sense.
The updates have nothing to do with news parsers. News parsers are loaded dynamically, every time they are used. So are metadata downloading plugins. So are get books stores. Indeed almost all code that parses data from the web in calibre is loaded dynamically independent of calibre updates. The calibre developer whom you so blithely complain about here actually jumps through a million hoops to make sure those bits of calibre remain backward compatible with version of calibre and therefore python, going back a decade and more.
I agree with you but I also think that calibre should have update patches instead of downloading and installing 100mb file every 2 weeks. Calibre comes with its own python it is mostly self contained so it would be great if we had a choice for downloading just an update patch. I don't think this is something Kovid has the time though he probably could do it. It's the same problem when he was not willing earlier to move to python 3 as the amount of man hours required vs maintaining Python2 for calibre himself was easier. But someone came along and started porting calibre to python 3 and Kovid used their help to move to python 3. So if a dev comes along with better way to update calibre Kovid will probably accept it but as it is not a priority for him he might not ever get around to doing it himself.
I don't have this problem because I just don't update mine very often.
I have to admit I've never heard a complaint about too frequent optional updates.
Sure, if you are forced to update. But if your Calibre ain't broken then just skip the update?
Sure, if you are forced to update. But if your Calibre ain't broken then just skip the update?
If it was security updates or features that I would like, then I'd want to update frequently. By having too many releases users will start skipping them, and then users aren't getting those important updates.
Realistically, Calibre should just integrate an update delivery mechanism such as Sparkle on macOS (not sure about other platforms), but sadly I think the developer has Strong Opinions and I can't see this happening.
Realistically, Calibre should just integrate an update delivery mechanism such as Sparkle on macOS (not sure about other platforms), but sadly I think the developer has Strong Opinions and I can't see this happening.
Forcing the option to be presented is also a problem. People aren't running the software to manage the software, they are running the software to read a book or whatever.
Right on.
That's a huge issue these days. We have to spend far too much time updating or upgrading software [1], figuring out why or even whether it is needed, (trying to) fix issues arising from all that, (trying to) roll back if we cannot solve those issues, having downtime on use of the software while all this is (mis)happening, and more.
[1] And what the heck is the difference between updating and upgrading, anyway? (I'm not interested in googling it. More busy work.) And who the heck is interested in the difference? Not end users, for sure. I have come across these two similar, hence maddening terms, in at least Ubuntu Linux distributions. Why can't they use less ambiguous terms?
And to top it all, I'm a techie. If I (and many other techies) have such issues, what to say about laymen, who are sometimes called "normies" by said techies and even by biztechies? I've actually heard or read both types using that term, disparagingly. The irony is that it only reflects on them, i.e. all of us in those fields, because the term implies that we are abnormal - with good reason.
End of rant.
I'll see myself out now, your tech honour (overlord).
;)
That's a huge issue these days. We have to spend far too much time updating or upgrading software [1], figuring out why or even whether it is needed, (trying to) fix issues arising from all that, (trying to) roll back if we cannot solve those issues, having downtime on use of the software while all this is (mis)happening, and more.
[1] And what the heck is the difference between updating and upgrading, anyway? (I'm not interested in googling it. More busy work.) And who the heck is interested in the difference? Not end users, for sure. I have come across these two similar, hence maddening terms, in at least Ubuntu Linux distributions. Why can't they use less ambiguous terms?
And to top it all, I'm a techie. If I (and many other techies) have such issues, what to say about laymen, who are sometimes called "normies" by said techies and even by biztechies? I've actually heard or read both types using that term, disparagingly. The irony is that it only reflects on them, i.e. all of us in those fields, because the term implies that we are abnormal - with good reason.
End of rant.
I'll see myself out now, your tech honour (overlord).
;)
I call installing new software versions "updating" because its newer, while "upgrading" implies things are improved, which is far from a given when installing software updates.
Good explanation. Date meaning time and grade meaning quality. I get it, thanks.
