Calibre – New in Calibre 7.0
calibre-ebook.com
calibre-ebook.com
It's got metadata matching, support for multiple users, and statistics tracking which allows me to have a "Leaderboard" that shows how fast you read (words per minute). Fun competition between my wife and I (that I'm 100% losing). It's a Progressive Web App and utilizes a Service Worker to support 100% offline reading as well.
There's a demo server [2] (creds are "demo" for both user & pass).
I started getting into ebooks again after not using them for a few years. When I fired up my kindle it auto updated to a new version. Now it’s unable to run KOReader. If only I had changed my WiFi password in the past 5 years!
Some folks have performance issues with VERY large libraries of 80,000 to hundreds of thousands of books which aren't experienced by people with more normal sized libraries of dozens to single digit thousands of books. There may be some room to optimize this case but to be fair this is an edge case.
On Windows antivirus can cause issues if the library directory isn't excluded. This is fairly out of scope and is just the general suck of using the Windows platform.
Mac users complained of general slowness. There may well be room for improvement in this area.
Sending to device may be slower than expected if sending involves either transmitting books over the wifi depending on the speed of the underlying connection or especially if sending requires conversion. It might be worthwhile in this case to enable conversion of books on import so as to obviate the need to convert many books at once later.
It's easy to identify an epub that went through Calibre: there's usually a lot of junk metatada in the file. Not just a "contributor" tag or a custom "modified" timestamp, but dozens of empty json structures embedded in xml. And a (potentially empty) bookmark file. But what surprised me is that Calibre accepts to write metadata that is obviously wrong. For instance, a simple heuristic could detect when the user has confused the full name "Jane Doe" with its file-as form "Doe, Jane" and ask for confirmation. And after seeing many dates at "0101-01-01 ...", I suspect that was the default value in some version of Calibre.
I'm glad Calibre exists and that many people like it, but I hope a better software will emerge: safer, saner, faster, maybe prettier and easier to install.
This contains the misunderstanding that merely by existing calibre "uses up" something like oxygen. This is true in a commercial product when there are a finite number of buyers whose money in turn funds a finite number of merchants efforts to bring a product to market.
In open source software users are finite but on average worthless except insofar as they constitute a funnel whereby some microscopic portion may in some instances become contributors but more often than not that funnel is virtually non-existent with contributions coming from the same small cadre of developers.
> The UI feels very dated to me
Perhaps the worst reason to make a different piece of software. Modern usually is synonymous with an oversimplified interface which shoves much functionality into a junk drawer and makes it easy to do some subset of easy things and hard to do anything else.
Although quite usable out of the box the calibre UI is also very customizable and trivial to figure out how to customize
- You can add or remove functions to right click menu or tool bars
- tool bars by default has both icons AND text and you can change the icons if you want something that looks more "modern"
- The default layout has a toolbar, search bar, list of books, info about the selected book, and a tag/author/series etc browser toolbar.
- If you were wondering how to change the layout there is a button on the bottom right that says "layout" alongside a colorful icon. If you click it you can choose a pretty cover grid view and hide both the book info and tag browser. Congrats it now looks "modern"
- not only can you set single character shortcuts because they only operate when the cursor isn't in a text field but the preferences menu for shortcuts makes it easy to search for a function by name in order to bind and the shortcut so chosen is shown by the function.
- It has a search that is both powerful and works exactly how you would think it works
For having a huge pile of functionality it is probably one of the most usable pieces of software I use regularly. It works in a fashion that suggests the author uses it and has thought a lot about what would make it easier to use.
I'm also a little lost at what slow means here as on Linux it like virtually every desktop app that isn't based on electron it responds instantly and briskly. Perhaps it works poorly on Mac?
> This contains the misunderstanding that merely by existing calibre "uses up" something like oxygen. This is true in a commercial product when there are a finite number of buyers whose money in turn funds a finite number of merchants efforts to bring a product to market[...]
You don't say it explicitly, but there's an implied "this is not true with open source software". I don't agree. I wrote about this a few years ago:
<https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan...>
If people think of a problem as solved or in the process of being worked on by competent minds, they're less likely to pledge their own minds to solving the problem.
> > The UI feels very dated to me
> Perhaps the worst reason to make a different piece of software.
