21 ms·

Calibre 4.0

552 points by sprague 7y ago

SamuelAdams 7y ago
Does this still insist on making a copy of all my books on my local hard drive? I have about 10,000+ books on a network share. It would be nice to be able to search through them and download just the ones I'm interested in, but past versions of Calibre require the book to be downloaded to your local HDD before it pulls any metadata.
- virtualritz 7y ago
  Just mount the network share where Calibre expects its library and be ok with the way it organizes the books in there. No local copy happening then.
  - ratherbefuddled 7y ago
    Calibre 3 advised very strongly in the docs not to put libraries on network shares.
    - konart 7y ago
      Well, I would imagine this being a blocker for many people who have their ssd only big enough to host the OS an apps + some space for 'just in case'.
      - kungtotte 7y ago
        Or people who have let's say an ebook reader, a phone, a laptop, and maybe a desktop that they want to share books between and don't want to eat up multiple GB of storage on each device by duplicating their library everywhere.
        MagnumOpus 7y ago
        That's what the http content server is for?
  - ivanb 7y ago
    This is a bad advice. Calibre (as of version 3) doesn't support this mode of operation. If the network disconnects you will most likely corrupt your library database.
    - pwinnski 7y ago
      This is bad advice. Using Calibre while knowing that certain circumstances surrounding a network disconnect might corrupt your library database is better than rejecting Calibre out of hand since it doesn't support network libraries well. Best of all would be in Calibre's library handling weren't so finicky, but in the absence of that, I use Calibre with a remote share and I'm just very careful about library backups, how long I leave it running, and am patient with the slowness.
    - peterloron 7y ago
      How often does your network disconnect? Sure, it would be great if the backend storage system was better at handling atomic operations, but I don't think this is really a huge problem assuming you're not using a really crappy network. I run Calibre with the library mounted from a NAS. Works fine for my ~2000 book collection. Not as speedy as local SSD, but it is ok.
      - nirvdrum 7y ago
        Does that work okay with multiple machines connected at the same time? I've been worried about what happens when there's a write conflict to the DB. I'd really like a way to easily share and manage my eBook library from both my laptop and desktop.
        xbmcuser 7y ago
        You can now at least manage the library through the web interface because of the new server.
      - xbmcuser 7y ago
        If I recall correctly you can have the actual database file on the ssd while the books on the network share that would probably improve the speed a bit.
- _coeus 7y ago
  Could you tell calibre to open the network share as a library? Not quite the same, I'm currently using calibre with a library on a remote server (albeit samba share over VPN) and it doesn't download the books to my local device, unless i choose to save them from my library to it.
- Hitton 7y ago
  I don't think so, but there is inbuilt calibre-server which should suffice for most of your needs and apparently it was improved in last version. There is also calibre-web[0] project. And on Calibre's wikipedia page it lists quite a few Calibre related applications which could do what you want. [0]: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
- rexpop 7y ago
  I have had plenty of success running Calibre over sshfs.
umvi 7y ago
Calibre CLI is awesome. I've used it to convert ebooks to PDF
robk 7y ago
Calibre is so darn useful. It gets hate for the eclectic ui but it's absolutely essential for any ebook Downloaders imo. Kovid is a real hero for as much work as he does on this. He must spend several hours a day every day of the year on it.
- bambax 7y ago
  Yeah, the UI is just bizarre but it doesn't really matter. What matters is whether the update supports DRM stripping extensions. Can't find that info anywhere; won't update without knowing...
  - afiori 7y ago
    That is because for legal reason it is better if they stay completely unsupported from the main developer
  - Santosh83 7y ago
    You can ask this in the forums and someone ought to have tested the plugin with 4.0 by now...
  - jpindar 7y ago
    I just downloaded a book from Amazon and was able to convert it from azw3 to epub.
