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Comment by mattkevan | Hacker News Reader

Calibre is great. There’s a real lack of good quality ebook software and Calibre is an essential do-everything toolkit.

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.

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Calibre's UI is an artifact from a superior and more civilized time, IMHO

Extremely functional and just a little bit incomprehensible. Compared to modern UI/UX which just slaps me with how stupid it thinks I am

It reminds me a bit of something you would find running on solaris in the 90s.

> 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.

Both things can be true - a person can prefer a more complicated and feature rich UX, while most people prefer a simpler UX that doesn't provide as much control.

You can definitely have a simple to use UI that still has all the same complex functionalities of an esoteric one. The more advanced features will just be more hidden away. To me, the only real advantage to an esoteric UI like calibre is the ability to do things faster and easier once you have learned it.

But honestly, for that i prefer a CLI.

And yet, Facebook app is actually more complex (and arguably, chaotic and ever changing) UI - but she handles it fine. So does everyone.

Im sure she could do it with detailed screenshots and instructions

Can we have apps for smart people?

Yes, why did the world have to stop making apps for power users? Why can't both groups coexist?

Because the lifecycle of a modern startup is:

- 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.

Sure, emacs or CLI?

Or Blender, or the GIMP, or FLStudio, or AutoCAD, or Visual Studio, or Lightroom (Classic), or Filezilla, or Photoshop, or or or or...

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

I earnestly think it's motivation and there's this societal pressure that software "is too hard." Just like your mom can use the Facebook app just fine. I have trouble using it, I'm worried anything I type into a box will turn into a public post with notifications going into everyone's inbox, and I've also mostly avoided it for over a decade. My grandmother over a decade ago figured out how to buy a webcam, install it, and use the software when grand kids were born.

> Extremely functional and just a little bit incomprehensible.

lol, that is what everyone should aim for (I'm not being sarcastic).

spoiler; most users are stupider then that ui/ux thinks you are.

> The interface, however, is like some incredible piece of outsider art, gloriously free of best practice, convention or accepted wisdom.

That was a wonderful way to put it. Excellent writing.

The UI is not the only weird part of it, probably the least weird one.

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.

If you're on linux, check out Foliate. It's everything you're asking for :D

Not really. As soon as I've launched Foliate the second time it shown me the list with the previous book I've read. I don't want a viewer to maintain any state (besides the settings) between uses.

Any recommendation for a similar tool for Windows? The integrated Calibre reader is... Special...

Sumatra can open many formats including epub, but some epubs may not look as good, also check Adobe Digital Edition.

What's the benefit over just converting to html and using a browser? As far as I know epub is just html anyway.

Mostly; the structural information is in a mix of XHTML and various XML schemas. Conceptually it's more like that weird "HTML archive" format that IE used to do back when, but considerably more complex, and much less terrible thanks to being a W3C standard and not MIME-encoded.

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's among the reasons why I actually dislike ePub and prefer to convert (which involves pandoc/calibre + some hand-written scripting and hand-editing) epub to FB2 (which I love, it only has some minor imperfections). FB2 is a well-structured straightforward single-file XML designed with data-presentation separation in mind.

I can see the appeal, but that's not an option for me right now, since EPUB is on the input side of the project that's had me studying the relevant standards in the last few days.

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.

This is off topic, but I found a recent comment from you just so I could thank you for recommending Free Radical a little while ago. I never even played the game, but the book is excellent on its own.

Okular can open ebooks. Maybe it does what you want.

Okular's my favourite PDF reader -- I install it even on Microsoft Windows machines I have to use -- but it doesn't read .epub or .mobi files unfortunately.

I'm pretty sure it does for me. I think it's probably a package that it uses. I'll check tomorrow and let you know.

Hot dang you're absolutely right - I'd never discovered this package before:

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!

> okular-extra-backends

> 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).

Yeah, it's well hidden - I'm sure I've looked for okular support for mobi & epub a while back, mostly because 'ebook-reader' that comes with calibre is a bit pants.

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).

I agree the UI is confusing. However, I'm glad Calibre exists, solves my needs, and is so versatile. And in the end, I decided the confusing UI didn't matter all that much. I'd rather they* spent their efforts in improving stability and features rather than making a fancy intuitive UI -- assuming of course you can't have both. If you can have both, all the better!

*I'm never sure if Calibre is a one-person effort. If it is, more kudos to the author.

This is the best attitude I’ve ever seen in a rebuke of a poor interface. I wish I treated every criticism this way.

It's obviously a labor of love. Sort of like a house that was built by someone's grandfather ... also subject to grandfathered building codes. :)

I’d really love a post that just analyzed this take.

This is how I feel about the Libby app for iPhone. What is it with book apps? https://twitter.com/bendansby/status/1334717731925417986?s=2...

I'm genuinely curious to hear any specific changes you might make. I'm a librarian and I can say that Libby was a huge improvement in usability over the Overdrive app and we spend much less time on basic user support now. There are weird quirks for me as well, but I'm always hard pressed to say exactly what I would change.

It is a huge improvement over the low bar set by Overdrive. I use Libby everyday with my children and I think my three complaints are:

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.

Re. 2 I just checked: for the currently selected library, it shows you what looks like curated content from the library, to enable you to pick up on things that you might not necessarily do when just interacting with the app with searches and etc.

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