Yet another background daemon. No thanks. Update when you need to, it's not like it's mandatory.
I really agree. Update fatigue is a real thing. MKVToolnix is the same way, every single time I start it I am interrupted by an update dialog. Even the act of just dismissing it is a minor annoyance.
I would be happier if it just did it in the background while it was running like Chrome and Firefox. Download the update in the background and then silently install it next time the app starts. I don’t need another daemon running in the background at all times.
I would be happier if it just did it in the background while it was running like Chrome and Firefox. Download the update in the background and then silently install it next time the app starts. I don’t need another daemon running in the background at all times.
> Download the update in the background and then silently install it next time the app starts
and silently break something the next time you start an app? Better use some scoop package manager and update at your own schedule
and silently break something the next time you start an app? Better use some scoop package manager and update at your own schedule
>I just wish it didn't have updates so often. Since you have to do it manually...
Super easy on the Mac. No issues at all.
Super easy on the Mac. No issues at all.
I myself love the frequent updates but understand where you're coming from. Perhaps you can install/upgrade via your package manager, on macos at least homebrew has Calibre (and his other project kitty) available as casks.
I have Calibre installed via Homebrew and it still constantly pesters me.
I haven’t looked into it but I suspect the app is updated far more often than the cask.
I haven’t looked into it but I suspect the app is updated far more often than the cask.
Using Homebrew Cask for Calibre actually makes the problem worse because the download is consistently very slow for some people. For me, it took around an hour the last time I had it installed on my Mac.
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/issues/104814
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/issues/104814
Don't package managers solve this? Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I was under the impression that good package managers existed for all major desktop OSes. Surely Windows and MacOS aren't still in a situation where apps are expected to regularly check for updates and upgrade themselves, right?
For Windows, false, unless you install it through the "Microsoft Store"
Chocolatey exists and supports Calibre.
[deleted]
Updates are hardly mandatory. I heard advice on Mobileread a few years ago saying don't bother updating unless there's something you need, and I've often skipped several versions between updating mine.
always a join to update calibre. thank you.
I remember that Calibre 6 required plugin authors to update, so it was a 'breaking change' at the time. Anything similar with Calibre 7, or should plugins continue to work?
It looks like plugins work fine. I downloaded 7 and had three plugins that needed updating, but I think that was just a timing issue.
This is the same guy who wrote Kitty Terminal. Such a nice guy who keeps writing excellent software and giving it away for free.
A lot of people would disagree with this. I don't want to talk ill of anybody here but maybe you should keep an eye on both projects' GitHub issues for a while.
As for a great terminal from (IMO) a genuine nice guy, try wezterm.
(I do infact pick open source software based on how they respond to issues since I am likely to spend time interacting with them.)
As for a great terminal from (IMO) a genuine nice guy, try wezterm.
(I do infact pick open source software based on how they respond to issues since I am likely to spend time interacting with them.)
Kovid is super responsive and helpful on GitHub issues. His tone is not always friendly, but I guess you have to grow some teeth in todays open source world
He’s writing software for free. Providing full support for hundreds of issues is beyond reasonable. If there’s a breaking bug, it’s understandable if he will investigate, but nobody has time to investigate every single request. I’ve had my fair share of issues on my own projects and some people are too lazy to diagnose their own issues.
I'm a bit divided on Calibre. On one side it's very versatile and useful. On the other side had it so many data loses over the years for me, that it's disturbing, and I stopped using it regularly. I wish there would be a good robust alternative. But at this point Calibre is such a Moloch..
As a counterpoint, I've been using Calibre for 10+ years with hundreds of books and multiple libraries, syncing them across Windows and Linux machines (using Nextcloud), and I've never even once seen any data losses.
Of course is it not a common problem. Calibre wouldn't be so popular otherwise.
And some hundreds book's is not much, unless you change all of them at once. The probability of loses depends on the number of changes. One reason seems poorly implemented writing of data, and lousy communication of pending changes. At least it was the case 2-3 years ago when I last looked at this. But I guess, this is part of the questionable UI..
