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Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

I'd like projects like this to include some kind of rationale for their existence. This reader sounds fine, but what's wrong with Calibre and LibreraFD?

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I wish calibre could look like this. Calibre is a lovely project that I've used happily for years but that UI is really something else.

Also, the attitude in the Calibre community to even minor UI suggestions, at least in my experience, amounts to "if you think there's any room for improvement, you're wrong and should leave forever".

At least it's a stable UI. Sure it's not whiz-bang fabulous, but consistency is it's own win.

"stable UI" is not a high bar.

Sadly, it is.

One of the first things I do with calibre is install a nicer icon pack. There are a ton of ui focused modifications you can do at least

Because they wanted to? Why should they have to justify providing free software?

Not the original commenter, but I totally agree with you -- no one needs to justify free software at all; the more the merrier. I do think that there's something to be said for clarifying why one might use one over the other in a space with multiple options or one clear winner (which I think Calibre is right now). Offering some improvements, problems that are fixed, etc. explicitly could help users make a jump or understand their options better.

That's absolutely a nice to have, though -- free software for the sake of free software is excellent, and always justification enough.

Well that's fine, that's a perfectly good rationale, but it would be helpful to actually state it. Once it's out there with some effort to get other people's attention, why not say what is supposed to make it interesting? I like Calibre even if its UI is a bit quirky. It's not perfect and I'd look into something new if there is a concrete reason to do so, but I have better things to do than investigate every possibility without such reasons.

>Why should they have to justify providing free software?

They don't, but they have to be honest about what they're presenting. There's this shitty motte-and-bailey situation in open source where their website ( https://librumreader.com/ ) looks like marketing for a serious application - but the moment you treat it like a serious application, people are like "it's free, why are you treating it like a serious application?".

Look:

>Simplicity

>Focus on what actually matters, using a simple and straight forward interface.

>Your time is too valuable to be wasted on complex applications.

What does the tone here convey? Is it "this is just a cool project I wrote"?

That does seem to at least communicate the selling point: it's simpler and more convenient to use than Calibre, which has a notoriously clunky and unintuitive interface.

Because if you want to "sell" your software so that people download the application and even contribute to the project, you should give them a reason. Otherwise, why would someone use this (or even bother to take a look at it) instead of an alternative that is decade-old and trusted?

> Why would someone use this (or even bother to take a look at it) instead of an alternative that is decade-old and trusted?

We live in a world where new and shiny (tech) is espoused over old and trusted all the time. The latest must be the greatest.

Anyone coming in without any prior knowledge of the subject will typically gravitate to the thing that looks newer.

So as the years go on, the new thing will build a new community, while the old thing will generally see it’s community slowly die off.

It’s not great, but it happens more than it should

Not all must be bad though. New communities and new things often allow more room for changes. Old communities often don't want to change, because "it's always been this way" or something similar. Not everything needs change, but if new ideas and new requirements have no space at all, you can't "blame" others for building new communities to accommodate those ideas and requirements.

For the love of God this is an alternative to Google Play Books, not to a desktop software.

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