Calibre version 1.0 released
calibre-ebook.com
calibre-ebook.com
iPad, Kindle, Nook etcetera, it's all the same incompatible DRM-crippled crap. Without the existence of Calibre it's pretty much impossible to have your own virtual library.
This software should get way more credit and support. Especially from publishers that support DRM-free books, like O'Reilly.
The real shame is I've mostly become a dead tree book consumer, back from my enlightened epub ways. The status quo of ebooks is really bad, and as much as calibre helps, venturing out of the Kindle route was fairly high maintenance. I only hope we can take these freedoms back into the mainstream with all the 'own cloud' movements happening, that I may easily buy ebooks online straight into my cloud and serve them out to a smart ereader, to my phone, desktop browser, etc.
I push my Kindle stuff straight to my Android devices without caring about DRM, but only because I semi-regularly dump any new books to my Kindle for PC install and make sure I get DRM free copies for backup purposes, but I currently do this manually. My "exposure" is never more than a handful of books.
Otherwise I've bought a lot more than I otherwise would from O'Reilly because they're DRM free and happily sync my books directly to Dropbox etc.
My "own cloud" I currently handle simply with rsync - storage capacity on my devices grow faster than the content I want to have on the go for the most part, other than video which I do need to manage a bit.
Pragmatic does the same thing; there's a directory called "Pragmatic Bookshelf" on my dropbox and inside that they automatically make a directory for each title. Multiple editions, when published, magically appear in the same title directory and they send an email to let me know. Source for this information is looking at my phone's dropbox while I type this.
Delivery of electronic goods via Dropbox seems to be turning into a standard.
And despite having a ton of Android devices, Google Play has gotten exactly $0 for books, videos or music, since it's a massive confusion of rental and DRM and I just don't can't be bothered verifying what is DRM free, and to keep (e.g. for books, I don't know if there is a way to verify if they're DRM free before purchasing - I can't find anything after a quick look).
Nook or Sony accept standard DRM epubs, iPad doesn't
Change the wording to "de facto" standard
Soft DRM is IMHO a possible way to go: You get freely usable files but the files get tagged with your name. It's AFAIK the kind of DRM Apple uses for music files from the iTunes Store.
"An EPUB file can optionally contain DRM as an additional layer, but it is not required by the specifications.[24] In addition, the specification does not name any particular DRM system to use, so publishers can choose a DRM scheme to their liking."
You don't even need DRM to sell on the Kindle store, it's optional for authors.
What I really wish for would be someone to offer physical books at price X and the combo physical book + DRM-free ebook at price X+0.50€ or X+1€ or something small like that. (I can understand that e-books by themselves are not dirt cheap, since most of the cost goes does not come from the printing and physical distribution process. But in a bundle with a physical book that is already paid for through the price of the physical book, so one just needs to tack on a little bit to make a nice profit). I'd take that option everytime, turning the small extra into almost 100% profit.
Why do you need anything to put on a shelf?
I, for one, am glad that books don't need to take up physical space anymore.
Because it adds to the room. I realize this is very much a question of personal taste, but I find that a room with a wall covered in books can be a beautiful design detail that adds warmth and character to a room. Plus physical books are pretty awesome in their own right.
It feels very clean to me. I don't like cluttering up space for no reason than to occupy it.
I'm a fan of e-books and definitely think they have their place (I've purchased a total of 3 Nook devices over the years), but I am not ready to wholesale walk away from dead-tree books either.
There are interior decorators who know about our observational biases and will specify books on shelves to match a "look" although the client will probably never crack the book open. Once I learned that, the utility of analyzing bookshelves dropped a bit.
Have to actually read to be interesting, merely owning an unread book isn't very interesting. This impacts the public library user pretty intensely, because they can read a lot without having the interior decorating to prove it.
Of course it is a heuristic and there are both false negatives and positives, so YMMV.
Agreed that probably pretty expensive if you're trying to pose as a foodie complete with "Modernist Cuisine" and all that.
On the other hand, "Vintage classic worn leather covers, organized on the shelf by color" that stuff is shoveled out by the pound. The expensive part is hiring the interior decorator, not buying the shoveled books.