And some hundreds book's is not much, unless you change all of them at once. The probability of loses depends on the number of changes. One reason seems poorly implemented writing of data, and lousy communication of pending changes. At least it was the case 2-3 years ago when I last looked at this. But I guess, this is part of the questionable UI..
Why doesn't Calibre have a "real" app for iOS like Kybooks that can both render almost all formats relevant (epub+mobi+azw3+pdf+txt+rtf+(audibooks possibly and additionally but its also orthogonal in some sense structurally) and serve as the root folder/Library for all of them?
They have an app but it always tiptoes around doing exactly this! No servers or local server stuff or at least don't force people to have that preexisting structure in order to do a facile and intuitive things. Was the implicit act of competing with Apple's Books apps compelled against?
If they would do just that, they could have all the donations/money they would ever need
They have an app but it always tiptoes around doing exactly this! No servers or local server stuff or at least don't force people to have that preexisting structure in order to do a facile and intuitive things. Was the implicit act of competing with Apple's Books apps compelled against?
If they would do just that, they could have all the donations/money they would ever need
Several reasons.
It is a cross platform application in python using QT so is not really for mobile it even possible.
What you state as things it does not need are the things that it was designed to do - reading ebooks came along quite late (v 4 or 5).
Its original function is to convert ebooks between formats and store them in a common database.
It is a cross platform application in python using QT so is not really for mobile it even possible.
What you state as things it does not need are the things that it was designed to do - reading ebooks came along quite late (v 4 or 5).
Its original function is to convert ebooks between formats and store them in a common database.
I really appreciate your response altho I'm not sure the tenor speaks entirely to the fundamental points I raised. Like it or not, most people who use Calibre to convert books come to view it as a universal ebook library and I'm sure everyone would prefer it at least nodded to that reasonable association if not pivoted whilst retaining the commitment to its converter origins/current mandate. I kinda wish we could "have it all" and I'd have zero issue putting my money towards that end
It seems ridiculous to leave that continuity, user-friendliness, and money on the table out of some insistance on never departing from what they essentially are inextricably tied-to and associated with as a manner of household awareness if I might be so bold as to suggest they have reached a degree of ubiquity when it comes to the digital ebook experience
It seems ridiculous to leave that continuity, user-friendliness, and money on the table out of some insistance on never departing from what they essentially are inextricably tied-to and associated with as a manner of household awareness if I might be so bold as to suggest they have reached a degree of ubiquity when it comes to the digital ebook experience
I am confused by your comments.
I read them as asking why Calibre does not provide a renderer as the main thing but provides other things that people don't need.
My comments are that calibre is designed for the things you say people don't need and the renderer on Windows/Mac/Linux is an afterthought and due to its architecture it can't run on mobile devices why KyBooks etc are designed for.
I really don't understand the point you are trying to make.
I read them as asking why Calibre does not provide a renderer as the main thing but provides other things that people don't need.
My comments are that calibre is designed for the things you say people don't need and the renderer on Windows/Mac/Linux is an afterthought and due to its architecture it can't run on mobile devices why KyBooks etc are designed for.
I really don't understand the point you are trying to make.
I guess I just feel like one grows to consider it like the iTunes of ebooks that also converts, and that there's a workflow that it lends to where you've downloaded your book, you need to convert it to work on all your relevant devices and the respective format, have a bookshelf type interface or whatever your preferred view , be the main books app, and allow for syncing a library via cloud.
I don't know if I'm saying this well but I think the main ideas are here.
I don't know if I'm saying this well but I think the main ideas are here.
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre
I just noticed that Calibre is referred to as an eBook manager, which is more in line with what I was talking about in some sense. All of that should fall under `eBook Manager`
I just noticed that Calibre is referred to as an eBook manager, which is more in line with what I was talking about in some sense. All of that should fall under `eBook Manager`
Kindle now accepts epub files directly. Why would you need this app anymore ?
