32 ms·

The Calibre Content Server

314 points by dabber 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
blfr 9y ago
I love it in principle but, considering how small most books are relatively to storage space offered by modern devices, even mobile ones, what is the upside of storing content centrally instead of just carrying a copy with you?
- criddell 9y ago
  You know how everybody shares their tv and movie collections with Plex? I suspect this is a way of doing the same thing with books.
  - blfr 9y ago
    Yeah, I get that this is what they're aiming for but home server with Plex is justified by the massive size a video and even music collections can reach.
    - criddell 9y ago
      I think a lot more people share their music and video collections than their book collections despite the file size differences. Maybe it's because there isn't a book-Plex?
      - pigeons 9y ago
        I've never heard of plex except in eve online context, but people have been sharing calibre content server links for many years
      - thaumasiotes 9y ago
        Maybe it's because music and video can be easily consumed during the duration of a visit, whereas books take much longer? "Check out what I have on the server" makes sense for music and much less sense for books.
    - roywiggins 9y ago
      Plex can also transcode, which is more important if your video is on a bunch of different formats that might not have hardware support on all your devices.
- jarman 9y ago
  >As a result, you do not need to install any dedicated book reading/management apps on your phone
- adwf 9y ago
  You still need to remember to sync your new books to your local device at some point. This lets you do it anywhere/anytime, thus avoiding the scenario of leaving for holiday and forgetting entirely.
- Santosh83 9y ago
  Many of my ebooks are anywhere from 50 to 350 Mb. That adds up when you want to load many of them. The downside of course is that you need a good Net connection, unless the Calibre Content Server can be configured to do some kind of 'trimming', while serving the ebooks over the wire. Also a content server mitigates you having to manage and synchronise your ebooks in multiple places. You only need to manage one library. Although I guess any sync application can work just as well for this.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Why are your ebooks so large?
    - Santosh83 9y ago
      They contain a lot of colour images and diagrams. Books on biology and art. Granted other topics including fiction are usually in the ballpark of a few megabytes.
      - breakingcups 9y ago
        Kilobytes even
  - roryisok 9y ago
    Since it's browser based you won't be loading 350mb, you'll be loading one page at a time.
- nirav72 9y ago
  Not all ebooks are small. Especially when they're in PDF. I have some that are upwards of 20-30 mb.
- ytjohn 9y ago
  I used to COPS on my nas. I would add books using calibre, stored on the nas, and served up via COPS. Many apps (I used FBReader) have OPDS capabilities. This is a sort of online catalog which your reader can browse, search, and download books from. I almost never used the online reading feature, but did utilize the catalog concept quite a bit, especially when switching devices. I had a rooted Nook that had both FBReader and Kindle reader installed, giving me a sort of "best of three worlds" reader. I did have to "page sync" manually. I would do this by memorizing a sentence or phrase on one device and then search for it on the other device. https://github.com/seblucas/cops https://github.com/seblucas/cops https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/OPDS https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/OPDS
- washadjeffmad 9y ago
  I use raspis to host a local calibre service to share collaborative materials and resources in office, at home to share media with guests ("hey, take a look at this magazine article/graphic novel/campaign"), and for when I want to make available format shifted content and documents through libreoffice headless (not everyone wants pdf/mobi/docx/etc). I can also throw up another instance to serve to specific groups, like relatives or kids, so they can download and network print deemed safe content like crosswords or recipes. You can probably see why I wouldn't want that on my phone all at once.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  I have 11gb of books and less than 11gb free on my device. Although I don't use the content server I do use calibre companion to wirelessly connect and sync select books based on author or tag. Even if I were syncing the entire library calibre is a nice way to manage metadata and sync and calibre companion is a nice search interface. Also a single central location + backup ensures that your books are unlikely to be lost.
criddell 9y ago
I've always just used Calibre because it's a nice way for me to strip DRM and then archive my books. I've never really used it any kind of active way. Since I buy pretty much everything from Amazon, I already effectively have a content server. Does anybody have a link to an online server (with public domain books)? I'm curious to see what the presentation is like. What's the typography like? Does the screen dim after 30s? What's the browser battery consumption like compared to an ereader app? Long term, my big concern about ebooks is DRM. Amazon's most recent version (KFX) hasn't been cracked and workarounds involve getting Amazon to send you an older version of the file with older, crappier hyphenation and layout. I've started mostly buying DRM free books from Amazon, but they don't make it easy to find them.
- throwanem 9y ago
  I've yet to run into an Amazon-purchased book that Calibre can't liberate, and I haven't even updated Calibre since installing it a few years back. Where are you seeing this turn up? If I need to be looking for alternate sellers or finding some workaround, better to know it ahead of time, I suppose.
  - StevePerkins 9y ago
