Comment by addicted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by addicted | Hacker News Reader

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Most (all commercially available?$ebook readers are not as simple as that.

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.

So "it's job is not well defined".

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.

> I want it to give me access to the ebooks I buy online.

> 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. :(

I am an open source developer. I am familiar with the criticism. It's fine. Because a lot of software really is crap. Open Source is not a trait that suddenly makes software better.

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.

I actually think Calibre's kitchen-sink approach is great. By-and-large I don't really need the fifty things it does to be best-in-class. If it's good enough, then it's fewer UNIX-style utilities I need to download on top of my existing installation.

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.

> I am an open source developer. I am familiar with the criticism. It's 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.

Or fork it and implement your feature. Even make a PR if you really think that something the main product should have.

> 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.

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.

> 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. (...) A python script, A proprietary Kobo app over wine, some bash scripts and a well kept directory achieves this. But calibre doesn't.

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.

>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.

Yeah, and no free pony coming with each download either...

It's job is to manage your digital library of books. Are you upset that it has too many features? I just don't understand why you're debating.

If you don't need it, then don't use it.

I do need it. But what I prefer is something simpler that does one job and does it well.

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.

Some link to both proprietary and FOSS alternatives?

Thanks, Pietro.

You go write your scripts, maintain them, etc since you feel that's a superior option

We'll keep using Calibre

Why the snarky tone? I expect better from a debate on HN.

Just because you were civil in your expression of it doesn't mean that your opinion itself isn't in poor taste to communicate, especially for someone involved in open source. You may be indifferent to criticism which exists only as a means of self-expression, but when silence costs nothing it's difficult to see exactly how your thought couching your criticism of the e-book ecosystem as a distaste for this long running, free and fairly popular piece of software was going to advance the conversation.

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...

The alternative reality where all of those functions are handled by independent pieces of software, or even worse by software not specialized in ebooks at all, is not necessarily better.

In fact I'd bet money it it would be less useful and less productive and much more forbidding to users.

You've got a bunch of people here saying "I love Calibre", that should be enough proof that it's doing a good job, however well you understand that job to be defined.

Calibre does a lot of course, but for your first point, Kobo exposes a folder when connected via USB, and you can drag plain epubs over which it will then load into its library with no additional software.

As does a Kindle, except you need .mobi files.

> Most (all commercially available?$ebook readers are not as simple as that.

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.

> 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.

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?

> > 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.

> 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?

> That would be you making it complicated. What are you all doing with your Kindles that needs multiple levels of organization?

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.

Formats are a different point from “ebook groups”. To answer your question — I’ll modify the line that calls the conversion program (which is, at the moment, Calibre’s ebook-convert). As you can imagine, I’ve already had to do that a few times over the last 15 years. It took me less time than the “add to library” dances would have.

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.

> Formats are a different point from “ebook groups”.

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.

> different readers have different ways to do things

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.

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