Does it accept ADEPT encrypted EPUB?
Can you look at your library on a PC?
Can you use a non Kindle reader?
Kindle is a small part of its use.
Can you use a non Kindle reader?
Kindle is a small part of its use.
Directly directly, or "send epub to amazon via email for them to convert it and send it to your device"? Pretty sure it's still only the latter because we can't have nice things.
No idea if they're all Ferengi (DRM is good for business?) or there's an actual reason for them to not just support epub actually directly.
No idea if they're all Ferengi (DRM is good for business?) or there's an actual reason for them to not just support epub actually directly.
Because not everyone uses Kindle? Or Amazon?
7.0 seems buggy,can't double click to open files anymore,6.x worked well.
Works fine for me. I never read ebooks in Calibre, but occasionally open one to take a glance.
I don't mean to be ungrateful but I'd appreciate some competition for Calibre. The UI feels very dated to me and the functionality is pretty slow and awkward. But it's got such market and mindshare for open source e-reader software that there hasn't been much room for other folks to try something different. I guess there's a few epub readers (Sumatra displays ePubs, someone below mentions Thorium Reader) but I don't know of anything that Calibre does with maintaining a library of e-books in various formats.
Maybe have a look at Kavita or Ubooquity (possibly Komga, but that's more for comics)
https://www.kavitareader.com/
https://vaemendis.net/ubooquity/
https://komga.org/
https://www.kavitareader.com/
https://vaemendis.net/ubooquity/
https://komga.org/
Calibre can be a real pain in the ass to set up the first time. Everything from special extensions for certain devices to very specific configurations (which you definitely won’t figure out on your own without a guide) make the experience quite unpleasant. Once it’s up and running it’s… fine. I have a huge library and also long for a better alternative. Of course, this is free, and I try to be grateful for what we have.
It doesn't try to solve the same use cases that Calibre does, but I built an open source (EPUB only) manager / reader / statistics tracker called AnthoLume [0]. It mostly stemmed from me reading in KOReader [1] on my Kindle, and not having the ability to sync the progress to my iPhone / iPad.
It's got metadata matching, support for multiple users, and statistics tracking which allows me to have a "Leaderboard" that shows how fast you read (words per minute). Fun competition between my wife and I (that I'm 100% losing). It's a Progressive Web App and utilizes a Service Worker to support 100% offline reading as well.
There's a demo server [2] (creds are "demo" for both user & pass).
[0] https://gitea.va.reichard.io/evan/AnthoLume
[1] http://koreader.rocks/
[2] https://antholume-demo.cloud.reichard.io/
It's got metadata matching, support for multiple users, and statistics tracking which allows me to have a "Leaderboard" that shows how fast you read (words per minute). Fun competition between my wife and I (that I'm 100% losing). It's a Progressive Web App and utilizes a Service Worker to support 100% offline reading as well.
There's a demo server [2] (creds are "demo" for both user & pass).
[0] https://gitea.va.reichard.io/evan/AnthoLume
[1] http://koreader.rocks/
[2] https://antholume-demo.cloud.reichard.io/
This looks really cool!
I started getting into ebooks again after not using them for a few years. When I fired up my kindle it auto updated to a new version. Now it’s unable to run KOReader. If only I had changed my WiFi password in the past 5 years!
I started getting into ebooks again after not using them for a few years. When I fired up my kindle it auto updated to a new version. Now it’s unable to run KOReader. If only I had changed my WiFi password in the past 5 years!
If people find calibre slow, why not open some PRs to make it faster? Doesn't seem like a good argument for starting a new project.
I was confused on that front because its quite fast on Linux. Brief research on the subject suggested a few things.
Some folks have performance issues with VERY large libraries of 80,000 to hundreds of thousands of books which aren't experienced by people with more normal sized libraries of dozens to single digit thousands of books. There may be some room to optimize this case but to be fair this is an edge case.