    KFX just started rolling out in recent months. As the parent post said, the only way right now to "crack" is to dodge it. To have Amazon send you a copy of your book for a older device or older version of the PC software that doesn't support KFX, so they have to send you a crackable format instead. I haven't done anything with Barnes & Noble in quite some time, but I've been curious to try a eBook purchase from there to see if their current DRM is any more friendly.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      That explains why I haven't seen it! I haven't updated Kindle for PC in years, either. Thanks for the info! I might have to give B&N a try myself, although at the moment the only books on my list are preordered.
rufugee 9y ago
I've been searching for a solution to handle the various ebooks I buy and to allow me to annotate them in a centrally stored location. I have kindle purchases, pdfs, epubs, and mobis from various publishers. Moon Reader (http://www.moondownload.com http://www.moondownload.com) would be great if it had a desktop or web-based client...however, it's only supported on Android. If Calibre can give me this experience, it's value just increased immensely. Looking forward to trying this.
- throwanem 9y ago
  "Note: "On initial release, the book reader is fully functional but is missing some more advanced features from the main calibre viewer, such as popup footnotes, bookmarks and annotations in general. These will be added in due course. In fact, the browser reader is designed to eventually replace the main viewer, once it matures."
  - rufugee 9y ago
    Indeed. Awesome news...
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    On mobile I would rather use something that doesn't stop working when I don't have internet access. I kind of expect any browser based reader to be thoroughly mediocre compared to actual clients.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      "The server downloads and stores the book you are reading in an off-line cache so that you can read it even when there is no internet connection."
fest 9y ago
I thought that this was a recently added feature. Turns out it has been there since at least 2011 (based on a forum thread about it). Will have to try it!
- jpindar 9y ago
  The content server has been around for a while, but the ability to read the books in the browser is new.
  - garettmd 9y ago
    Newish, it's been around for at least a few months now, since I first tried it out a few months ago. I got excited seeing the link on HN, thinking it was some new feature added to the server
dancsi 9y ago
It would be great if this feature was extended so that I can sync my books across different Calibre installations on different machines.
- StevePerkins 9y ago
  Hell... yes. That would be a holy grail for me. I store everything in Calibre. When I buy an eBook from Amazon, the first thing I do is strip the DRM. Because even though I'm basically happy with my Kindle library, I don't want to lose all my stuff if they change their policies to something I'm not happy with in the future. So I'm doing most of my library management from a PC, but doing most of my reading from a Kindle Fire. There's no great solution for this, so I've just been taking the books that I'm actively reading and copying them into Dropbox. This is an interesting project, and I'm sure I'll try it out. But I'm skeptical of using a browser-based book reader on my Kindle. Say what you want about Amazon, their native reading app is still the best I've ever seen by far. Meanwhile, even Amazon's own web-based reader is crap.
  - nmaggioni 9y ago
    [Syncthing](https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/) is the perfect tool for the job. Set Calibre's directory on your PC as the main folder, and it'll propagate changes wherever you want.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Can't you just put your library and database on git or Dropbox? It should just work, unless you're accessing them from two devices at the same time.
  - r3bl 9y ago
    Yup, that's exactly what I do. I sync over the database and library over to Nextcloud to have it available on both of the operating systems I'm using. It's also synced automatically to an external hard drive connected to the Raspberry Pi, so I have two backups (one online, one offline) in case something goes wrong.
r3bl 9y ago
They have also made Calibre look a little less crappy on high definition screens, and added a conversion to .docx: https://calibre-ebook.com/new-in/twelve https://calibre-ebook.com/new-in/twelve
- mrmondo 9y ago
  So glad about this, it always looked terrible on any Macs as it wasn't really designed with 2.5K-5K screens in mind.
dubyte 9y ago
I did a little go server to expose an opds basend of a dir structure https://github.com/dubyte/dir2opds https://github.com/dubyte/dir2opds So far I only tested on moonreader
fest 9y ago
It looks like you still need Calibre GUI to add books- this is read-only interface. I was hoping that this could replace my Google Drive folder with various papers on interesting topics I'd like to read.
robk 9y ago
I love Calibre and contribute recipe updates often but don't really see the value of the server. I script things to download via command line and then send to kindle over email. It's more robust than the front end and less hassle than running a server you have to use the browser to access. Given file sizes are small (this week's Economist is about 15mb) it's perfectly Fine to us email.
- roryisok 9y ago
  One guy further up the thread has 350mb ebooks
  - ktta 9y ago
    There are people who have 200GB of books (non-fiction only so none of the fiction books that seem to come out at an alarming rate every day)
    - lfowles 9y ago
      Books that are 350MB individually* Many comic books from recent humble bundles have been around that size, for example.
      - ktta 9y ago
        I am having a bad day understanding comments.
- mcgrath_sh 9y ago
  I use a docker container called CalibreWeb to view my Calibre library on any device. This is useful because I also read comics and Image sends me a .cbz file that I can put into Calibre then download via web to Chunky. The other cool things that the container I use does is set up accouts so it can just email me or my family directly to our kindles. It is wonderful. I will be checking out the built in server because it lets you edit metadata. If I can do that without having to go to my TV which acts as my servef monitor and am able to do it at a desk, I will be STOKED.