- elwell 7y ago
  Got to respect dedication and hard work. But why doesn't his homepage support Chrome? https://kovidgoyal.net https://kovidgoyal.net Edit: I was referring to the alert() upon loading the site: W A R N I N G! Your browser is not supported by this site. I cannot guarantee that things will work as they should. Consider downloading either Mozilla >=1.4 or Internet Explorer >= 6
  - bla3 7y ago
    Works fine over here.
captn3m0 7y ago
Is it switching to Python 3?
- duckerude 7y ago
  Yes. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/blob/master/README.python3 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/blob/master/README.pyt... https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/pull/870 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/pull/870 > Yeah there are not a lot of low hanging fruit left. Now one just has to get betas out and have people test them and report bugs. And plugin developers use the betas to port their plugins. But it is going to have to wait until after the webengine migration is done and calibre 4 is released.
  - slacka 7y ago
    This is great news. Last I heard, the author of Calibre's said: > I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself. Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase. [1] > calibre has half a MILLION lines of python and python extension code...calibre has lots and lots of code that deals with bytes -- network protocols, binary file formats, etc. Python 3 is simply worse than python 2 for this use case. It has a crippled bytes type among other unfelicities. [2] > There is just no way that calibre is ever going to be ported to python 3. [3] Glad to see some outsider, flaviut, stepped to to the challenge and kovidgoyal accepted his pull request. Looking at the pull request it seems that kovidgoyal's fear about external native functions, network protocols, binary file formats, and python3's byte type was not so insurmountable. [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107 [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1456642 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1456642 [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1756458 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1756458
  - driverdan 7y ago
    870 has been open for over a year. It's clearly not high on the priority list.
    - icebraining 7y ago
konart 7y ago
Gonna give it another try on my mac. All previous attempts have failed because of how slow it was and many crashes. The reader was terrible too.
- sigzero 7y ago
  I use it on my Mac all the time. I've never had it crash on me. The reader...is not so good.
  - konart 7y ago
    Some faulty pdf\epub files maybe, but none of them crash any of my other readers, so... I gave up at some point. I love Calibre as a project, but for now I can't really say the same for the product.
- copperx 7y ago
  When I had a Mac, I hated the Calibre reader for its slowness, and honestly, it was unnecessary because iBooks is pretty great regarding typography and formatting. However, on Windows, I've found that the Calibre reader is the best. I've found that Adobe Digital Editions and the Kindle reader have terrible formatting on a non-mobile screen.
agumonkey 7y ago
Calibre ui made me stay away, I don't mind different but sometimes you do need to get a bit more mainstream. Blender 2.80 did this move and it helped a lot I believe.
- mmsimanga 7y ago
  Perhaps I have a different use case. I spend very little time in Calibre but loads more time on my Kobo reader. The time I spend is so little that I have never really noticed the user interface. I use Calibre to transfer books to and from my reader and occasionally download meta data for books. I know Calibre has functionality to download blogs and so on but I use Kobo's integration with Pocket[0] to read online articles. [0]https://getpocket.com/ https://getpocket.com/
  - esseti 7y ago
    do you integrate with pocket? i tried but miserably failed. it results in a mess of files and data that i can't read. do you have a source link or good link on how to setup?
    - jbeales 7y ago
      On your Kobo go to Hamburger Menu > Settings > Accounts, then do what it asks to sign in to Pocket. Once that's done you get a "My Articles" option in the hamburger menu, and that's your Pocket content.
      - esseti 7y ago
        damn, i'm using the kindle. i wish it has this easiness of integration.
        jbeales 7y ago
        Thought you were on Kobo for some reason. Might be worth grabbing a cheap one as a Pocket + Overdrive device, it's a pretty great combo ;)
jimstr 7y ago
If you like it and want to support development, the main developer is on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/kovidgoyal https://www.patreon.com/kovidgoyal
- ru999gol 7y ago
  you might want to read up on the controversies surrounding him first though
  - dexterdog 7y ago
    Do you mean because he's arrogant? Who cares? The software is great and saves me a ton of time and money.
    - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
      I care. As developers we have the moral responsibility of not putting people at risk even if we don't have the legal one. The author has zero care for security and the product had plenty of vulnerabilities. This harms users and also other people. Furthermore, poor behaviors attracts blame on the whole open source community.
      - mmsimanga 7y ago
        Fork it.
        eeZah7Ux 7y ago
        The codebase is horrible. I use something else.
        nieve 7y ago
        A something else that you're avoiding naming?
2rsf 7y ago
Is there a good replacement for Calibre ? one the converts from any format to any format, strips DRM (so I heard), adapts to different readers and if you really have to allows you to read (though the reader looks terrible)
KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
Literally the worst damn mandatory app that I need to have installed on every computer.
Tomte 7y ago
I relly want to like and use Calibre, but none of my several tries to get started were successful. No idea how to browse my Kindle library, how to browse books on my Kindle, or do anything else. It's a totally non-intuitive GUI.
- calcifer 7y ago
  When you plug your Kindle in, a big Kindle icon appears on the top menu and you can browse the contents by clicking on it. How is that unintuitive?
  - Tomte 7y ago
    Okay. Where are my bought books not currently on Kindle? I've already logged into my Kindle account.
    - calcifer 7y ago
      Amazon doesn't provide any APIs for querying your non-device Kindle library, so naturally you won't see those books in Calibre. But, you can integrate Amazon's email-to-Kindle feature with Calibre [1] so new books are automatically added to your Calibre library as well. [1] http://blog.calibre-ebook.com/2017/01/managing-your-kindle-library-is-easy.html http://blog.calibre-ebook.com/2017/01/managing-your-kindle-l...
      - Tomte 7y ago
        Okay. Would be great if Calibre told you that. After it prompts me for my Amazon password I sure expect those books to show up. As I said, the UI/UX is very confusing.
majkinetor 7y ago
For people who don't like its desktop GUI, you can also run integrated web server and access/edit books via browser.
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
There have been complaints about the UI since forever, and the developer is well-known for bristling at any constructive criticism and telling people to either accept the way he likes things, or simply don't use the application. Consequently, I am surprised that no one has forked Calibre, even if it was just to kept the backend but simply overhaul the UI. Something that I would like to see in a future version of Calibre (or a fork) is news-download recipes changed to a plugin system that can be updated separately of Calibre itself. It is not ideal that if a news recipe becomes obsolete due to changes on the respective news website, one has to upgrade Calibre to a new version. For users whose distros package only a certain version of Calibre, it would be nice to continue running that distro-supported version but simply be able to update the news recipes from within the Calibre settings.
- TheCraiggers 7y ago
  The code base is a nightmare and still uses Python 2. I'm not surprised it hasn't been forked, although I'm a little surprised it hasn't been replaced. Frankly, the software is just fine for most needs, and the person in charge is still active, so the desire to replace it just hasn't materialized. EDIT: Looks like somebody actually took the initiative to port it to Python 3.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    Calling the codebase a nightmare is the understatement of the year. I tried forking it at some point. I don't think I could reasonably even attempt describe the codebase in a way that wouldn't get me banned from HN, and most likely the rest of the internet. Needless to say I gave up.
    - Hendrikto 7y ago
      That makes me very curious. Could you write a blogpost on the topic by any chance?
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
Great app. I know everyone likes to extol the UNIX "A program should do one thing and do it well" philosophy, but Calibre is one of the few "monolithic" apps I can think of that justifies the bulk. It does everything you could want it to do regarding eBooks: viewing, editing, management, delivery, etc.
- paol 7y ago
  Don't forget DRM stripping.
  - AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
    I had mentally lumped that under "management," but maybe I should've added "conversion" as a category. Certainly DeDRM Tools has been worth the price of admission alone.