On Windows antivirus can cause issues if the library directory isn't excluded. This is fairly out of scope and is just the general suck of using the Windows platform.
Mac users complained of general slowness. There may well be room for improvement in this area.
Sending to device may be slower than expected if sending involves either transmitting books over the wifi depending on the speed of the underlying connection or especially if sending requires conversion. It might be worthwhile in this case to enable conversion of books on import so as to obviate the need to convert many books at once later.
Some folks have performance issues with VERY large libraries of 80,000 to hundreds of thousands of books which aren't experienced by people with more normal sized libraries of dozens to single digit thousands of books. There may be some room to optimize this case but to be fair this is an edge case.
On Windows antivirus can cause issues if the library directory isn't excluded. This is fairly out of scope and is just the general suck of using the Windows platform.
Mac users complained of general slowness. There may well be room for improvement in this area.
Sending to device may be slower than expected if sending involves either transmitting books over the wifi depending on the speed of the underlying connection or especially if sending requires conversion. It might be worthwhile in this case to enable conversion of books on import so as to obviate the need to convert many books at once later.
For starters, both the developer and the code have, shall we say, a Reputation.
I haven't used Calibre for years (it was annoyingly slow on a low grade laptop), but I've dealt with many epub files, and I think Calibre does a bad job when modifying them.
It's easy to identify an epub that went through Calibre: there's usually a lot of junk metatada in the file. Not just a "contributor" tag or a custom "modified" timestamp, but dozens of empty json structures embedded in xml. And a (potentially empty) bookmark file. But what surprised me is that Calibre accepts to write metadata that is obviously wrong. For instance, a simple heuristic could detect when the user has confused the full name "Jane Doe" with its file-as form "Doe, Jane" and ask for confirmation. And after seeing many dates at "0101-01-01 ...", I suspect that was the default value in some version of Calibre.
I'm glad Calibre exists and that many people like it, but I hope a better software will emerge: safer, saner, faster, maybe prettier and easier to install.
It's easy to identify an epub that went through Calibre: there's usually a lot of junk metatada in the file. Not just a "contributor" tag or a custom "modified" timestamp, but dozens of empty json structures embedded in xml. And a (potentially empty) bookmark file. But what surprised me is that Calibre accepts to write metadata that is obviously wrong. For instance, a simple heuristic could detect when the user has confused the full name "Jane Doe" with its file-as form "Doe, Jane" and ask for confirmation. And after seeing many dates at "0101-01-01 ...", I suspect that was the default value in some version of Calibre.
I'm glad Calibre exists and that many people like it, but I hope a better software will emerge: safer, saner, faster, maybe prettier and easier to install.
> But it's got such market and mindshare for open source e-reader software that there hasn't been much room for other folks to try something different.
This contains the misunderstanding that merely by existing calibre "uses up" something like oxygen. This is true in a commercial product when there are a finite number of buyers whose money in turn funds a finite number of merchants efforts to bring a product to market.
In open source software users are finite but on average worthless except insofar as they constitute a funnel whereby some microscopic portion may in some instances become contributors but more often than not that funnel is virtually non-existent with contributions coming from the same small cadre of developers.
> The UI feels very dated to me
Perhaps the worst reason to make a different piece of software. Modern usually is synonymous with an oversimplified interface which shoves much functionality into a junk drawer and makes it easy to do some subset of easy things and hard to do anything else.
Although quite usable out of the box the calibre UI is also very customizable and trivial to figure out how to customize
- You can add or remove functions to right click menu or tool bars
- tool bars by default has both icons AND text and you can change the icons if you want something that looks more "modern"
- The default layout has a toolbar, search bar, list of books, info about the selected book, and a tag/author/series etc browser toolbar.
- If you were wondering how to change the layout there is a button on the bottom right that says "layout" alongside a colorful icon. If you click it you can choose a pretty cover grid view and hide both the book info and tag browser. Congrats it now looks "modern"
- not only can you set single character shortcuts because they only operate when the cursor isn't in a text field but the preferences menu for shortcuts makes it easy to search for a function by name in order to bind and the shortcut so chosen is shown by the function.
