Calibre – E-Book Management
calibre-ebook.com
calibre-ebook.com
Calibre 5.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24586455 - Sept 2020 (267 comments)
Calibre 4.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21156482 - Oct 2019 (302 comments)
The Calibre Content Server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14568146 - June 2017 (140 comments)
Announcing Calibre 2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8212885 - Aug 2014 (98 comments)
Calibre version 1.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6271090 - Aug 2013 (121 comments)
Calibre and Project Gutenberg: Liberate Your eReader. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3750807 - March 2012 (18 comments)
The interface, however, is like some incredible piece of outsider art, gloriously free of best practice, convention or accepted wisdom.
As a UX designer it gave me some trouble at first, but now I’ve genuinely come to appreciate it. There’s no way the interface could be ‘improved’ by conventional standards of aesthetics or usability without losing the thing that makes it special in the first place.
1. Filtering and categorization can be confusing: I have a difficult time finding books that are age appropriate for my daughter and available. I end up memorizing favorite authors as that is easier than the filtering.
2. The four buttons at the bottom are… interesting? The “library card” button the second from the left does… what exactly? I have never really understood the purpose of that button or why it is shaped like a card.
3. Figuring out how to exit a children’s book that is read “within” the libby app is inconsistent. I can never figure out how to reliably call up the UX to exit or change books.
*I'm never sure if Calibre is a one-person effort. If it is, more kudos to the author.
Extremely functional and just a little bit incomprehensible. Compared to modern UI/UX which just slaps me with how stupid it thinks I am
Because most average users of any software absolutely fall in that bucket. My mom can use the Facebook app on her phone just fine, but I wouldn't even dare to suggest that she try to convert an eBook on Calibre and transfer it to her Kindle.
But honestly, for that i prefer a CLI.
- Deliver a minimum viable product, maximally optimized for signups ("growth")
- Work on it until you can brag about a nice, consistent, exponential growth curve
- If you haven't run out of money and burned by this point, you get acquired and win the startup lottery
- The product gets shut down
There's no place in this lifecycle to develop a product to its full potential.
And while you might think that the above obviates my argument, when was the last time something new came out? All the best software we have nowadays is old, designed before current standards
lol, that is what everyone should aim for (I'm not being sarcastic).
What I miss are first-class attachments (i.e. code archives and CD/floppy images) support, raw file naming (without automatic romanization of non-ASCII alphabets), flat storage (without creating a separate folder for every book). Using a Calibre-managed library from outside of Calibre (i.e. on a PocketBook reader) feels quite unnatural.
Another thing I always wanted is a simple viewer app without library management features. Like Adobe Acrobat Reader but for ePub and other book formats. The Linux app closest to this concept also comes with Calibre (Sumatra does the job on Windows). All the other book viewers I've seen insist on maintaining your library.
The .epub file itself is just a zip archive. You can open it that way and pull the HTML content out, if you want, although it may be a pain to work with absent some kind of conversion - I think Calibre can linearize an epub into a single HTML file, but I haven't actually needed to do that so can't say for sure.
That said, it's not the worst standard, if a little bit overcomplicated by trying to be all things to all people with a bunch of features I suspect are almost never actually used in the wild. Having the content already formatted as XHTML is really convenient for what I'm doing with it, too.
okular-extra-backends
Includes support for mobi and epub, as well as TIFF, CHM, Markdown etc. Weirdly the .epub and .mobi are quite slow to open compared to PDF, but I'm happier now for the suggestion to go hunting for this - thank you!
> Includes support for mobi and epub
Curious. I didn't know that was there.
> as well as TIFF,
The last time I've tried it didn't seem to support multi-page TIFFs
> CHM
Very curious. Never seen a good alternative CHM viewer (although seen apps advertised as such numerous times).
Must have been quite a while back, I guess.
On Debian unstable I'm seeing okular-extra-backends (as mentioned) along with packages for ODP and ODT, as well as an okular-mobile package (postscript, dejavu, DVI, comic books, fictionbook, Plucker, etc.
I've just tried this with an Asterix comic in .cbr format - no joy.