  - hiram112 7y ago
    Do you know if the various 'add-ons' that were required to strip Kindle of DRM are still available and updated. Years ago, I enjoyed stripping my own purchased Kindle books to ePub with Calibre, so I could read them on my non-Kindle device, but it wasn't so easy as the patches became harder to find, and Amazon would constantly change their DRM.
    - skrowl 7y ago
      That's the primary reason I use it. Strip DRM from my purchased books and then upload to Google Books for viewing on all my devices.
      - michaelmrose 7y ago
        Have you considered that maybe you shouldn't be buying DRM content in the first place? If you are going to spend money buy a physical book and consider passing it on after you have read it if you don't want to reread or refer to later.
kennyadam 7y ago
Lots of people being very critical of a unique piece of software that is super powerful, free and regularly updated. Seemingly because their big SV brains can't handle a clunky interface. What a bunch of entitled jerks you sound like.
- _coveredInBees 7y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Calibre is Kovid's labor of love and he wouldn't be so active on it if it weren't, especially considering there is little to no monetary incentive for him to spend the amount of time he does on it. It's also open source. Literally every whiner has the opportunity to fork it and do with it what they please, but instead, they just want to sit by the sidelines and criticize him for his decisions. As Neil Gaiman so aptly wrote on his blog [1] - "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch". I feel the same needs to be reiterated in this case - "Kovid Goyal is not your bitch". Edit - Ouch, OP, I guess you struck a nerve with the HN crowd by saying it like it is... 1: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.htm...
  - MagnumOpus 7y ago
    Comparing Goyal to GRRM is desultory. GRRM charged his book buyers a whole bunch of money in installments for decades, and when he got rich out of these fans, he happily screws them over by refusing to finish his story. Goyal provided a unique and complete piece of software, charging exactly zero, and continues to improve it even a decade after it released.
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      I don't know much about GRRM, so are you referring to general book sales when you mention "whole bunch of money in installments"? If you start consuming an unfinished story and then entitle yourself to an ending, that's 100% your fault. As an outside observer who never even watched the show, GoT fans are just tantrum-throwing assholes. When you spend $X on a book, you are just buying that book, not that book + liens on the author's future output + a guarantee that there will be any. Such weird entitlement in that community. Also, you presumably also demand a really good book as well so that he doesn't "screw you over" (cmon) with a bad book where the fans now recommend dodging the final books (Rendezvous with Rama, Wheel of Time, etc).
sigzero 7y ago
If you use it, I hope you support the author.
billfruit 7y ago
An issue in the past was that books loaded into Kindles through Calibre appeared as 'personal documents' rather than as a 'book' in the Kindle, upsetting causing the reading state sync to not work if you were reading the same book for example through the Kindle app in your smartphone also, very annoying, and goes against the promise of ebooks. I hope they have a fix for this.
- wahlis 7y ago
  That must be a very long time ago. It worked fine with my Kindle 3 which was released in 2010
- JonLim 7y ago
  I've gone through the motions of emailing the book to my Kindle, which allows it to be downloadable on other Kindle devices or the app, and also syncs up reading location. Doesn't work for huge books, but has been a great boon for most books!
  - colomon 7y ago
    Right, that's actually my standard Calibre use case: Load book into Calibre. Convert it to MOBI if needed. E-mail it to my Kindle address. It then pops up everywhere I have a Kindle app, mostly my iPad and Galaxy S9. Huh. Now that I'm thinking about it, it seems like this would be even easier to do from the command line...