Bringing it home to HN I suspect for many here, there are some copies of Knuth, and the little scheme series, and numerous others, on some peoples bookshelves that look nice but have avoided reading...
I have to say one of the main reasons for this is that they are beautiful books. The design and printing of them are awesome, I even used them as inspiration for designing my friends first novel (self published) which took me six months of researching typesetting and fonts and hacking away on InDesign. I don't think I could ever bring myself to throwing/giving them away.
But I've never really had the chance to use them for posturing, non of my meatspace friends are remotely involved in IT, so have no idea about the books. But many a person has been impressed by the aesthetic quality of them, believe it or not...
With my ebooks I am not so sure that I'll be disciplined about keeping backups on contemporary storage material, have a reader still able to read the format or a tool to convert them easily.
I must admit I don't share your confidence in modern book making methods. I've had books fall apart after a couple of months, so I don't see 50 years happening.
Its the same with CD & DVD...we are promised many years of safe storage but in practice they fail soon.
For my digital media I'm paranoid - I have a mirrored NAS, rsynced to a third drive, copies on my laptop, and two offsite backups of most of my media, and I'm still concerned about how easy it is to lose it.
Especially as most of my early writing (of little value to anyone but me, but of great sentimental value) only survives on printouts - even faded acidic printer paper from the early 80's to early 90's have long outlasted the storage media holding the files it was saved on. Not because disks can't live long, but because the density and relative fragility makes it so much easier to lose or damage the data.
Exactly. They were made 25 years ago. I'm talking about books being printed right now. Quality is not what it once was.
A sewn cloth binding, archival-grade acid-free paper, and good inks will last centuries.
Pulp paperbacks may fall apart after a single reading, though I've got a few I've had for 20+ years and multiple readings, though a few of those have a fair bit of packaging tape on them.
Several of my college textbooks fell apart distressingly fast, and I've got a number of softcover books whose pages are getting unglued (varying vintages). Different cover materials can also have different longevities: a few composite / plastic covered books have had the covers crack off or break.
CD's and DVD's are another matter unfortuntaly... I am now basically operating under the assumption that any CD or DVD will be unreadable after a few years.
If I'm not mistaken then libraries buy a higher grade of books designed to endure much more. I've seen it on Amazon. i.e. a book comes in ebook, paperback, hardback & then another category - the name of it currently eludes me though.
I agree on the re-binding though.
I want my son to be able to pull down an atlas and noodle through it, or Brewer's dictionary of phrase and fable, or {insert long list of books here}. That's harder for him to do if they're all stuck on a disc somewhere.
Give your kid a tablet, and they have instant access to more books, films, television shows, etc. than you could ever hope to fit in your home.
Why flick through an atlas when you have services like Google Maps which are more useful (route planning, satellite imagery, 3D visuals, etc.)?
Why flick through a physical copy of Brewer's, when you can scroll through a digital copy, or just browse the Internet and find all that information and more?
curation is important.
Also with an ereader travelling is fantastic. A library in less than 300 gm.
It's also easier to access that library on your phone which is with many people all the time.
Not to mention access for your kids to millions of legal free ebooks.
Search _is_ one application where electronic copies definitely can surpass physical books.
Though if I know the author and work, I can often flip to a page pretty quickly. Especially if there's an index, but even without, I have a pretty good sense of where in a book a passage occurred, even position on the page.
but the legal stuff is annoying. when I die my books are legally dubious - do they get handed down in my will or does the licence make them non-transferable. and removing drm is a criminal offence.
If these were digitised they'd most likely be stored on the same device as their personal and private matters, and one does not out of good manners, automatically fire up their PC's or tablets to go and have a rummage around.
I have hundreds of books and I'd find it hard to decide which ones should hit the recycler. To this day yet even my scrappy 1970's paperback copies of stuff like 1984, Brave New World or The Ginger Man still elicit long conversations because visiting friends can freely browse your shelves.
I also know my kids don't read nearly as much as I did, so encouraging them to peruse the media server just isn't the same as letting them chill in the home library, and procrastinate from formal assignments by checking out the old man's books. (I will admit to dog-earing the naughty bits of some of my parents racy paperbacks.)
