New in Calibre 6.0
calibre-ebook.com
calibre-ebook.com
I must admit, I'm slightly shocked at some of the comments here. Kovid puts in an extraordinary amount of work (nearly 80 hours a week) into Calibre - of which most is for free, in the name of open source software. Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the mobileread forums will also know him as a remarkably intelligent, dedicated, and all-round fantastic guy. He's very patient and kind with beginners, responsive to feedback, and rarely loses his cool with anyone. His only 'crime' was being blunt with a bug report around eleven years ago, and I'm struggling to see why people are so myopic as to turn that into their entire perception of him. Add to the fact that he eventually fixed every bug in that thread as well as second-language difficulties that he likely experiences, and the vitriol that people have for him is undeserved.
The proof of the pudding is Calibre itself, which is a joy to use. It is hands down one of the most useful programs on my computer. It's rarely buggy, fast, logical to use, very feature-rich, and rather customisable. I'm perplexed as to whether some of the people in this thread and I are using the same software. It's very easy to set up, as all you do is either point to a pre-existing library of files or create a new one. Adding books is trivial, as is editing metadata, and the reader itself is splendid. That's really what most people need out of e-book software, but Calibre really does go above and beyond any e-book software on the market right now. The only close competitor is Foliate, which is not cross-platform like Calibre, and even then it simply lacks many useful features that I rely on with Calibre, despite having a much cleaner UI.
But yes, I frequent the MobileRead forums and by and large he's responsive and helpful.
BTW, if we don't have to use software written by people we don't (or won't) like when we know everything they did or said, I bet we'd have to shutdown our phones and computers and never turn them on again.
Here's something from 2018: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9#issuecomment-41...
Foliate is a much better reader IMO, but Foliate cannot do everything Calibre can. Calibre, on the other hand, can do everything Foliate does.
Calibre is much more than just an eBook Reader. Foliate is a very good (the best for computers, maybe? I don't know how it pales agains Apple Books) eBook reader.
It's pretty essential for getting things onto the devices that I actually use to read, though.
Extraordinary amount of work does not guarantee extraordinary quality or results, not even ordinary quality.
> Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the mobileread forums will also know him as a remarkably intelligent, dedicated, and all-round fantastic guy.
Reads like a working para social addiction. Anyway, whatever qualities one has, doesn't matter. One can be nice, and still fail at important things. Those things actually happen all the time and somehow people are always surprised and defending.
> The proof of the pudding is Calibre itself, which is a joy to use.
Opinions are very divided on this part. And as someone who had several hard problems over the decade, including multiple data loses, I'm very far from calling it a joy. It's useful, and if you know your way around the flaws it will also not a harsh experience, but a joy it was never for me.
So maybe it is most honest of me not to try and answer that question in this context, and instead say that this is an excellent question to ask of anyone using value implicitely in these sorts of discussions.
There is no widely accepted definition of value in conversation. Even the very concept of "value" is inherently subjective.
Anyone who tries to use such words in an argument is just appealing to their own feelings, pretending they have an "objective argument". For some reason, it feels manipulative to me.
Only as a reader. For everything else? Not at all.
I've used Calibre for a very long time now and when my kids finally got Kindles they started using it as well.
I couldn't care less what pointless debates others may have with Kovid. He is very helpful, very active in the forms, and constantly updates this software.
many opensource projects become abandonware, but Kovid continues to pour hours and hours into this.
Cross platform usage alone is impressive. it works the same on my Mac/Linux machines as it does on the kids Windows machines.
Maybe he has been "rude" at times, but who hasn't? let's not let a few instances of him losing his patience cast a shadow over the incredible work he has done for many people.
I support him regularly. Consinder doing it as well if you appreciate the app. Go to https://calibre-ebook.com/ , there’s a support link on the top right.
[1] This is the forum dedicated to Calibre https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166
I just wrote it today and still need to package it. I was tired of alt+tab + up arrow + enter constantly to execute builds etc. in my terminal. It calls out to a kitty wrapper script I wrote[1] that (eg) queries kitty for its running windows so that when I launch from vscode it can find the right kitty window for the vscode workspace and execute there...