    - input_sh 7y ago
      If you fill out the "Sharing books by email" in Calibre's settings, you can just right-click a book -> "Connect/share", "Email to example@kindle.com". It'll do the conversion for you (if necessary). I'd advise a separate email address for this functionality.
thrower123 7y ago
Surprised to see so much hate for Calibre's UI here. I'm not sure I understand. I can load damn near anything that pretends to be an ebook into it, and then I can double-click on the row for that item, and it pops open a reader window. That's all I need it to do. At least on Windows, I've been pretty underwhelmed with other ebook viewer apps I have tried. The various Kindle apps tend to blow for anything you don't obtain through Amazon, and often don't work great for syncing even Kindle ebooks. I still have a bunch of Microsoft Reader .lit files kicking around, and Calibre is one of the only things that will open them. The Calibre PDF reader is pretty terrible, but setting is up to pop open to Adobe or whatever instead doesn't take much ceremony.
- hestipod 7y ago
  Seeing how many people prioritize fashion over function...in this topic, and life in general, depresses me. Calibre works very well and you have people saying they "can't" use it because it's not pretty enough. It's one guy, does SO much, and it's free. I don't care what it looks like. It's amazing.
- sundarurfriend 7y ago
  I'm not exactly surprised because that was my original response to the UI as well, several years ago, but the surprising thing to me now is why exactly I considered it such a terrible UI back then. One thing I can remember is that if you start a conversion or a download, often it silently starts in the background with apparently no indication anything is going on, unless you know to look for "Jobs" in the lower right corner. But I think I had a bunch more complaints which have apparently become invisible to me now.
ryanmercer 7y ago
I love Calibre, been using it since way back in my kindle keyboard days.
snvzz 7y ago
Calibre does the trick. It's a shame there's no good hardware ereader to use it with. Every e-ink device is closed hardware, runs only closed software, and is trying to lock you into some DRM-rich ecosystem.
- codq 7y ago
  FWIW, I've never had a problem with my kindle, which has never been connected to the internet. Even the 'special offers' dissipate after being in airplane mode for a certain length of time. I see no value in using any online feature—I've never taken my kindle off of airplane mode, and use Calibre to load all content.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    I wouldn't have paid for the ad-free version of the kindle had I known it was just a lock-screen promo for a book. I'm exposed to so few new books in my life that I kinda like the feature. Then again, I also wouldn't have bought the ad-free version had I known I was going to keep it in airplane-mode since the day I bought it. Back when I first bought my kindle and made this decision, I was thinking the ads would be something like a "checkout these deals on Bose speakers!" interstitials every three page turns.
- Hitton 7y ago
  Actually there are ways to install software on many ereaders. About 10 years ago I used PRS+ on Sony's PRS-500. Nowadays Sony's ereaders are pretty much dead, but there is alternative software for Kindle, Kobo and others. By quick googling I just found: https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/ccoffing/OcherBook https://github.com/ccoffing/OcherBook https://github.com/lgeek/okreader https://github.com/lgeek/okreader https://fread.ink/ https://fread.ink/ Also: https://onyxboox.com/ https://onyxboox.com/ - this is Android so I guess it's bit more hackable https://the-digital-reader.com/2015/06/19/is-the-booq-cervantes-the-first-open-source-ereader/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2015/06/19/is-the-booq-cervan...
  - 7y ago
corbet 7y ago
Does it still phone home every time you fire it up?
the_af 7y ago
Kudos to Calibre and its author. It's one of the first programs I install on any Linux machine I own. Yes, the UI is a bit quirky, but who cares? I spend my time actually reading the books, and for managing my library and converting between formats Calibre is ace. That useful software like this exists makes me very happy.
bananamerica 7y ago
Calibre is the worst piece of software thar I also happen to love.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pwinnski 7y ago
Surveying this thread, I see an amazingly wide range of uses for Calibre. Yes, the UI is really bad, perhaps especially on a Mac, but it is so mind-bogglingly good at so many different things that it is difficult to believe that Kovid Goyal manages all of this by himself. Other people have different use-cases than I do, and Calibre satisfies us all. Excellent, amazing, wonderful work, Mr. Goyal!