peternicky 9y ago
Related but slightly off topic: Am I the only one who is turned off to calibre due to how "heavy" and clunky it feels? I suspect this is due to the program being written in Java. I think the author does great work maintaining the project but frankly wish it was more modern. Perhaps this is a good side project for me to delve into ;) EDIT: thanks to users who clarified that Calibre is written in python.
- terda12 9y ago
  Hey just be glad it's not another one of those even clunkier nodejs "desktop" apps To be honest though, calibre just works for me. Sure it's not a super optimized c++ project but there's so many things it can do. See I just need to transfer ebooks to my kindle, and it does it perfectly every time.
- m_sahaf 9y ago
  For what it's worth, there isn't a single line of Java in the source code. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre
- mark_edward 9y ago
  Calibre is written in Python
- mrmondo 9y ago
  I've used it for years and love its features but yeah the UI and processing always felt heavy like a java app but as someone else noted it's not java - it's python so I suspect the laggy of slowness in the UI might be a side effect of python's single threaded / GIL performance issues. Python can be fast, especially for scientific work but in my experience - I get annoyed by python apps more than other interpreted languages such as Ruby as it often seems to peg a single core to 100% whenever I'm waiting for something to finish processing - again I'm sure it's the way things are written more than the language itself as such but it seems it makes it hard to write python applications that make efficient use of modern multi core CPUs. (I host a lot of Python, Ruby and web apps written in various other languages).
- tomc1985 9y ago
_mj6o 9y ago
Semi-related: I wrote a fb messenger bot [1] which can send any ebooks (including epub) to your kindle. It's handy if you've only got access to an epub, and a bit less clunky than sending via email. [1] https://m.me/kindleebooksender https://m.me/kindleebooksender
- yunyu 9y ago
  Just so you're aware, I added it and Messenger automatically sent the "Get Started" text, and the typing animation ran for about 30 seconds until it stopped with nothing happening.
  - _mj6o 9y ago
    Huh that's weird. I'm looking at the logs, and this is the first time that's ever happened. It will usually just spit out the following introductory text: Hi there! Send me your ebooks and I'll send them to your Kindle. To get started, I'll need you to first tell me your Kindle's email address. This can be found on your Kindle management page: https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/manage?ie=UTF8#pdocSettings (ending with @kindle.com) Will look into this, thanks!
- dabber 9y ago
  I'm not on messenger but that's pretty cool. Is it one at a time? What's the upload limit?
  - _mj6o 9y ago
    You can upload as many files as you want in one go. No limit on the number of ebooks you can send, but the max size for any one file is ~20MB
drumttocs8 9y ago
I've been using Google Play Books as a way to keep my books in the cloud, ready and available. Looking forward to seeing how Calibre works in comparison- hopefully much greater control, with similar functionality.
jl6 9y ago
I am a happy user of Calibre and am grateful for the work the author has done, but I've never heard a convincing explanation of why it is so slow when adding books and updating metadata. 10-15 seconds to add a 500KB ePub. I have apps that will transcode 4K video at a higher throughput than that. What's it doing?!
- walterbell 9y ago
  Is the database on a local or network drive?
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  2 seconds to add a 12MB pdf Calibre 2.85 Funtoo Linux Current reading a file from a ssd that wasn't previously cached or opened prior to test. Same speed with a 300k file therefore obviously time is dominated by whatever calibre does when it adds a book not reading the file.
CaptSpify 9y ago
Having tried to set this up, it's a neat idea, but needs a lot more work before it's ready. Can't logout users, poor interface design, a bunch of JS errors when just trying to load a book (immediate request timeouts, incorrect paths, trying to access missing objects, non-working buttons, etc). I hope it gets better though, because it's a great concept EDIT: also, the forums aren't letting me register due to an error in their captcha being broken, so I can't discuss/submit my bugs there. EDIT2: I was able submit a bug report to lanuchpad.
flappydev 9y ago
can someone tell (test) for me if calibre server serves to a console browser such as elinks ? Thanks
projectorlochsa 9y ago
Calibre is unfortunately a big mess of spaghetti code. I had a problem with speeds when a book is being added. Couldn't get myself out of the soup to fix it.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Is this a function of the number of existing books in the library? Basically does this appear only with large libraries? Might be worth filing a bug I have found the author to be pretty quick in responding.
  - projectorlochsa 9y ago
    Nope. Works slow with 0 books, although I do have about 700, which still is by Big-Oh standards, at least it should be, small.
    - michaelmrose 9y ago
      2422 books here all of the above ought to be small though as noted. I think it would be interesting to profile and figure out which part is slow. Is it equally slow if you run calibredb add in the terminal?
mahyarm 9y ago
I personally just use iBooks as my personal content server / ebook reader. Get your epubs somehow and drag & drop to iBooks. It syncs with all of your devices whiles using your iCloud account. It's very easy, and I've found iBooks the nicest ebook reader yet. I like it better than amazon's kindle apps and you can use an open format.