Point is, Kovid Goyal is awesome and the extensibility he wrote into kitty makes all that possible. I didn't know he was also the author of Calibre for a long time.
That said, being unkind to otherwise civil users is never OK.
Edit: the interview (in Spanish) https://calibre.softonic.com/articulos/entrevista-a-kovid-go...
Calibre is one of those excellent pieces of software that shows free and open source can sometimes be better than commercial software. My only gripe with it is that it is updated so often [sometimes it seems almost weekly] and every update involves visiting the site and downloading the whole app again. In-place auto-updates would be nice.
I use Calibre along with Calibre-Web [0] to make my library available online, so I can always grab one of my books to read on my phone, whenever I'm stuck somewhere, thumb-twiddling. I have an rsync... command aliased in my terminal. So every time I add new books to Calibre on desktop, I just type that in a terminal and it's immediately synced to my online library.
[0] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
PS: Top marks also to Calibre Dev for actually spelling the name of the app properly. It gladdens my heart no end to see the occasional piece of proper English flotsam still afloat on the massive tide of online Americanisms.
UPDATE: Dammit! --just downloaded and Calibre 6 is OSX 10,15+ only. Another piece of software leaves me languishing, as I stick with Mojave. On the plus side, I'll no longer have to worry about the huge updates I was complaining about above!
Its “job” is not well-defined. I read electronic books almost exclusively (for prose fiction; art and equations are a different bag) since 2008 or so, and never saw any point in it beyond format conversion.
It does format conversion very well. The command-line converter requires a running graphical session for some reason, though.
I feel like I’m missing something every time Calibre comes up. People seem to love it, but I just found it confusing and unnecessary when I dealt with it.
For the Kobo Libre, I can indeed see a mounted volume, but copying a file into it does not consistently make that book available for reading.
Given I don't have these problems when I use Calibre, I'd definitely say it makes my life easier.
What do you mean by the device itself - how does a device show up on macOS?
For me it's basically a way to use two plugins and occasionally fix a book cover. It's a bit bloated IMO.
That's a very important distinction.
Contrary to music, I consume my ebooks on one device: my e-reader. My laptop, phone and tablet are terrible for reading. Why would I need my ebooks on my phone or tablet.
The only thing I do want, is to process my annotations on my computer. Which calibre cannot do (but a python and bash hack does provide me).
For reference materials, textbooks, comics, and other image heavy and laid out precisely books, I almost exclusively prefer PDFs and only read them on my tablet.
If it's a book with almost zero images, like most fiction, how they're laid out doesn't matter, and I enjoy the ability to read anywhere on any device. I've never found the need for an e reader and regularly switch between my tablet or phone. Reading comics on the phone isn't for me, but there are a lot of people that don't mind it.
And a file manager doesn’t track which books of mine are synced and which are not. Calibre does.
A file manager does not make it easy for me to correct the ebook’s metadata so it appears properly on the ebook reader. Calibre does. Calibre will also automatically download metadata for you from a variety of sources (with many options for the level of automation, including individual review with diffs from the existing metadata).
Calibre also makes it trivial for me to create a web server so I can access my books from any device from anywhere.
Calibre will also track which books I’ve read and which ones I haven’t. Which a file manager won’t.
Calibre also makes it possible for me to read the books on my computer itself before I sync them to my device.
Calibre will also automatically convert my book to a different format depending on the device I’m syncing to, something a file manager won’t do either.
Only if you make them. Have been pretty simple for me. I don’t do most of the things you mention, and do not see myself wanting to.
I do use Calibre for conversion (through the command-line ebook-convert tool, wrapped in a script that converts and mails to Kindle in one operation). I don’t use different devices, to “automatically” does not mean much.
That's not how it works. Each device and firmware has its own way of doing things. For example, I would have no idea how to build "ebook groups" on my reader, but I don't have to worry about that because Calibre knows how to do it for me. Creating those by hand would likely involve a third party tool or XML/other structured text format editing, which would be annoying.