- ece 7y ago
  This used to be called function over form.
fortran77 7y ago
I love Calibre. Yes, It's a little clunky, but it solves problems nobody else does. I have a lot of eBooks, because I built a DIY Book Scanner and scanned all my books in a couple of years ago.
zczc 7y ago
Just updated. Alas, the new viewer still does not provide nondestructive viewing. Open file, press PgDn, exit, and the viewed file is silently changed. The viewer writes current position in the viewed file itself (META-INF/calibre_bookmarks.txt). UPDATE: just found out there is now a checkbox in the viewer preferences: "Keep a copy of annotations/bookmarks in the e-book file, for easy sharing". If unchecked, the viewed files are kept intact. Nice!
- Santosh83 7y ago
  Where on Earth is this setting inside the Calibre preferences menu?? I just spent about 5 minutes looking and simply couldn't find it anywhere!
  - thesimp 7y ago
    It is not in the Calibre preferences but in the Viewer preferences. Open an ebook in the Viewer and while in the Viewer press ESC to get to the menu, then the option is under Miscellaneous.
    - coldacid 7y ago
      Of course. So you still have to destructively edit your books before you can tell Calibre to stop destructively editing your books. Genius!
      - pritambaral 7y ago
        I just checked and I can open the E-Book Viewer standalone, without a book. I also checked that the destructive edit happens upon viewer close, not open or page turn.
        Santosh83 7y ago
        That behaviour was for the old viewer with version 3. The new version 4 one reverts to what GP is saying: you have to open an ebook before you can even access the settings through pressing ESC or right click. Also the version 4 ebook viewer is step back from the old one, as it stands now. It is slower, more resource hungry and buggier. The only arguable improvement is it now uses a 'flat' theme that doesn't look dated. I'm even considering reverting back to Calibre 3 because of the ebook viewer randomly freezing on large epubs with equations and so on.
ausjke 7y ago
I wish ebook-viewer added highlight annotation capability, I can use PDF viewers to highlight texts but not ebook-viewer, so I had to convert all of epub etc to PDF under calibre. for technical books annotation is essential for me, it's my notes so I do not need re-read the book from start to end each time.
mwsfc 7y ago
Well, given the subject here, it seems relevant to ask how everyone is organizing their libraries in Calibre. Is there such a thing as "best practices"? Would really love to hear ideas as I've found library mgmt in Calibre to be cumbersome, sluggish, and rather none intuitive compared to something like Plex for movies & TV shows.
- dzmien 7y ago
  The library function is my biggest gripe about calibre. It makes you copy all of your ebooks into a new directory if you want to use it.
- input_sh 7y ago
  Check out Calibre-Web (https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/ https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/). I'm only mentioning it because you've mentioned Plex, because it comes with a theme that's a clone of Plex: https://github.com/leram84/layer.Cake/tree/master/caliBlur https://github.com/leram84/layer.Cake/tree/master/caliBlur
QuadrupleA 7y ago
It's interesting, my complaint with Calibre was always performance rather than UI - it can be surprisingly slow for processing & converting mostly-text formats. But the sheer number of features & formats makes it worth the downsides. Indeed it's probably a good reminder to me as a developer, I can get too focused on making things snappy, efficient and pretty where perhaps I could have delivered twice the features if I took a little more of an 80/20 approach.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  I am very curious if the performance problems come from the architecture, the code or from being written in Python.
ValentineC 7y ago
My (only!) gripe with Calibre is that it checks for updates, but doesn't have a feature to automatically update after that. Thankfully, I just make do with running: brew cask reinstall calibre
Havoc 7y ago
Are the DRM removal plugins compatible with v4?