314 points by dabber 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

blfr 9y ago

I love it in principle but, considering how small most books are relatively to storage space offered by modern devices, even mobile ones, what is the upside of storing content centrally instead of just carrying a copy with you?

criddell 9y ago
You know how everybody shares their tv and movie collections with Plex? I suspect this is a way of doing the same thing with books.
- blfr 9y ago
  Yeah, I get that this is what they're aiming for but home server with Plex is justified by the massive size a video and even music collections can reach.
  - criddell 9y ago
    I think a lot more people share their music and video collections than their book collections despite the file size differences. Maybe it's because there isn't a book-Plex?
    - pigeons 9y ago
      I've never heard of plex except in eve online context, but people have been sharing calibre content server links for many years
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      Maybe it's because music and video can be easily consumed during the duration of a visit, whereas books take much longer? "Check out what I have on the server" makes sense for music and much less sense for books.
  - roywiggins 9y ago
    Plex can also transcode, which is more important if your video is on a bunch of different formats that might not have hardware support on all your devices.
jarman 9y ago
>As a result, you do not need to install any dedicated book reading/management apps on your phone
adwf 9y ago
You still need to remember to sync your new books to your local device at some point. This lets you do it anywhere/anytime, thus avoiding the scenario of leaving for holiday and forgetting entirely.
Santosh83 9y ago
Many of my ebooks are anywhere from 50 to 350 Mb. That adds up when you want to load many of them. The downside of course is that you need a good Net connection, unless the Calibre Content Server can be configured to do some kind of 'trimming', while serving the ebooks over the wire. Also a content server mitigates you having to manage and synchronise your ebooks in multiple places. You only need to manage one library. Although I guess any sync application can work just as well for this.
- walterbell 9y ago
  Why are your ebooks so large?
  - Santosh83 9y ago
    They contain a lot of colour images and diagrams. Books on biology and art. Granted other topics including fiction are usually in the ballpark of a few megabytes.
    - breakingcups 9y ago
      Kilobytes even
- roryisok 9y ago
  Since it's browser based you won't be loading 350mb, you'll be loading one page at a time.
nirav72 9y ago
Not all ebooks are small. Especially when they're in PDF. I have some that are upwards of 20-30 mb.
ytjohn 9y ago
I used to COPS on my nas. I would add books using calibre, stored on the nas, and served up via COPS. Many apps (I used FBReader) have OPDS capabilities. This is a sort of online catalog which your reader can browse, search, and download books from. I almost never used the online reading feature, but did utilize the catalog concept quite a bit, especially when switching devices. I had a rooted Nook that had both FBReader and Kindle reader installed, giving me a sort of "best of three worlds" reader. I did have to "page sync" manually. I would do this by memorizing a sentence or phrase on one device and then search for it on the other device. https://github.com/seblucas/cops https://github.com/seblucas/cops https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/OPDS https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/OPDS
washadjeffmad 9y ago
I use raspis to host a local calibre service to share collaborative materials and resources in office, at home to share media with guests ("hey, take a look at this magazine article/graphic novel/campaign"), and for when I want to make available format shifted content and documents through libreoffice headless (not everyone wants pdf/mobi/docx/etc). I can also throw up another instance to serve to specific groups, like relatives or kids, so they can download and network print deemed safe content like crosswords or recipes. You can probably see why I wouldn't want that on my phone all at once.
michaelmrose 9y ago
I have 11gb of books and less than 11gb free on my device. Although I don't use the content server I do use calibre companion to wirelessly connect and sync select books based on author or tag. Even if I were syncing the entire library calibre is a nice way to manage metadata and sync and calibre companion is a nice search interface. Also a single central location + backup ensures that your books are unlikely to be lost.