Okay, I'll say it differently. Calibre's UI is bad. Forget "dated"—I don't think it even qualifies for the use of that word. Firefox 3's UI is dated. Calibre's UI is just bad. It has a bad UI, irrespective of trends.
When I first downloaded Calibre years ago after having heard people rave about it for a while, I thought there must be some sort of mistake, or a joke even. Calibre has a hilariously bad UI, minus the hilarity. And it wouldn't be quite so crazy if it weren't the case that there's clearly been a lot of effort that has gone into trying to make it do things that are bad. The animation effect that makes thumbnails "pop" is but one obvious example.
If Calibre were "Zotero, but specifically for ebooks", it wouldn't be on the receiving end of this kind of criticism.
Also you can disable the little animation if you don't like it the preference is "disable animations" under look and feel.
> Okay, I'll say it differently. Calibre's UI is bad > It has a bad UI, irrespective of trends. > Calibre has a hilariously bad UI, minus the hilarity > clearly been a lot of effort that has gone into trying to make it do things that are bad
This is just you saying over and over that its bad.
> The animation effect that makes thumbnails "pop" is but one obvious example.
To be more precise by default in the pane wherein is displayed the details of the currently selected book when you change the selected book there is a fraction of a second it goes through an animated transition.
A bad UI is one in which common tasks are unpleasant, confusing, or hard to accomplish. Not liking an animation appears to be an aesthetic judgement as is the notion that its interface is "dated".
Can you explain what is actually bad about calibre precisely?
Version 7.0 crashes on my Ubuntu 23.10, unfortunately. Had to return to 6.29.0.
FT search has word and phrase search, boolean operators and NEAR search abilities. And there is a really cool match list, giving some context of the match before you actually go to it in the PDF file.
You cannot search across libraries, though.
Did not know about Calibre for this - I was relying on opening each search and searching it individually.
[0]: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract [1]: https://www.opait.com/tessstudio/
I created a script that dumped my library of 1000s of books to .txt and then grepped them.
sudo apt install libxcb-cursor0Installer is also hinting for the missing dependency now before installation.
For viewing/annotating on Android I use Flexcil.
Yes! Covers, Metadata (searchable and including custom columns and comments), reading progress, filters (important for me: tags), different layouts, virtual views.
And it can use the full text search of Calibre (but only when connected to the Calibre content server).
Otherwise the core app's UI looks fine to me personally, though some of the plugins make some, unusual, choices.
Stick to your todo list apps and stay in your lane.
- dark theme and switch the icon theme to monstre
- remove toolbar buttons you don't use like help/donate/news etc. so that it's quite minimal and streamlined
- edit the ebook reader css to add some padding / line-spacing to fit your taste and use a font like Libre Baskerville
- no splash-screen
The preference pages remain a bit of a headache to navigate but it's not like you are fiddling with those too often and importantly, it does have plentiful configuration to do what you want.
And if you run into a problem, you'll probably get a response from Kovid faster than any company. Overall, thank you Kovid for years of hard work!
> - edit the ebook reader css to add some padding / line-spacing to fit your taste and use a font like Libre Baskerville
Where/how do I find those options? I found other CSS in the Preference pages, but not the ebook reader css.
2. Click the top or hit escape to show the menu and open up the preferences.
My current settings are:
- Colors: off-white background and dark grey text - I tend to pick these per device given different brightness / temperature of the display
- Page Layout: margins - left/right: 100px, top/bottom: 75px
- Fonts: I get Libre Baskerville from Google Fonts. I believe I choose a different font on Windows because each OS's rendering is slightly different. For me it's a matter of getting the font-weight just right so that it's not oppressive to the eye, distracting or hard to read but just right and it's a combination of the font, colour, size and how the OS renders. My goal is that it feels like the words on the page just fall into my eyes without effort.
- Style: This is where you can write css. (complaints about how bad my css is will fall on deaf ears!) The hack job I have on this machine is:
p
{
line-height: 1.5em !important;
font-size: 0.854em !important;
padding-bottom: 25px;
text-indent: 35.868px !important;
}
div
{
line-height:1.5em;
padding-top: 1em;
}
line-height: 1.5em;
Some ebooks have hardcoded styles that force ugly formatting. Fortunately Calibre lets you edit ebooks so you can just open them up and delete their custom css.