filmgirlcw 7y ago
As others have said, this is an app I have an absolute love/hate relationship with. I really appreciate all the work the dev puts into it, but it’s a slow app that just isn’t very usable. It’s not just that it’s ugly, it’s that it’s poorly designed. And yet, nothing else even comes close to doing what it does. I even wrote out a spec for a similar app that was built using a more modern framework/usable interface, that some friends and I could potentially build, but the task was so monumental and the return on investment (and I’m not even talking about money) seemed so small, we shelved it. That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that DeDRM is the reason a lot of us use the app — I know it’s a key for me — and that does have an excellent CLI tool. There are also some good iOS apps that work with the book server, for accessing lots of ebooks. Even then tho, those apps are labors of love where the core audience is both critical and shockingly cheap (I say shockingly b/c many pay thousands on ebooks and ereaders a year — it’s an enthusiast market). One look at the MobileReads forums (a fantastic resource) for any specific app, and I kind of understand why we don’t have a “good” Calibre that is OSS for paid for that matter.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  > modern framework/usable interface, Let me guess, some Electron monstrosity that looks like a web site but runs on a desktop?
  - horsawlarway 7y ago
    Let me guess, you're the type of person that doesn't understand ROI? Let me guess, you'd rather have a holy war about shit your users don't give a flying fuck about? Let me guess, you want it to run in QT and use nothing but C++ despite the fact that it will take 4 times longer to reach users, and when it does it will be less stable, less usable, and harder to hire resources for? But it's cool, cause electron is slow, amirite guise!!?!?!?!
    - tomc1985 7y ago
      Honestly if someone doesn't like Calibre so much it would be better to contribute to it, or fork it. And yes, electron sucks and it ruined desktop software because a bunch of business brats have to cut costs on software craftsmanship. This "modern UI" crap is a lie. Software using native widgets (or even JVM) is fine, but hey take it to extremes
_el 7y ago
Other commenters are pretty ruthless. Calibre's great for managing e-books and putting them onto an e-reader. It works reliably and I've never had an issue. Imagine writing a useful (free!) tool and the best thing people can say is "well, the code is a nightmare and the UI is ugly". Shameful - remember that there's a real, hard-working person on the other side of your comments.
- nottorp 7y ago
  Yeah, what's the problem with the UI? You use it 3 minutes to convert/upload a book that will keep you busy for hours. I really don't think they need a redesign or anything.
zmix 7y ago
While Calibre is not what I'd consider to be a "beautiful" program, I do not care. It's functionality is unbeaten. What I really hate about it is the directory structure, it forces upon you. I have my books sorted in topical directories and Calibre sorts them by author. That sucks. If this single issue would be addressed, I couldn't be happier with Calibre, especially, since Kovid is a very helpful person.
- pnutjam 7y ago
  Do you tag your books? The metadata can be very helpful. You could also consider libraries by topic.
  - zmix 7y ago
    I tag my files on macOS since the OpenMeta days. But I refuse to access any library with an application frontend, it's the file system or nothing. These Librarian apps are good for metadata management. That's what I use them for. However, I am mostly on Windows, these days, so no chance for filesystem tags, even worse now, that I have all my eBooks on a home server.
    - pnutjam 7y ago
      The DB frontend is very useful for metadata, short descriptions, and finding duplicates. I run a headless version of Calibre in the cloud, so I can read in the browser and do other stuff.
    - _Microft 7y ago
      Afaik there are tools that use Alternate Data Streams (ADS) to store metadata for files (on NTFS drives).
scarejunba 7y ago
I used this for a bit ages ago. Useful tool. Funnily, I think it's a great example of how building some things is way harder than people think. For instance, everyone has complained about Calibre since the beginning of time. Code, UI, everything. And yet, no one has come up with a replacement. Maybe pandoc captures some use cases. It's like OpenSSL in that respect alone. Everyone wants something like it but it's too hard to build so they'll just use what they think is an inferior solution (when really it's superiority as a solution is that it exists).