criddell 9y ago

I've always just used Calibre because it's a nice way for me to strip DRM and then archive my books. I've never really used it any kind of active way. Since I buy pretty much everything from Amazon, I already effectively have a content server. Does anybody have a link to an online server (with public domain books)? I'm curious to see what the presentation is like. What's the typography like? Does the screen dim after 30s? What's the browser battery consumption like compared to an ereader app? Long term, my big concern about ebooks is DRM. Amazon's most recent version (KFX) hasn't been cracked and workarounds involve getting Amazon to send you an older version of the file with older, crappier hyphenation and layout. I've started mostly buying DRM free books from Amazon, but they don't make it easy to find them.

throwanem 9y ago
I've yet to run into an Amazon-purchased book that Calibre can't liberate, and I haven't even updated Calibre since installing it a few years back. Where are you seeing this turn up? If I need to be looking for alternate sellers or finding some workaround, better to know it ahead of time, I suppose.
- StevePerkins 9y ago
  KFX just started rolling out in recent months. As the parent post said, the only way right now to "crack" is to dodge it. To have Amazon send you a copy of your book for a older device or older version of the PC software that doesn't support KFX, so they have to send you a crackable format instead. I haven't done anything with Barnes & Noble in quite some time, but I've been curious to try a eBook purchase from there to see if their current DRM is any more friendly.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    That explains why I haven't seen it! I haven't updated Kindle for PC in years, either. Thanks for the info! I might have to give B&N a try myself, although at the moment the only books on my list are preordered.

rufugee 9y ago

I've been searching for a solution to handle the various ebooks I buy and to allow me to annotate them in a centrally stored location. I have kindle purchases, pdfs, epubs, and mobis from various publishers. Moon Reader (http://www.moondownload.com http://www.moondownload.com) would be great if it had a desktop or web-based client...however, it's only supported on Android. If Calibre can give me this experience, it's value just increased immensely. Looking forward to trying this.

throwanem 9y ago
"Note: "On initial release, the book reader is fully functional but is missing some more advanced features from the main calibre viewer, such as popup footnotes, bookmarks and annotations in general. These will be added in due course. In fact, the browser reader is designed to eventually replace the main viewer, once it matures."
- rufugee 9y ago
  Indeed. Awesome news...
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  On mobile I would rather use something that doesn't stop working when I don't have internet access. I kind of expect any browser based reader to be thoroughly mediocre compared to actual clients.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    "The server downloads and stores the book you are reading in an off-line cache so that you can read it even when there is no internet connection."

fest 9y ago

I thought that this was a recently added feature. Turns out it has been there since at least 2011 (based on a forum thread about it). Will have to try it!

jpindar 9y ago
The content server has been around for a while, but the ability to read the books in the browser is new.
- garettmd 9y ago
  Newish, it's been around for at least a few months now, since I first tried it out a few months ago. I got excited seeing the link on HN, thinking it was some new feature added to the server

dancsi 9y ago

It would be great if this feature was extended so that I can sync my books across different Calibre installations on different machines.