> I don’t use different devices
That's your setup. Another person may have three readers, for whatever reason. How would you keep track of it then, and would it not be easier to just hand over things to Calibre for automatic synchronisation?
> That's not how it works. Each device and firmware has its own way of doing things. For example, I would have no idea how to build "ebook groups" on my reader
That would be you making it complicated. What are you all doing with your Kindles that needs multiple levels of organization?
> How would you keep track of it then
Keep track of what?
A Kindle Keyboard 2 is completely different than a Kindle Oasis 3. The file format they use is different (they've changed formats a few times in the last 13 years,) the software is old enough on the Keyboard 2 that it's fundamentally quite different, etc.
This doesn't even preclude other e-reader companies existing which further complicates the setup. What if your old Kindle dies and suddenly none of your scripts work anymore because the new Kindle is just subtly different in how it works? What if you suddenly hate the Kindle ecosystem and want to switch to Kobo?
>Keep track of what?
Having more than one e-reader? This is not an uncommon case, honestly.
I still don’t understand “keeping track”. So you have several readers, there are books on them, you read the books. Calibre does not sync notes or reading position anyway (and certainly not wirelessly), as far as I know.
The point is that even in the same line of readers, there are subtle differences. Replace "formats" with "ebook groups" if it somehow makes it easier for you to understand that different readers have different ways to do things.
> I still don’t understand “keeping track”. So you have several readers, there are books on them, you read the books. Calibre does not sync notes or reading position anyway (and certainly not wirelessly), as far as I know.
Uh, yes it does: http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/showthread.php?t=296205
And if you have thousands of books and multiple devices, keeping track of what's on each device and which format is best for the device gets messy. It's not a hard concept to grasp.
Sure. Yet the underlying activity (reading) is not complicated.
> Uh, yes it does: http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/showthread.php?t=296205
I opened that link and skimmed it. There is a whole thread of people there who can’t get their reading position synced using Calibre.
> And if you have thousands of books and multiple devices, keeping track of what's on each device and which format is best for the device gets messy.
I don’t see a reason to track that, and think you are inventing a use case where there isn’t any. People are obsessive, though, and will spend countless hours tracking things for no benefit when given a tool to do so.
Calibre comes from a period in the '00s where people did a lot of this sort of metadata tracking and cataloguing. There used to be a whole class of applications to track your physical library (with barcode scanning &c; I remember Delicious Library), physical CDs, … All are now dead. Music collection managers are barely alive.
There is very little point in maintaining a “collection” of digital stuff you did not create and do not plan to use. Your beach reading is not it.
There are very useful parts of Calibre — formats, device profiles, the plugin ecosystem. Sadly, it is not particularly modular in terms of workflows (which is the underlying cause of this whole discussion), yet has become a standard platform for all community efforts into deDRM &c.
It's a webserver, file manager, sync client, transcoder/converter, RSS reader, metadata manager all in one.
With all possible regards and respect to the author, I find calibre a terrible mess. It does a lot of things, none of which very well. And the one thing that I want it to do, it doesn't. Not reliable or not at all. I want it to give me access to the ebooks I buy online.
This isn't calibres' fault, but the industries'. DRM, incompatible formats pushed by tech giants. But in the end, all I want is a way to see, reference and sync the books that are on my Kobo with my (Linux) desktop.
A python script, A proprietary Kobo app over wine, some bash scripts and a well kept directory achieves this. But calibre doesn't. Though it can read RSS feeds.
We'll keep using Calibre
There's a term in Portuguese for a crying baby that's held to a breast but who continues to cry, without even trying to suckle; it's what came to mind when I read your original comment. It's not used for flattery, I'm afraid...
> This isn't calibres' fault
The software doesn’t do everything.
…but you really only want it do something else, that’s not possible.
So it’s bad.
This is a very difficult position to defend:
There is software, free, maintained as a labour of love, that others like. …but it doesn’t do the one thing you want.
So it’s categorically bad and a mess.
That’s the sort of entitlement that makes open source developers quit. :(
My point was this: calibre does a lot. Many things only tangentially related to "managing ebooks". Yet it doesn't do some obvious things that are clearly part of managing ebooks. Like, managing ebooks.