Once expansive touchscreens are cheap, of course, we can display a virtual wall of bookshelves and instantly load a text on the device of choice, or even print on demand.
And I also know I haven't bought a hard copy book in several years and I love being able to travel with a substantial library (and music collection). All I'll ever need is a little electricity to keep a tablet charged. (Assuming an easy way to move my collection to the next gen device.)
Choice. Choice. Choice. (EDIT: Oh yeah--merci, Calibre.)
This is exactly what I had in mind when reading some of the comments. "Discoverability and serendipity", as DanBC pointed out is fixable by this technology. But you don't need huge touchscreens. A medium-sized one (55"?) with something like Cover Flow, where different books slowly move across the screen might be a pretty good solution.
The problem is that when stuff is out of sight, you don't even think that it is there. Look at the Internet: it's a massive amount of information and you just don't even know what you could ever find unless you spend time searching for it.
When something is physically tangible, it's way easier to locate it and to think about it. That's how our brains work.
But I'm concerned about what that does both for my relation to the media, and how it will change how my son gets introduced to things. So many of the ways I got introduced to books and music etc. was via what my parents had on the shelves or left out, or the radio the played etc.
I think this is part of a huge societal change we don't talk enough about: Our exposure is changing dramatically. E.g. we play much less music out loud at home than my parents did, because most of my music listening is with earphones from my phone during my commute. While we have quite a few books out (which I'm ironically, given my concern, quickly changing), most of what I read is never "visible" to my son unless/until he hacks my laptop.
I wrote a long piece about it on my blog a couple of weeks back: http://www.hokstad.com/the-hidden-library
It's not just for my son either - I find that I feel I have a different relationship to books that are out on the shelf: I get constant reminders about them, and refresh my memory, and will often flip through on or etc., while I've found myself even forgetting books I was right in the middle of on my Kindle app because it's not visible unless I pick up a device and start the app and look for it.
I've started thinking about what I want to do to address it, and one approach I want to play with is picture frames - exposing "content as art" in the form of jacket covers from books, albums etc. automatically on a few digital photo frames around the house, coupled with organizing a full "family library".
It's not %100 though so you do have to do a quick verification that it got the right one (some tracks can end up on compilation discs). Normally a normal lookup is better/quicker than the fingerprinting.
Umm... this is incorrect. Most of the cost does come from printing and distribution. The next largest chunk is editing, but it is still smaller than the other.
I find they're an advantage over Web pages in that all the annoying formatting is removed, you're left with a basic text and can focus on the content. It's also amazing to have your entire library available (and indexed) at your fingertips. For research, use of plugins to create and maintain a bibliography is also tremendously useful.
DRM is a zit on the face of knowledge.
And I'll plug Moon+Reader, for mobile, a pretty slick ebook reader in my experience.
Kovid Goyal, the creator of Calibre has been, for me, as much of a poster-child of FOSS as Firefox or Linux. He has a point release every week, and you could just update the software without worry - nothing would break. He's open and frank about the development process - nothing hidden, or "thrown over the wall" no open-core features to abuse the power user, no excuses for stuff that isn't ready to release.
I have no idea why only now he reached 1.0 - it's been feature complete for my needs for a couple of years now. But as it stands, I wish to congratulate him for reaching the milestone and to thank him and everyone who supports the project - by submitting code, patches, bug reports, helping in the forums, donating money, and using the software.
My books are organized beneath ~/Books/ by author, series, and title. I don't need them "managed", I just want to be able to convert them, and once done I can copy them to the device via /bin/cp, etc.
I'm using the command-line tools from calibre and they work, but the GUI itself is redundant for me.
It has all the problems people associate with GUI based FOSS. The UI is pretty terrible. It looks and feels like FOSS from seven years ago. It has about a million prefs / settings buried many layers down in a very confusing series of prefs dialogs. It shouldn't take you 3 hours to configure an ebook reader. It should just come with sane settings out of the box. As someone else remarked the UI often feels slow / sluggish.
The app is 253MB (OS X version)! Is it just me or is that crazy?
All in all python code and libraries accounts for 73Mb, and bundled frameworks for 143Mb.
That's the price you pay for writing an app with a UI in python.
I don't think he was. I read that as the unspecific "you", with the meaning being equivalent to "That's the price one pays for writing an app with a UI in python."