StevePerkins 9y ago
Hell... yes. That would be a holy grail for me. I store everything in Calibre. When I buy an eBook from Amazon, the first thing I do is strip the DRM. Because even though I'm basically happy with my Kindle library, I don't want to lose all my stuff if they change their policies to something I'm not happy with in the future. So I'm doing most of my library management from a PC, but doing most of my reading from a Kindle Fire. There's no great solution for this, so I've just been taking the books that I'm actively reading and copying them into Dropbox. This is an interesting project, and I'm sure I'll try it out. But I'm skeptical of using a browser-based book reader on my Kindle. Say what you want about Amazon, their native reading app is still the best I've ever seen by far. Meanwhile, even Amazon's own web-based reader is crap.
- nmaggioni 9y ago
  [Syncthing](https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/) is the perfect tool for the job. Set Calibre's directory on your PC as the main folder, and it'll propagate changes wherever you want.
StavrosK 9y ago
Can't you just put your library and database on git or Dropbox? It should just work, unless you're accessing them from two devices at the same time.
- r3bl 9y ago
  Yup, that's exactly what I do. I sync over the database and library over to Nextcloud to have it available on both of the operating systems I'm using. It's also synced automatically to an external hard drive connected to the Raspberry Pi, so I have two backups (one online, one offline) in case something goes wrong.

r3bl 9y ago

They have also made Calibre look a little less crappy on high definition screens, and added a conversion to .docx: https://calibre-ebook.com/new-in/twelve https://calibre-ebook.com/new-in/twelve

mrmondo 9y ago
So glad about this, it always looked terrible on any Macs as it wasn't really designed with 2.5K-5K screens in mind.

dubyte 9y ago

I did a little go server to expose an opds basend of a dir structure https://github.com/dubyte/dir2opds https://github.com/dubyte/dir2opds So far I only tested on moonreader

fest 9y ago

It looks like you still need Calibre GUI to add books- this is read-only interface. I was hoping that this could replace my Google Drive folder with various papers on interesting topics I'd like to read.

robk 9y ago

I love Calibre and contribute recipe updates often but don't really see the value of the server. I script things to download via command line and then send to kindle over email. It's more robust than the front end and less hassle than running a server you have to use the browser to access. Given file sizes are small (this week's Economist is about 15mb) it's perfectly Fine to us email.

roryisok 9y ago
One guy further up the thread has 350mb ebooks
- ktta 9y ago
  There are people who have 200GB of books (non-fiction only so none of the fiction books that seem to come out at an alarming rate every day)
  - lfowles 9y ago
    Books that are 350MB individually* Many comic books from recent humble bundles have been around that size, for example.
    - ktta 9y ago
      I am having a bad day understanding comments.
mcgrath_sh 9y ago
I use a docker container called CalibreWeb to view my Calibre library on any device. This is useful because I also read comics and Image sends me a .cbz file that I can put into Calibre then download via web to Chunky. The other cool things that the container I use does is set up accouts so it can just email me or my family directly to our kindles. It is wonderful. I will be checking out the built in server because it lets you edit metadata. If I can do that without having to go to my TV which acts as my servef monitor and am able to do it at a desk, I will be STOKED.

peternicky 9y ago

Related but slightly off topic: Am I the only one who is turned off to calibre due to how "heavy" and clunky it feels? I suspect this is due to the program being written in Java. I think the author does great work maintaining the project but frankly wish it was more modern. Perhaps this is a good side project for me to delve into ;) EDIT: thanks to users who clarified that Calibre is written in python.

