I can never figure out how to do those things without massive research each time I need to do them.
Maybe it's just me, but I do find the UI horribly confusing.
Now I think for those new books, you need to do some hoop jumping about "send to device" with an old kindle or PC.
Is there a place that sells ebooks that with easily strippable DRM?
At this point I think Apple’s really the only candidate for it. Everyone else is either helped by DRM (Amazon, B&N, Kobo), too small, or just don’t seem like a good fit (Google). I was hoping they’d do it after doing so with music, but at this point I’ve given up.
So what happened afterwards?
Deutsche Telekom sold the infrastructure to Rakuten, the Japanese owners of Kobo , in 2017. Interestingly, 6 years later, Tolino still exists with the same DRM-free architecture and new devices are actually developed by Rakuten.
Unfortunately, converting to the older file format means you lose all the typography improvements from the newer version. Also, I believe that loophole is slowly being closed by Amazon. It’s probably not a viable long term solution.
Personally Calibre did amazing work for me always, even if the UI was clunky. When I used a kindle i had it set up to immediately convert everything to a non DRM format and use amazon whispernet (or whatever they're calling it now) to send them automatically and wirelessly to the device.
Hard to argue with that kind of flawless performance.
Calibre is not one of those tools.
However, to be fair, I have the feeling that Calibre is mostly the result of Kovid Goyal's version of what I do, but he decided to write some software to do it back when there were fewer choices. As a result, it's highly personal to his interests and workflow, and lots of the complaints about it are really just a result of other people wanting to do things their own highly personal way and running into an impedance mismatch with Goyal's way, just like they'd run into one with how I do things.
It's clear that there's huge demand for ebook management software, but there's no comprehensive "Plex" for ebooks, and as a result you end up having to strap together your own stuff to get it working.
Number 2 is awesome because when people publish without DRM, effectively I don't need to worry about the format.
The first has never been that big a deal to me but I'll always have it on a machine I use for the other two.
Tips:
calibre companion avoid the need to fiddle with a usb cord and worry about your device properly talk to your computer something that is harder than it ought to be with phones/tablets
ondevice:false shows you all the books in your library that aren't on the connected device and can be combined with any other query eg tags:scifi and ondevice:false. If its harder than this you may be selected a device that was not only proprietary and shitty but also uncommon so that calibre don't know how to work around its shittiness.
2: right click book book convert individually/bulk convert
Tips:
If you want to know what things are not in your preferred format say you want epub and not mobi you can search for formats:mobi and not formats:epub. This makes it easy to ensure everything is in a format that for instance works well with your device.
Don't expect conversions to and from PDF to work well. If might turn out readable but it wont be optimal. It works MUCH better converting between more standardized ebook formats.
3. You CAN configure calibre to strip DRM on import automatically but this is inherently going to be a continuing struggle because its an arms race. Consider just not buying books that are protected by DRM. You can virtually always get a book without DRM, get a pirated version that doesn't by its nature have DRM, or a physical book. Hell if you like buy a physical book and donate it and enjoy your pirated book without guilt.
If you find the interface confusing in the settings you can literally customize
- the items that show up in the toolbar - the items that show up in the toolbar when a device is connected - the context menu that pops up when you click a book in each type of view if need be
You can further customize short cuts including single key shortcuts
If you do 3 things you can have 3 buttons in the toolbar or if you please 3 single character shortcuts. Want e to edit the books info and s to send it to your connected device then configure it so.
$ ebook-convert source.fb2 .epub
You figure out which command line flags you want to use (mainly for converting to PDF), save them somewhere, and then just use that command forever.
I'm not saying the authors of free software have any responsibility to listen to complaints, but complaints aren't inherently invalid because they're about something that's free.
Also this comment feels a bit rude to the author of Calibre - I’ve been using it for many years and it’s very helpful - I don’t think there’s any other book catalog software with similar feature set. If you feel that the ux/ui is bad - consider helping to improve it, it’s an open source software.
It is.
It doesn’t make Calibre less useful to say it. Calibre is a remarkable piece of software, which solves real issues and without real alternatives. But it’s UI happens to be bad.
I just try to use the CLI whenever I can, at least I don’t have to spend 10 minutes figuring out which button does what I want.