Works a treat with a Deadpool .cbz file though.
For CHM, and I've not [ found / been forced to acquire for want of a better format ] any of those since 2008, kchmviewer is pretty fine (I'm a KDE user so it fits nicely, though like most KDE apps it only wants some KDE / QT libraries to run on your preferred DE).
That was a wonderful way to put it. Excellent writing.
I spend most of my time in Calibre just managing my library or converting ebooks between formats (particularly if I'm pulling ebooks off my Kindle or Kobo to strip their DRM). When I want to test whether the conversion was successful, the built-in ebook viewer is there. It's not great, and I wouldn't use it over some dedicated programs to read an entire book, but it gets the job done.
Then there's that rare occasion in which I might actually need to edit an ebook, because the ToC is broken or I spotted an annoying typo that I feel compelled to fix. And for that, the e-book editor tool is more than capable. Again, maybe it's not ideal (I've never tried producing an e-book start-to-finish through it), but for some quick edits, it just works.
There's alot to be said for UNIX philosophy and fighting bloat, but sometimes having everything you could conceivably need for a given purpose in one well-maintained program is comforting.
I actually like this approach in general and I often wonder why there's so much animosity towards it. There's something about platform-like software like Calibre, or Emacs or WeChat where it becomes more than the sum of its parts that you just don't get with just a collection of disjointed, individual tools.
Every time this kind of UI comes up in discussion, I feel like there is always someone groaning about how much extra effort and cost is involved with giving the user too many options. In fact, you could say that modern software seeks to eliminate all noncritical optionality. Combine this with gobs of pointless whitespace, an inexplicable need to humanize pretty much everything, and smother the user in unnecessary feelgood emotions...
And then people wonder why modern apps suck so much...
Modern apps don't suck. Specific design patterns suck. Not all things modern adhere to those design patterns. Not all the patterns you mention suck.
If I were hiring you to design an interface, your aversion to "humanize pretty much everything" would kick me right off the list. It reeks of tech-saavy elitism.
Could you give some examples?
I would, however, love to be at the forefront of an anti-design movement that rightfully crushes the monotony/monopoly of modern UX
And what is wrong with tech-savvy elitism? Are you saying I should just forfeit the lifetime I've spent obsessing over this stuff to have an edge up on life? Give in to the tyranny of walled-garden and cloud-hosted nonsense?
A half-dozen well integrated mediocre tools is better than the sum of its parts, but that doesn't mean it's better than a half-dozen not-at-all integrated excellent tools.
A half-dozen pretty good tools that are well integrated is going to be excellent, but you'll still have some greybeards saying "I have to click through 12 menus to frobnicate the widget in this thing, while my old tool I could do it with a single command"
99% of "Integrated tools" fall more into the first category than the second, which makes sense; N non-integrated tools can have N parallel teams working on them, while an integrated tool cannot. This means each tool will get only a fraction of the effort in the integrated tool; it's a special case of Conway's Law.
Even as a developer (not a UX designer), whenever a client suggested, up-front, there should be a "power user mode" I would ask, "Is there such a thing as a power user or just someone with Stockholm Syndrome who hasn't found a better app yet?"
Well, there obviously shouldn't be. There should be one mode, and that's the power user mode :).
More seriously: power users aren't born, they're made - made through repeated exposure, if the software leaves them the space to grow in.
I disagree, and that's why I generally do not use Calibre, despite being an ebook aficionado. ...I already have my own ebook organization management. I'd like a good ebook reader, and I'd appreciate some of the surrounding tools, but Calibre's monolithic design isn't useful in my case.
It seems like even running the plain ebook reader takes a while because it's doing some callbacks to the larger program? Okular is a better fit for "a program that reads ebooks", but unfortunately has some really buggy handling with a number of books I've seen.
> I already have my own ebook organization management.
Calibre is an e-book management software with a reader for convenience, it's not geared towards reading.
