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Comment by VvR-Ox | Hacker News Reader

I would not recommend this in comparison to Calibre.

Notion is a commercial product and I'm just guessing but probably vendor lock-in in the long run.

Also it seems to be focused on team work and not managing papers/books. So as good as using this you could also use any other wiki software or database to do this.

# Calibre - Has server solutions to host your library easily - Is made for managing books etc. - It's open source and has a big community as well as plugins (https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre)

Don't get me wrong here, Notion looks like a great product and in my opinion it could be the next big thing in project management if marketing keeps up and they can convince the right people.

Only thing I really dislike about Notion so far: - It's not Open Source :-p (I'd love that)

For other things I'm sure it's awesome.

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As a fan of notion I agree with your post.

That said, Calibre is awful imo. I would recommend looking into Polar Bookshelf (open source): https://getpolarized.io

Thanks for the recommendation - I didn't know Polar and will definitely give it a try.

What do you think is awful about Calibre?

Cannot speak for the OP, but from my POV - dear $DEITY, the UI is bleeding awful. And so is the experience of using it. Yes, it gets the job done, but it falls far below the standards of any polished product.

For some, it is worth it, because it provides an OSS way to deal with audio books. To others, who care about UI/UX - well, it provides an OSS way to deal with books.

Does Polar support audio books, .epub files, etc? My impression is that its mostly intended for .pdf files and HTML pages, and isn't meant to be a drop-in replacement for Calibre at all.

With that said, the annotation support and integration with Anki both look like really cool features.

[Edit]

Yeah, after downloading, it appears that Polar only supports .pdf files and HTML pages. I tried to add .doc[x] and .epub files, but neither appeared to be supported. Additionally, Polar uses cookies and data collection for usage statistics and doesn't support disabling them.

I don't see how this app is even remotely a replacement for Calibre and certainly doesn't solve OP's problem; it does have a nicer UI than Calibre though, if you can excuse the large and uncloseable (bright gold) banner asking for monthly donations that takes up the top of the desktop app.

i don't work for notion, but all notion pages fyi are markdown underneath and export is supported out of the box.

Although that's nice I don't believe it has everything I want from an export.

Many services who provide an export don't consider that one might actually use the information without the app again.

So it would be great to not only be able to save some loose documents but also to keep relations etc. intact.

I know that this is not easy to achieve but it would be awesome and give you real freedom.

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