- It has a search that is both powerful and works exactly how you would think it works
For having a huge pile of functionality it is probably one of the most usable pieces of software I use regularly. It works in a fashion that suggests the author uses it and has thought a lot about what would make it easier to use.
I'm also a little lost at what slow means here as on Linux it like virtually every desktop app that isn't based on electron it responds instantly and briskly. Perhaps it works poorly on Mac?
This contains the misunderstanding that merely by existing calibre "uses up" something like oxygen. This is true in a commercial product when there are a finite number of buyers whose money in turn funds a finite number of merchants efforts to bring a product to market.
In open source software users are finite but on average worthless except insofar as they constitute a funnel whereby some microscopic portion may in some instances become contributors but more often than not that funnel is virtually non-existent with contributions coming from the same small cadre of developers.
> The UI feels very dated to me
Perhaps the worst reason to make a different piece of software. Modern usually is synonymous with an oversimplified interface which shoves much functionality into a junk drawer and makes it easy to do some subset of easy things and hard to do anything else.
Although quite usable out of the box the calibre UI is also very customizable and trivial to figure out how to customize
- You can add or remove functions to right click menu or tool bars
- tool bars by default has both icons AND text and you can change the icons if you want something that looks more "modern"
- The default layout has a toolbar, search bar, list of books, info about the selected book, and a tag/author/series etc browser toolbar.
- If you were wondering how to change the layout there is a button on the bottom right that says "layout" alongside a colorful icon. If you click it you can choose a pretty cover grid view and hide both the book info and tag browser. Congrats it now looks "modern"
- not only can you set single character shortcuts because they only operate when the cursor isn't in a text field but the preferences menu for shortcuts makes it easy to search for a function by name in order to bind and the shortcut so chosen is shown by the function.
- It has a search that is both powerful and works exactly how you would think it works
For having a huge pile of functionality it is probably one of the most usable pieces of software I use regularly. It works in a fashion that suggests the author uses it and has thought a lot about what would make it easier to use.
I'm also a little lost at what slow means here as on Linux it like virtually every desktop app that isn't based on electron it responds instantly and briskly. Perhaps it works poorly on Mac?
I'll bite.
> This contains the misunderstanding that merely by existing calibre "uses up" something like oxygen. This is true in a commercial product when there are a finite number of buyers whose money in turn funds a finite number of merchants efforts to bring a product to market[...]
You don't say it explicitly, but there's an implied "this is not true with open source software". I don't agree. I wrote about this a few years ago:
<https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan...>
If people think of a problem as solved or in the process of being worked on by competent minds, they're less likely to pledge their own minds to solving the problem.
> > The UI feels very dated to me
> Perhaps the worst reason to make a different piece of software.
Okay, I'll say it differently. Calibre's UI is bad. Forget "dated"—I don't think it even qualifies for the use of that word. Firefox 3's UI is dated. Calibre's UI is just bad. It has a bad UI, irrespective of trends.
When I first downloaded Calibre years ago after having heard people rave about it for a while, I thought there must be some sort of mistake, or a joke even. Calibre has a hilariously bad UI, minus the hilarity. And it wouldn't be quite so crazy if it weren't the case that there's clearly been a lot of effort that has gone into trying to make it do things that are bad. The animation effect that makes thumbnails "pop" is but one obvious example.
If Calibre were "Zotero, but specifically for ebooks", it wouldn't be on the receiving end of this kind of criticism.
> This contains the misunderstanding that merely by existing calibre "uses up" something like oxygen. This is true in a commercial product when there are a finite number of buyers whose money in turn funds a finite number of merchants efforts to bring a product to market[...]
You don't say it explicitly, but there's an implied "this is not true with open source software". I don't agree. I wrote about this a few years ago:
<https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan...>
If people think of a problem as solved or in the process of being worked on by competent minds, they're less likely to pledge their own minds to solving the problem.