It boils down to database and robustness. Filesystem and OS have their particular way of how it manage the files. And sometime when the file are being used and when calibre try to modify/something to the file, it can lead to unpredictable situation such as data corruption. And some OS sandboxed/isolated the app from ever touching outside of it own home directory unless explicitly permitted to do so. Sometime, it can be a permission weirdness. It is less variables for Kovid to worry and putting the software itself in control of the directory.
Also, another variable that Kovid don't have to worry about is between the keyboard and the chair errors. Users does stupid shit with it and those management software are sensitive to sudden changes without the software's awareness. Sure, you can set the path to find it again (it can be a pain for some), it didn't mean everything is jolly good. Some will force itself to rebuild the database to ensure it accounts for every bit of data. Those softwares are THAT particular and I can understand why.
Zotero does the same thing (and they preferred it), but Zotero does allows users to decide where it should be. Shoko Desktop/Server preferred their own but does allows users.
And the biggest advantage of calibre's approach is that its library only exist in single directory. You can move the folder itself without worrying the data corruption.
More people should support him; Calibre has been extremely high quality for years.
(not to be confused with the terminal software of the same name that runs in Windows.)
`ebook-convert` does exactly that.
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/de/generated/de/ebook-conve...
ebook-convert mybook.epub mybook.mobi
No, it doesn't. Eventually people learn to use it, and everyone is happy that way.
I find Calibre is not a tool to "enjoy" spending time on, but simply a tool to solve something specific so that I can then spend time on my Kindle.
There are other tools where I want to enjoy the time I spend using them (say, text editors, paint programs, IDEs) but Calibre is not one of them.
1. I can't figure out how to change the styling of the book viewer. 2. Whenever I search, then try to hit backspace to modify my search terms, it tries to delete the first search result.
There is nothing at all about the Calibre interface that needs to be the way it is. What's so interesting is the way it apes an old version of iTunes, one which nobody would've considered the pinnacle of UX, and still manages to complicate and bury things in unexpected places.
There are well-documented user interface design guidelines to follow, both vendor specific and general ones made by experts like Jakob Nielsen.
Well-designed user interfaces lend themselves to user experiences where the learning curve is low, not steep, sometimes coming close to flat.
The only excuse I can fathom for those who prefer the learning curve be as high as possible or never be lowered is resentment that their own efforts to scale the same mountain of learning the UI themselves.
I call that technical elitism. It says “I worked hard to learn how complicated interfaces work, everybody else should be held to the same expectation”. No, they should not.
If and only if the author(s) feel they have time and energy to spend on this, then that's ok. But no forks and no wasted energy, please!
I'd rather they spent time solving bugs and improving/adding features.
Completely self explanatory UIs don't exist. In the olden days they required manuals. Now we have online help and google at our fingertips, fortunately.
Unlike jokes, UIs are not an end unto themselves. I'm more than willing to accept a somewhat ugly or cumbersome UI if the underlying tool is as good as Calibre.
If we ask for a better user interface, it pays to be sure it is actually an improvement.
Seems like a needlessly complicated way to do it when the books have series metadata, so props to Calibre for the extra work to support that!
A great discovery for me was that Calibre can convert to KEPUB (subset of EPUB tailored for Kobo readers).
For example, when it converted the book Futu.re, it replaced all instances of "ft" with a blank space. While reading the book my brain has been interpolating over words to "fill in" the "ft" -- for example, when I read "a er" I know the word really is "after."
I don't understand all the ins-and-outs of e-book conversion, but I figure it might have something to do with the font processing. Aside from these occasional glitches, I am a very happy Calibre user.
More information about ligatures can be found on the Internet.
"Important: Don’t use Calibre to transfer the kepub file! Calibre will apply its own conversion on top of our own conversion, making for strange results" from https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks
I always used Calibre to convert normal epub files to kepub format, to be able to zoom images and other things that the Kobo doesn't do with epubs.
I didn't know I could also get kepub files from somewhere else.
By default Calibre didn't recognize Standard Ebook kepub files as anything other than a regular epub which caused it to reformat it (poorly) when sending to a Kobo eReader. It also prevented me from storing both the kepub and epub versions in my library.