3. A few other things I remove are i) columns from the grid view like rating/publisher/series ii) categories on the left like language/format - I only use author/tags. Once you remove all the things you don't use, it's a neat minimal app.
Step a new user through setting up Calibre to do something as simple as syncing to a e-reader with the functionality a user would normally expect, like displaying/syncing their reading progress.
Or just watch Goyal tell a new user "you can't do that, use the builtin reader if you want reading progress synced, fuck off" and then a bunch of other folks get into the weeds describing the mess of plugins and shit you need to do it.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=296205
I managed to get my e-reader to sync reading position to Calibre but it required a lot of frustrating work trying to follow tutorials on mobiread...creating custom fields and code snippets and praying that the whole thing won't break some time in the future.
It's probably the single most commonly wanted feature for a user looking at an e-book library management tool. That and syncing to their e-reader's shelves.
God help you if you want to use Goodreads...
Truth is, Calibre is a hard project to run, the man has been doing it himself, and he is super responsive and helpful in forums.
Every thread about Calibre a has a comment like this shitting on Goyal based on one or two of his comments, and then there are some comments that talk about how helpful he is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32052669
How could anyone support Goodreads seeing as their api is closed off? Thankfully calibre has the goodreads-sync plugin which still works as well as it does.
> watch Goyal tell a new user "you can't do that, use the builtin reader if you want reading progress synced, fuck off"
... which seems to be a quote that you just made up. I might be wrong (maybe you meant to link to another thread and mixed up your links, or maybe the link you provided wasn't supposed to actually be evidence for the quoted part), but it seems like not.
This is a horrible practice, and you should stop.* (It's actually against the rules on HN[1][2], but you shouldn't do it anywhere. It's lame.)
* Yes, even in circumstances where you profess to have no intent of misleading people and are just "paraphrasing"—that's not how paraphrasing works to begin with, and the person's own words should be sufficient[3] to indict if they are in fact sufficient to indict them.
1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13600284#13602947>
2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890551#15890822> (you'll need showdead turned on)
3. e.g. <https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/2011720#yui_3_10_3_1...>
As for a great terminal from (IMO) a genuine nice guy, try wezterm.
(I do infact pick open source software based on how they respond to issues since I am likely to spend time interacting with them.)
And some hundreds book's is not much, unless you change all of them at once. The probability of loses depends on the number of changes. One reason seems poorly implemented writing of data, and lousy communication of pending changes. At least it was the case 2-3 years ago when I last looked at this. But I guess, this is part of the questionable UI..
The Calibre UX is fine. The real UX divide isn't desktops / laptops vs. smartphones / tablets, but rather content creators vs. content consumers. Modern UX is oriented to content consumers but even there manages to waste too much space and has become too flat and minimal. But once your application is at least partly for content creators, a dense interface is ideal and comforting.
I've haven't experienced any data loss with Calibre except when the e-book editor crashes while checking a book for errors. This has always been due to memory exhaustion (2 GB limit) when checking books that were unnecessarily complex (see “ghastly things” above).
SumatraPDF opens EPUBs almost instantaneously, but at the cost of not rendering every aspect correctly. As I recall the documentation is clear about this limitation.
I like the PocketBook app a lot and use it to read books on smartphones. But it has some basic rendering quirks; for example it can ignore margin-top and margin-bottom on paragraphs, seemingly because it does not apply CSS precedence rules correctly. It took me five e-mail exchanges, including sending a very simple hand-rolled EPUB illustrating the problem, to convince the developers that there is a problem.
Where do you buy books? Are most books available or is the selection poor? Does it work with library apps like Libby?
In spite of being an avid reader, I have never actually bought an ebook. All my reading comes from LibGen, Anna’s Archive, or their predecessor communities for free downloads. Consequently, I never suffered from Amazon’s ecosystem: as soon as I took any new Kindle out of the box, I put it in airplane mode and only sideloaded books over USB.
They have an app but it always tiptoes around doing exactly this! No servers or local server stuff or at least don't force people to have that preexisting structure in order to do a facile and intuitive things. Was the implicit act of competing with Apple's Books apps compelled against?
If they would do just that, they could have all the donations/money they would ever need
It is a cross platform application in python using QT so is not really for mobile it even possible.
