Hacker News Reader

Comment by bowlofpetunias | Hacker News Reader

I have a love-hate relationship with Calibre. As a way to manage my ebooks, and especially overcoming the insanity that is DRM, Calibre is a lifesaver. I wouldn't even be buying ebooks if it wasn't for Calibre. (I only bought a Kindle after making sure I could crack the DRM and actually own the books I paid for.)

However, the user interface of Calibre is one of the worst I've ever encountered. It looks and feels like a teenagers first attempt at creating a desktop software prototype back in 1995. (Having to go to the website to download and install every single new minor release also feels like something from a bygone era.)

I donate to Calibre because I need it to continue existing, but I have no love for it.

View on HN

I loathe the book management parts of calibre too. I only use the command line tools.

A fork with a sane GUI would kill calibre.

I completely agree. I talked with the Calibre leader some years ago offering my help with the UX, and he didn't seem to have any interest in simplifying the UI. It's his app, and he wants it to have as much features as possible. It's great for many people but not for the majority I believe.

I stopped using it because I can't stand the UI :(

What do you use instead? Calibre has a rather large amount of features, but they are hard to find :)

Edit: if someone were to publish independent mockups for a new Calibre UX, it could motivate community feedback and/or dev contributions. The ebook market is larger now than a few years ago, given the rise of mobile.

I don't use anything. Right now, I have the ebooks I buy in Amazon and then the others in a folder in Dropbox. But I have no order...

Calibre is open-source and seems to be a Qt +PyQt front-end to a sqlite database, fairly mainstream dev tools. But it doesn't seem to have an active development community with multiple contributors, except for plugins. Anyone know why?

Toxic maintainer. Kovid Goyal is known to be abrasive. I'm looking for good examples. But maybe I've just seen the other end of the arguments and he's okay?

I'm guessing the best bits are hidden here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/

Like eg this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934

Wow, you were not exaggerating. From comment #11 of that bug report [1]:

(...) You are not doing us a favor by reporting a bug. On the contrary, you are asking us to do you a favor and spend our valuable time helping overcome a problem _you_ are having. (...)

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934/comments/11

Now that you mention it, my one bug report was met with a frosty reception.

Edit: thanks for posting that bug report. I was quite excited about contributing to Calibre at the time of filing my bug report, but got such a negative reaction that the thought vanished. How many other missed opportunities have there been, maybe a fork would bring them back?

And of course the infamous "calibre-mount-helper" fiasco: http://lwn.net/Articles/465311/

Wow he doesn't have to try to be infamous.

wow, very eye opening. What an arrogant douche.

Anyway, I still rely on Calibre to manage my ebooks, and have donated a couple of times. Despite the messy and confusing UI, it's the only ebook manager I found that does what I need (Kindle sync, multiple layers of tags and categorization, download metadata).

I remember reporting a bug, a few years ago, though I can't find it now. It was about the weird glitches in the green icons next to the search bar in the toolbar.

These: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9umwphlisjy4uzd/Screenshot%202014-...

I included screenshots at the time. I got brushed off with a "this doesn't happen for me, it's probably your system being messed up" and my bug closed as invalid.

It's still there, across several different OS reinstalls. For that matter, it's still there in recent screenshots from other people: http://www.snapfiles.com/screenfiles/calibre.png

So maybe it's intentional? It seems too ugly for that, but...

Yeah, happens for me too but I never noticed until now. I guess I just always thought that this was the way it was designed to look. The UI is more than a little bit jumbled/ugly.

I could see where the intention might come from. The buttons relate to search functionality, and there's binoculars in the background.

But then... they don't line up. If it was intentional, I'd expect them to be on the same level.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com