There may be a better way but the workaround I use for now is to rename the kepub book files from .kepub.epub to .kepub which the Kobo eReader handles equally well. The downsides are that I have to remember to explicitly send the kepub format when I'm sending to a Kobo and I occasionally get notifications that there are duplicate book files in my library.
Kudos for your project.
Right now, I am trying to set up a scrapping the metadata from few sites in calibre (Import List plugin). Because LibraryThing, WorldCatalog and Amazon are usually scrapping for books. The thing is I don't know how to do XPath expression even I tried to read the guide. I couldn't understand how the hell it work. I can understand LaTeX, Homebrew, Chocolatey, Bash, CSS documentation just fine, but XPath I am just dumbfounded.
Kind of irritating when you have Calibre in a cloud-storage folder and your books are also in the cloud storage, and it uses up your space with duplicates.
No, there is not, and never will be:
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#why-doesn-t-calibr...
Calibre's library is meant to be the place where you store your books.
I'm curious why you want to store a second copy outside Calibre. Is it because:
1. Calibre doesn't allow you to find books the way you want? (e.g. tagging doesn't have the all metadata you want)
2. You have other software (e.g. ebook reader software) that needs to read ebook files, and it's impossible/inconvenient to use Calibre's OPDS server for that purpose?
3. Some other reason?
> Why doesn’t calibre let me store books in my own folder structure?
> ... a search/tagging based interface is superior to folders ...
> ... much more efficient than any possible folder scheme you could come up with ...
Quite opinionated software. That and the quirky UI are reasons why I only use Calibre for a conversion or de-DRM here and there. Jump in, flail around until task done, fast exit.
I don't even like it if a program scans my existing files to form a database without affecting them; but as long as it's not too in-my-face I guess I don't mind it so much; as I can get rid of the software and its database whenever I like, and I wouldn't notice anything was different. But Calibre decidedly takes the opposite approach, so, as the link says, I decided it's not for me. There are many parts of Calibre that I thought I might find useful, but it would be tiring to fight against a software that actively tries to work fundamentally differently than the way I like. (And I did try it, but using it felt almost as frustrating as using much of Apple software; it's an agony unless you use it exactly the way they want.) That's why I don't have Calibre installed on my computer even just for those useful parts; I just found other software to do things I like. Which is sad, because as an ebook user I really tried to like Calibre, and I really thought I would because I tend to love software that people criticize as "ugly/not modern" and "too cluttered/bloated". If only those things came with a package that didn't make it its "mission" to get me "to stop storing metadata in filenames and stop using the filesystem to find things".
There's a lot of really old software you probably use anytime you are on a computer. can't forget all of that!
as an avid calibre user myself, yay there are dozens of us! :)
That is rather limiting in 2021.
Genuinely the best reading setup.
KOReader gives me a great experience, sans the privacy violations, and with an incredible amount of additional control over the device. I love it.
Ok so the interface looks like it was made in the 90s. But I don't know where I'd be without Calibre.
I have no idea what the other 100s of buttons do in Calibre.
Getting really sick of the Goodreads/Amazon interfaces and lack of quality recommendations.
So I will install AlReader for sure.
Personally the only times i have used Calibre is the opposite of that: i used it with books i bought on Amazon to remove the DRM and convert them to epub so that i can read them on my mobile phone using my favorite ebook reader app (and also keep my own offline copies of course).
I did not mean to imply it has no legal use. However stripping DRM and converting is not one of them. It's a form of copyright infringement as well, depending on where you are. I'm not sure how 'calibre has nothing to do with illegal copying' is very credible at this point.
The only acronym i've heard for ERP is "Enterprise resource planning" so i'm not sure how that was relevant... and still am not because even searching in Google about what the acronym means all i get is definitions and explanations for "Enterprise resource planning".
> However stripping DRM and converting is not one of them. It's a form of copyright infringement as well, depending on where you are.
It isn't illegal where i am (and FWIW i do not even see it as unethical at all, if anything i consider DRM more unethical) but that is moot since what you originally wrote was "downloading ebooks illegally" which is what i responded about.