> > The UI feels very dated to me
> Perhaps the worst reason to make a different piece of software.
Okay, I'll say it differently. Calibre's UI is bad. Forget "dated"—I don't think it even qualifies for the use of that word. Firefox 3's UI is dated. Calibre's UI is just bad. It has a bad UI, irrespective of trends.
When I first downloaded Calibre years ago after having heard people rave about it for a while, I thought there must be some sort of mistake, or a joke even. Calibre has a hilariously bad UI, minus the hilarity. And it wouldn't be quite so crazy if it weren't the case that there's clearly been a lot of effort that has gone into trying to make it do things that are bad. The animation effect that makes thumbnails "pop" is but one obvious example.
If Calibre were "Zotero, but specifically for ebooks", it wouldn't be on the receiving end of this kind of criticism.
Can you give examples of ways in which the UI is bad? and should be better implemented?
Also you can disable the little animation if you don't like it the preference is "disable animations" under look and feel.
Also you can disable the little animation if you don't like it the preference is "disable animations" under look and feel.
I just did. Let's start with acknowledging that. If you want more, then how about asking that way. Otherwise, one gets the impression that you're not really asking because you're uncertain but rather because it is easy to do so with very little effort (and just as easy to respond to whatever other examples you get with a declaration that none of them are actually any sort of problem).
You actually didn't
> Okay, I'll say it differently. Calibre's UI is bad > It has a bad UI, irrespective of trends. > Calibre has a hilariously bad UI, minus the hilarity > clearly been a lot of effort that has gone into trying to make it do things that are bad
This is just you saying over and over that its bad.
> The animation effect that makes thumbnails "pop" is but one obvious example.
To be more precise by default in the pane wherein is displayed the details of the currently selected book when you change the selected book there is a fraction of a second it goes through an animated transition.
A bad UI is one in which common tasks are unpleasant, confusing, or hard to accomplish. Not liking an animation appears to be an aesthetic judgement as is the notion that its interface is "dated".
Can you explain what is actually bad about calibre precisely?
> Okay, I'll say it differently. Calibre's UI is bad > It has a bad UI, irrespective of trends. > Calibre has a hilariously bad UI, minus the hilarity > clearly been a lot of effort that has gone into trying to make it do things that are bad
This is just you saying over and over that its bad.
> The animation effect that makes thumbnails "pop" is but one obvious example.
To be more precise by default in the pane wherein is displayed the details of the currently selected book when you change the selected book there is a fraction of a second it goes through an animated transition.
A bad UI is one in which common tasks are unpleasant, confusing, or hard to accomplish. Not liking an animation appears to be an aesthetic judgement as is the notion that its interface is "dated".
Can you explain what is actually bad about calibre precisely?
Thanks for making it clear that I would have wasted my time writing up a response had I been unfortunate enough to fall under the mistaken belief that you were asking in good faith.
michaelmrose(2)
Refer to the preceding comment. I gave an example.
Worthy of note the Calibre-Web[0] project, which builds atop Calibre library to provide powerful web interface. The project and its maintainer deserve some love and support.
[0] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
[0] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
I use calibre-web and love it.
It just recently got wifi kobo sync, which is pretty sweet too
I currently use the Amazon Kindle ecosystem extensively and love it. I am a little bothered by how closed off it is, however. Is there an open ecosystem that is just as good?
Where do you buy books? Are most books available or is the selection poor? Does it work with library apps like Libby?
Where do you buy books? Are most books available or is the selection poor? Does it work with library apps like Libby?
I used a Kindle for a decade, but then switched to a Kobo device (Libra 2) and I really enjoy it. Kobo is friendly to users modding the device, so you can easily install KOReader that is a superior interface if you read a lot of PDFs.
In spite of being an avid reader, I have never actually bought an ebook. All my reading comes from LibGen, Anna’s Archive, or their predecessor communities for free downloads. Consequently, I never suffered from Amazon’s ecosystem: as soon as I took any new Kindle out of the box, I put it in airplane mode and only sideloaded books over USB.