terda12 9y ago
Hey just be glad it's not another one of those even clunkier nodejs "desktop" apps To be honest though, calibre just works for me. Sure it's not a super optimized c++ project but there's so many things it can do. See I just need to transfer ebooks to my kindle, and it does it perfectly every time.
m_sahaf 9y ago
For what it's worth, there isn't a single line of Java in the source code. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre
mark_edward 9y ago
Calibre is written in Python
mrmondo 9y ago
I've used it for years and love its features but yeah the UI and processing always felt heavy like a java app but as someone else noted it's not java - it's python so I suspect the laggy of slowness in the UI might be a side effect of python's single threaded / GIL performance issues. Python can be fast, especially for scientific work but in my experience - I get annoyed by python apps more than other interpreted languages such as Ruby as it often seems to peg a single core to 100% whenever I'm waiting for something to finish processing - again I'm sure it's the way things are written more than the language itself as such but it seems it makes it hard to write python applications that make efficient use of modern multi core CPUs. (I host a lot of Python, Ruby and web apps written in various other languages).
tomc1985 9y ago

_mj6o 9y ago

Semi-related: I wrote a fb messenger bot [1] which can send any ebooks (including epub) to your kindle. It's handy if you've only got access to an epub, and a bit less clunky than sending via email. [1] https://m.me/kindleebooksender https://m.me/kindleebooksender

yunyu 9y ago
Just so you're aware, I added it and Messenger automatically sent the "Get Started" text, and the typing animation ran for about 30 seconds until it stopped with nothing happening.
- _mj6o 9y ago
  Huh that's weird. I'm looking at the logs, and this is the first time that's ever happened. It will usually just spit out the following introductory text: Hi there! Send me your ebooks and I'll send them to your Kindle. To get started, I'll need you to first tell me your Kindle's email address. This can be found on your Kindle management page: https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/manage?ie=UTF8#pdocSettings (ending with @kindle.com) Will look into this, thanks!
dabber 9y ago
I'm not on messenger but that's pretty cool. Is it one at a time? What's the upload limit?
- _mj6o 9y ago
  You can upload as many files as you want in one go. No limit on the number of ebooks you can send, but the max size for any one file is ~20MB

drumttocs8 9y ago

I've been using Google Play Books as a way to keep my books in the cloud, ready and available. Looking forward to seeing how Calibre works in comparison- hopefully much greater control, with similar functionality.

jl6 9y ago

I am a happy user of Calibre and am grateful for the work the author has done, but I've never heard a convincing explanation of why it is so slow when adding books and updating metadata. 10-15 seconds to add a 500KB ePub. I have apps that will transcode 4K video at a higher throughput than that. What's it doing?!

walterbell 9y ago
Is the database on a local or network drive?
michaelmrose 9y ago
2 seconds to add a 12MB pdf Calibre 2.85 Funtoo Linux Current reading a file from a ssd that wasn't previously cached or opened prior to test. Same speed with a 300k file therefore obviously time is dominated by whatever calibre does when it adds a book not reading the file.

CaptSpify 9y ago

Having tried to set this up, it's a neat idea, but needs a lot more work before it's ready. Can't logout users, poor interface design, a bunch of JS errors when just trying to load a book (immediate request timeouts, incorrect paths, trying to access missing objects, non-working buttons, etc). I hope it gets better though, because it's a great concept EDIT: also, the forums aren't letting me register due to an error in their captcha being broken, so I can't discuss/submit my bugs there. EDIT2: I was able submit a bug report to lanuchpad.

flappydev 9y ago

can someone tell (test) for me if calibre server serves to a console browser such as elinks ? Thanks

projectorlochsa 9y ago

Calibre is unfortunately a big mess of spaghetti code. I had a problem with speeds when a book is being added. Couldn't get myself out of the soup to fix it.

michaelmrose 9y ago
Is this a function of the number of existing books in the library? Basically does this appear only with large libraries? Might be worth filing a bug I have found the author to be pretty quick in responding.
- projectorlochsa 9y ago
  Nope. Works slow with 0 books, although I do have about 700, which still is by Big-Oh standards, at least it should be, small.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    2422 books here all of the above ought to be small though as noted. I think it would be interesting to profile and figure out which part is slow. Is it equally slow if you run calibredb add in the terminal?

mahyarm 9y ago

I personally just use iBooks as my personal content server / ebook reader. Get your epubs somehow and drag & drop to iBooks. It syncs with all of your devices whiles using your iCloud account. It's very easy, and I've found iBooks the nicest ebook reader yet. I like it better than amazon's kindle apps and you can use an open format.