That is criticism towards the model, not the software. It criticizes the lack of polish and lack of focus that many FLOSS suffers from. "Do one thing and do that well" is what I prefer. As opposed to a kitchen sink of plugins, an ever wider spread of use-case half-covered With, again, emphasis on the I.
For example, for end-to-end ebook creation or editing, I would probably download Sigil. But for the majority of e-book edits that I do (generating or fixing a broken Table of Contents, correcting the odd typo here and there, looking at the CSS rules that are causing the book to display weirdly on my Kobo, etc), Calibre's e-book editor is fine.
Dude. If you're a woman and you make jokes about how women should be at home cleaning not being engineers, it's not "fine", it just makes you a dickhead. Even if you're a woman. The same goes here.
If you work an open source, that doesn't give you a free moral entitlement to tell other people their work is crap, should have more features, should have the one feature you personally want for whatever reason.
You don't like it?
Too bad. It's not for you then. Don't use it.
Be respectful of others; the contribution they make, the effort they go to.
It costs you literally nothing.
I think the issue here is that your critique is way out of proportion to reality; Calibre is... fine. It's not great; but it does the job perfectly well for lots of people. It does lots of things. It does most of them fine. It does some well, some badly. I could say the same thing about the gimp. You come off as just having an axe to grind here for no good reason; and negative comments like this do cause people to stop contributing.
If you don't like it, just.. don't. use it.
I prefer to have an all-in-one application that does all this for me. My ebook workflow is not particularly demanding, so I let Calibre manage everything and don't maintain my own scripts.
Such a definition of "job not well defined" is just "IDE, but for ebooks" when seen from a different angles. People swear by IDEs for all kinds of reasons, convienience and integration first and foremost. You may not need an IDE, but I'll take it over rolling my own tools any day.
Yeah, and no free pony coming with each download either...
There are perfectly good Calibre extensions that do this. Given the legalities, it is not at all surprising that those extensions are not written or maintained by the main Calibre developer, and not included with Calibre. But they are easy to find and install.
In fact I'd bet money it it would be less useful and less productive and much more forbidding to users.
If you don't need it, then don't use it.
That exists, proprietary. In floss it exists for CLI only.
I'm upset that it keeps accumulating features. I understand why. I understand others need those features. But what upsets me is that this "eats" a lot of energy, which now isn't spent on simpler, easier, cleaner or friendlier FLOSS alternatives. I spend that time. On tools for ebooks that I opensourced.
But alas, the most common response to my efforts is people telling me that I should instead spend that time and effort building additions for calibre rather than trying to gain traction on some alternatives. The same most common response people working on e.g. Krita face: wasted time, improve Gimp instead.
Thanks, Pietro.
I do agree I could live without it but files tend to accumulate and putting books in collections help.
All of this would be much easier if the kobo was dumber and just created shelves/collections based on folders.
It also does a lot of database management ie; for Kobo, inserting things into the Kobo database, where schemas have varied over time etc etc.
You can of course just copy paste files as a baseline and it'll work.
Even including an occasional article, 'thousands' is very impressive.
I bounce between books a LOT. I don't read daily or anything and no speed reading skills but I'm usually reading 5-10 at a time and I fall asleep to audiobooks.
This is a book - book 1 of 3 That book - book 2 of 3 There book - book 3 of 3
There's more to it but that is the gist of it. It's awesome.
Calibre makes it simple and the books appear properly on the device. And it can fix metadata on books downloaded from the internet. That's the main reason I use it. Add in the fact that it's a nice management tool for seeing all my books at once and I'm very pleased with it.
The Calibre conversion CLI tool is easy to run though. A bit unfortunate I can’t do it in an SSH session from my phone.
One aspect of working with digital books I haven't solved yet is syncing bookmarks and highlights across devices, or making them easily searchable. I'm sure there's a plugin or tool which makes it easy, yet I just haven't found it yet.