In spite of being an avid reader, I have never actually bought an ebook. All my reading comes from LibGen, Anna’s Archive, or their predecessor communities for free downloads. Consequently, I never suffered from Amazon’s ecosystem: as soon as I took any new Kindle out of the box, I put it in airplane mode and only sideloaded books over USB.
Perhaps not precisely what you’re asking, but there are simple ways to download the Kindle books that you paid good money for, and decrypt them to plain ePub or PDF using Calibre.
I was a kindle user and recently switched to Pocketbook. I’ve been buying new ebooks from ebooks.com which are often already drm free. For me, there haven’t been any downsides.
There are some options where you can buy DRM free ebooks listed at https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks
I use calibre to transfer ebooks and pdfs to my kindle on MacOS. I literally use no other features and from what I’ve seen it seems like it’s suffering from enshittification.
Right sidebar on GH has multiple ways to donate to this project: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre
It doesn't work on macOS 12, which is strange because even Apple itself still supports macOS Monterey.
If you use it, think about donating to the project. Please.
I just tried to launch Calibre. It nuked my Mac and I had to force a manual reboot - which is only necessary maybe twice a year or so.
After I started using Zotero, I found that I stopped using Calibre. Especially with Zotero's recent improvements, it serves as a decent replacement.
I've used Calibre for years and I like it a lot. It quite good for creating or editing e-books (oh the ghastly things you see if you look inside an e-book...)
The Calibre UX is fine. The real UX divide isn't desktops / laptops vs. smartphones / tablets, but rather content creators vs. content consumers. Modern UX is oriented to content consumers but even there manages to waste too much space and has become too flat and minimal. But once your application is at least partly for content creators, a dense interface is ideal and comforting.
I've haven't experienced any data loss with Calibre except when the e-book editor crashes while checking a book for errors. This has always been due to memory exhaustion (2 GB limit) when checking books that were unnecessarily complex (see “ghastly things” above).
SumatraPDF opens EPUBs almost instantaneously, but at the cost of not rendering every aspect correctly. As I recall the documentation is clear about this limitation.
I like the PocketBook app a lot and use it to read books on smartphones. But it has some basic rendering quirks; for example it can ignore margin-top and margin-bottom on paragraphs, seemingly because it does not apply CSS precedence rules correctly. It took me five e-mail exchanges, including sending a very simple hand-rolled EPUB illustrating the problem, to convince the developers that there is a problem.
The Calibre UX is fine. The real UX divide isn't desktops / laptops vs. smartphones / tablets, but rather content creators vs. content consumers. Modern UX is oriented to content consumers but even there manages to waste too much space and has become too flat and minimal. But once your application is at least partly for content creators, a dense interface is ideal and comforting.
I've haven't experienced any data loss with Calibre except when the e-book editor crashes while checking a book for errors. This has always been due to memory exhaustion (2 GB limit) when checking books that were unnecessarily complex (see “ghastly things” above).
SumatraPDF opens EPUBs almost instantaneously, but at the cost of not rendering every aspect correctly. As I recall the documentation is clear about this limitation.
I like the PocketBook app a lot and use it to read books on smartphones. But it has some basic rendering quirks; for example it can ignore margin-top and margin-bottom on paragraphs, seemingly because it does not apply CSS precedence rules correctly. It took me five e-mail exchanges, including sending a very simple hand-rolled EPUB illustrating the problem, to convince the developers that there is a problem.
I love Calibre. All I do is maintain my library on it, and a few extra Kobo things like backing up the database. There's more I could use it for, but don't really need to. Mostly I read books. Calibre helps tell me what I have or don't have. The UI is fine. Updating is fine. It's free, well-supported, and in my experience works fine on my M1 Mac (and it worked fine on Windows last time I used it as well. I've never installed or used it on a Linux machine).