On other projects, you first get a huge range of code complexity/quality, making contributing perhaps simply not feasible. After that, you can run into all sorts of stuff. My real world experience:
"We won't take this because we use linked lists, not hashtables, because <original maintainer> likes linked lists."
"We won't fix this broken XML parser because this code is fast."
"Why did you fork and create those modules without telling us? That's really rude to all of us that spent so much time on this." (In response to an announcement a company had ported a project to another platform, and wanted feedback and was going to open all their work. They ended up just keeping it internally.)
In short, the whole "hey it's open so go fix it" is a rather trite simplification. It does not reflect the usual or even possible experience for the majority of users.
Your personal anecdotes are less about the software being open source and perhaps more about a lack of coordination with the existing developers. Every time I've contributed to an OSS project, I've opened a dialogue with the existing team ahead of time and had my ideas vetted before I put in a bunch of work. That or (now in the Github era) they were tiny/trivial patches where I wouldn't mind if my pull requests get ignored.
With closed source software that has shitty UI (and there's lots of that too), you have to just live with it...
The bulk of that is Qt. If your OS had a standard Qt library thaf every application that uses Qt could reuse, Calibre wouldn't have to distribute Qt itself.
But since on McOS10 the preferred method is to distribute every depedency over and over again in each app that needs that dependency, you end up with that bloat. The common retort is, "253 MB? We have terabytes of storage now! Who cares about a few extra megabytes here and there."
The rest of it - the UI, the workflow, the community - these are all horrible.
Can we get a real UI, autoupdates (and without needing to download the whole giant binary every time), a database that doesn't choke on realistically large libraries? How shaving some time off of the 45 seconds the application takes make an Amazon API call to grab metadata and a tiny cover image? These are just the obvious, major issues that have been present for years now.
Calibre is already that half-assed community project cliche. One that has so much potential at first, but falls apart since no one can see the forest among the trees. Has been for a while now.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=668899
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=125693
I gave up on calibre largely due to the irratation caused by this bug. Sure the UI is not great but I could deal with the UI. I keep networkmanager installed on my laptop to keep some oddball VPN profiles available. 80% of the time I have NM disabled, pidgin and a host of other apps have no problem with NM being disabled.
"Unfortunately" most of my books are non-fictional/science/textbooks etc. For the few fiction books I read, I pretty much use ebooks unless it's a comicbook or maybe some fine leather collectors item.
My main problem is that I scribble in, marker (multiple colors), take note, underline and do all kinds of stuff with my non-fiction books. I researched and the options to do all that were pretty underwhelming last time I checked. If any of you know about good "texbook tools" I'd be all ears.
I think for textbooks I'll never get used to ebooks. I also like being able to flip through them quickly, scan the content on a quick flip and so forth. The one major advantage of ebooks for my typical use cases is full text search (and theoretically links to other books on quotes and so forth).
Well the Kindle's support attaching notes to specific places in the book, but as you say its pretty underwhelming.
Realistically though what you describe is not really the envisioned use of an ebook. Perhaps in future readers...
Thx
If you've got resizable windows with split nested views containing things like column lists or trees, you notice the overhead a lot more.
The biggest new feature in 1.0 is a re-write of the 0.x data access layer. The application now starts almost instantly, and is much more responsive in general.
If you want to arrange files to directories, you can export documents into arbitary directory structure determined by big number of attributes and even tags.
It's also at least a little bit problematic that there is little support for treating source books as special, which would be a nice feature given the fact that the convertors are not yet perfect (and last I looked they didn't work very hard to make semantically sensible conversions, which makes knowing the source book that much more valuable...).
Of course, if Calibre would have source book concept, it could treat arbitrary directory as sources and map converted and massaged documents and metadata to them.
Despite its first 1.0 hit, for a long time, the project has been developing too actively for me to update every minor release (every week less or more).
It currently only supports PDF books (search/share/...), and is broader than a book library (includes photo album support/openid/...), something related to Calibre.
We are at pre alpha stage right now and super excited about the opportunities.
Please register with your Gmail id and we shall get an account in an hour.
P.S. Also I have just posted a ShowHN link for Blib