It has a web interface, and you can deploy it using a container. The killer feature for me that Calibre itself lacks is that has over the internet syncing with the native Kobo firmware. You essentially trick the Kobo into thinking it's calling home to get ebooks from their servers, but you're accessing your own instance of Calibre-web.
This makes my workflow of adding a new ebook as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.
Wow, sounds really nice, you got my attention! My stack to achieve the same result is a bit more complicated: I installed KOreader on my device, and it can read calibre's OPDS catalog feed. KOreader has some other niceties that I enjoy, mostly wallabag support.
How do you trick the native kodo firmware? Does it work outside your home network?
There's a plain text config file on the Kobo's memory and one of the config options is the store URL. CW generates you a new one tied to your local CW account in your instance and you replace the standard URL. You can do multi user stuff that way. You can also define a "shelf" and only books on that shelf will sync if you wish, handy if you have a large collection or a small memory Kobo.
The guide on setting up the Kobo sync feature is here: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio...
You just change the API endpoint in some file in .kobo on the device.
> Does it work outside your home network?
If you expose calibre-web publicly, sure. In my experience it takes a bit of effort to do that right, but it's doable.
Its wiki is fairly good and usually answers all the questions I have: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio...
Your sibling comments have not mentioned or alluded to any such flaws. Do you have criticism to share?
And to add my complaints to those of other commenters, hosting the library on another computer or network share is not supported, and you can't use an external DB provider e.g. MySQL.
(If anyone recalls old .NET "One Click" updaters, where you can just dump new versions into the right folder structure at a URL and the updater does the work of checking for new versions, the Store can now check similar folder structures if you'd prefer that way to manage updates instead of uploading updates directly to the Store.)
I think its more Developers don't realize their distrust of the OS is the problem today. Users are mostly happy with the Store, when they can find things on it. It is Developers that still don't like putting things on it, or have weird distrust issues with the Store, which is the issue now.
The whole point of a package manager is having one place to do all the updates/installations.
But this multi-billion $ company can't use it's clout and complete control over their OS to enforce one good way of installing/updating software.
Many of the developer complaints about the Store have been the times Microsoft has even hinted at trying to use their clout to move every install/update to the Store. You can find all sorts of yelling and arguments here on HN and elsewhere about Microsoft's various S Edition and S Mode projects over the years all the way back to Windows 8.
Talk about moving to one package manager to rule them all on Windows pushed Valve to return to work on Steam OS and moving to Linux for their freedoms. Talk about moving to one package manager sparked Epic creating the Epic Game Store to bulwark their sales freedoms.
Developers seem to love the freedom to build a million terrible auto-updaters no matter what their users actually want and go crazy every time Microsoft even mentions the idea of a user-friendly single package manager edition/version/mode of Windows.
Not even the Dropbox integration does this yet with sideloaded books, though. I think KOReader might be the only one that has pulled it off so far.
question is that, how safe this is? I need add https and a strong password, is there a docker for that?
(edit: found the link to set up reverse proxy with docker): https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/calibre-web
Such as?
I do admire this optimism and good faith. But no... many will not have ported until users start complaining that X plugin no longer works. Expect a few more months.
And I already had ways to search within contents of my books via "HoudahSpot" (an excelent MacOS tool that uses Spotlight search to sift through all my files and present the results in a tabular view), or via command line using `mdfind` [2]
[1] https://jtra.cz/stuff/lisp/sclr/assoc.html
[2] For example searching all PDF files for a certain keyword:
mdfind "kMDItemKind='*PDF*' && kMDItemTextContent='*tree-traversal*'" | grep -Ev "Mail|Library" | sort | lessI prefer it on my android phone, because it is one of the few that does true black as standard.
Enable the Calibre web server, then use KyBook to connect to it and download the books you want while on the same network as the Calibre server. You can set up a public URL if you want to access them remotely
I can't fit my library on the phone so haven't even thought of syncing the whole thing.
[0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/344271/books-autom...
I have "download new purchases automatically" on.