What you state as things it does not need are the things that it was designed to do - reading ebooks came along quite late (v 4 or 5).
Its original function is to convert ebooks between formats and store them in a common database.
It seems ridiculous to leave that continuity, user-friendliness, and money on the table out of some insistance on never departing from what they essentially are inextricably tied-to and associated with as a manner of household awareness if I might be so bold as to suggest they have reached a degree of ubiquity when it comes to the digital ebook experience
I read them as asking why Calibre does not provide a renderer as the main thing but provides other things that people don't need.
My comments are that calibre is designed for the things you say people don't need and the renderer on Windows/Mac/Linux is an afterthought and due to its architecture it can't run on mobile devices why KyBooks etc are designed for.
I really don't understand the point you are trying to make.
I don't know if I'm saying this well but I think the main ideas are here.
I just noticed that Calibre is referred to as an eBook manager, which is more in line with what I was talking about in some sense. All of that should fall under `eBook Manager`
I just wish it didn't have updates so often. Since you have to do it manually, I feel that every time I start it, this little chore is imposed on me, without any reward. If you really must release updates at this rate for some reason, then I would say that an auto-updater that runs in the background would be a huge huge improvement to the overall experience.
Of course, a built-in auto-updater would be good, but a packaged version is a nice workaround for me.
[1]: https://scoop.sh/
The main problem with Calibre is it's quite hard to package and many distros seem to have given up.
But why??? What in the world of Calibre demands such urgent updates? I use a variety of software (some quite complex) that do a great job with much less frequent updates. Why not Calibre?
To give an example, I once needed to reference a 2003 book that was out of print for a long-running project I was working on at the time, and the publisher who released it digitally had gone out of business, and the author's mailserver had gone dark. I checked the usual suspects for the PDF or hard copy of the book, but the only remaining copy of it I could find was a Calibre automated epub conversion from quite a few years in the past. A few years later, I once again looked for a better copy, only to find another Calibre epub conversion, but still no PDF in sight. This one, seemingly generated a few years later, was much higher in quality.
I was pleasantly surprised.
This is an extra pain in the ass for users because if your favorite news site parser breaks, you have no choice but to upgrade Calibre itself instead of just updating a config file.
At a minimum the news-parsing stuff should have long ago been split out into a plugin. It has nothing to do with calibre's function as an ebook library tool.
It is hard to imagine that anyone would disagree with this. I certainly don't, nor did I say anything to the contrary.
> If you think there are genuine pain points you can address, fork it and make a better one no one is stopping you.
The only thing stopping me is common sense.
Sure, if you are forced to update. But if your Calibre ain't broken then just skip the update?
Realistically, Calibre should just integrate an update delivery mechanism such as Sparkle on macOS (not sure about other platforms), but sadly I think the developer has Strong Opinions and I can't see this happening.
That's a huge issue these days. We have to spend far too much time updating or upgrading software [1], figuring out why or even whether it is needed, (trying to) fix issues arising from all that, (trying to) roll back if we cannot solve those issues, having downtime on use of the software while all this is (mis)happening, and more.
[1] And what the heck is the difference between updating and upgrading, anyway? (I'm not interested in googling it. More busy work.) And who the heck is interested in the difference? Not end users, for sure. I have come across these two similar, hence maddening terms, in at least Ubuntu Linux distributions. Why can't they use less ambiguous terms?
And to top it all, I'm a techie. If I (and many other techies) have such issues, what to say about laymen, who are sometimes called "normies" by said techies and even by biztechies? I've actually heard or read both types using that term, disparagingly. The irony is that it only reflects on them, i.e. all of us in those fields, because the term implies that we are abnormal - with good reason.
End of rant.
I'll see myself out now, your tech honour (overlord).
;)
I would be happier if it just did it in the background while it was running like Chrome and Firefox. Download the update in the background and then silently install it next time the app starts. I don’t need another daemon running in the background at all times.
and silently break something the next time you start an app? Better use some scoop package manager and update at your own schedule
Super easy on the Mac. No issues at all.
I haven’t looked into it but I suspect the app is updated far more often than the cask.
Can you use a non Kindle reader?
Kindle is a small part of its use.
No idea if they're all Ferengi (DRM is good for business?) or there's an actual reason for them to not just support epub actually directly.