It's incredibly cumbersome to set up for even the most basic, common tasks that everyone wants to do. He's forced to release constant updates because he refuses to separate the news processing code from the main application code (the processing "recipes" should be separately distributed) and worse, there's no auto-updater, so keeping the application up to date is a pain in the ass. The UI is outdated, hostile to users in general, and not low/impaired-vision friendly (six icons in the standard main toolbar all look virtually identical save for very minor differences, and Goval loves different shades of grey, reducing contrast.)
Last but not least: it's almost exclusively developed by one person (a problem by itself for such a large and widely used project) who is infamous for being at best abrasive and at worst an asshole - and not a particularly good programmer. The commit history is an absolute mess to try and navigate because he seems to have "save" and "commit" confused.
Edit: the very link itself is a perfect example of how Goyal seems to have zero awareness or care for others. Why do I have to click to expand text items in release notes? And he says that some plugins are no longer compatible because of the switch to Qt6. Which ones?
(I'm not commenting on the specifics of Goyal at all; I don't know about their situation.)
It is easy to criticize, but it takes a toll to fix books in ebook processing. I had to do some minor ePub work and I was like „WHAT, that’s the standard? This can’t be right“ but yeah the formats are trash and complicated. To be dedicated over a decade to fix and develop software is hard.
I have an Android phone and an iPad. The only cross platform solution I've found for syncing reading position between those ecosystems is Google Play Books, but they don't really like large PDF uploads and epubs sometimes fail. It feels kind of gross uploading my own books to Google and having them track that information and would like to remove them from my reading habits. Calibre-Web has been mentioned in this thread and seemed like a good solution, but apparently doesn't support saving reading position.
Is there any solution that lets me read the same book on my phone and my tablet and keep them in sync?
https://www.gutenberg.org/ | The classic source for free ebooks
https://standardebooks.org/ | Sources hosted on GitHub
Others?
I'm glad to see that development continues, this has been an utterly essential tool as I've switched between different ebook readers over the years.
Yeah, it's not some pretty mainstream app. But managing media files of any kind is a power user / nerd activity. Frankly it's a relief to to have to help people out with their completely fucked iTunes anymore. Personally I use Calibre for ebooks, and Swinsian (and tools like MP3Tagger). Ideally I'd have some sort of app that was like classic file-management-only iTunes but instead of iPod syncing, it would be a Plex or similar server for music and video.
Here's another worldview-shaker: You log into something. You don't "login" to something.
Note: I'm not seeing the release available on the website, but it's available in the Github repo.
Simple is beautiful. It's also not that hard to use.
Now that Books was finally added to Mac OS, I've put all of them in there so I can sync collections across all my (albeit Apple-only) devices.
Calibre doesn't fall over. Instead, it happily and quickly sorts and searches and downloads metadata, and syncs to my Kindle (converting formats if required in the process).
It's the most un-Mac-like program I use on my Mac, certainly, and some days I might even describe it as ugly or unfocused, but there are literally no alternatives that work nearly as well, and there's something to be said for that. And "unfocused" just means it has a lot of features I don't need, but other people may rely on those features and not need the features I use.
Edit: I know on the download page it says "Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below."
But that is bad advice. If you want a recent package, then use a distro that frequently updates it's packages. Most people using distros with ancient packages, (Debian, Slackware) _want_ it that way!
If it's OK, you should be able to read any non-DRM'd file of most formats by right click > View > "View with calibre e-book viewer".
You can also try any other ebook reader by clicking the "Configure Calibre" icon to open the Preferences dialog. Under "Behavior" find "Use internal viewer for" and uncheck the file format. Then when you right-click > View > View, Calibre will use your OS default viewer for that file format.
If you have DRM'd files (such as from Amazon), you will need a plugin to remove the DRM. The best way to find these is to look on https://www.mobileread.com which is a good place for Calibre discussion in general. I used to know how to do the Amazon ones but it's been a while, there might be a new way by now.
Really very useful.
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert....
We did have to add special cases for font sizes on Windows, because auto-sized fonts looked like shit there, whereas on Mac they looked fine.
Apple silicon support is ace, startup times on my M1 Pro have improved immensely from >6s down to 1s.