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Well put. Another comment here exemplifies this by reminiscing how they worked up a design draft for their Calibre competitor yet never even started it because it's just too hard and unrewarding. I also think people are too hard on the author's personality quirks. Yes, they can be grating, but this quirky person is presumably the sort of person who can build it and continue shepherding and maintaining it for over a decade. None of us with our infinite patience and epic social skillz apparently are doing it. How many here have even maintained a popular, complex product for any real duration? Or had to be your own product's customer service agent? It's not easy. I've seen people break down just fielding customer demands at Target during one summer job.
michaelmrose 7y ago
I love calibre but I find that a lot of the time I want to open a recently read book or one I know by name. Cold starting calibre, finding the book, opening the book, minimizing or closing calibre is a 4 step process that takes 15-30 seconds. Further it takes up about 250MB in memory to avoid that 4-8 second wait for it to start. By default without specifying a field it finds results in text describing the book which is almost never what I want as well. Calibre has a cli interface calibredb. One could use that but it would be vastly more cumbersome than using the gui. It isn't at all designed to be used interactively unless you like typing switches like --for-machine and mixing in a lot of jq in preparation for opening a book. What I really wanted to do was type a quick command with a search query just like I would type at the calibre search box have it pop open a list that I could narrow by typing hit enter and open a book. One step and 1 - 10 seconds to open a book instead of 15-30 without a process taking up ram all the time for no reason. https://github.com/michaelmrose/rdr https://github.com/michaelmrose/rdr Written in clojure and compiled to a portable executable with graal next to no requirements outside of rofi or dmenu and currently being tied to linux. Could presumably be be compiled for mac if I had one. It uses 19MB of ram for the and starts about instantly. -q [query] => pass query with the same syntax as calibredb or calibregui accepts -l => open the last book read -r => filter the most recent 30 distinct books opened via rdr via rofi or dmenu query string => If a string is passed in without -q -h -l -r specified it is treated as a query -o [file] => open with default reader and record in recent reads if part of a calibre library -S [options] => save options passed to disk Options -p [list] => list of formats in order of preference eg pdf,epub,mobi -k [number] => number of recent reads to keep --port PORT --server URL --user USER --password PASSWORD" The recommended usage is to pass the desired defaults with -S then omit them on future invocations. Example: rdr -S -L /path/to/library -p pdf,epub,mobi -k 10 -p 8090 --user me --password hunter2 then rdr -q query string here I currently have a keybinding tied directly to rdr -l and rdr -r and use it all the time. 1 button to go back to the most recently read book is nice. I'd also love any feedback anyone wanted to provide about the code.
crooked-v 7y ago
What I'd really like is an iOS app that can plug directly into a Calibre library (via iCloud or Dropbox or whatever). It seems like everything that's existed in that space requires an explicit download step rather than being able to sync/cache stuff in the background.
cheaprentalyeti 7y ago
Not meaning to sound ungrateful, but does anyone know of any _good_ dark themes for Calibre's ebook viewer? I found one on the web, but found it's generally easier to just use calibre to manage the files, but Atril or something similar to actually view it. This seems to especially be the case for books with code snippets and the like, like the ones I'm often getting via the Humble Bundle store.
qwerty456127 7y ago
I wish it was more unix-way-ish so I could write my own UI with just the features I need, my own back-end (I'd like a less-bloated library storage convention without directories for every book, without title transliteration, with support for multiple files of same format (e.g. .code.zip, audio.zip, .html.zip) for plain HTML files and embedded metadata) and ony use Calibre for tagging and conversion (with conversion customization, and I can also see no reason why conversion tools should not be a separate project). Calibre is by far the best yet still could be made a way better.
nirvdrum 7y ago
I appreciate letting me know what the license is, but I'm not convinced I should be required to agree to the terms of it before the (Windows) installer progresses. I'm not redistributing anything as a consumer of the software.
suchoudh 7y ago
This is one of those things that has made my life easier. Especially avoiding multiple copies of same pdf files. It helps me organize my e-Library much better than I have my home library. Thanks for the updated version
prvc 7y ago
Since we're sharing gripes, I wish it would only push updates when there is a significant user-facing change (such as a fix for a major bug). It's not worth the bother to update the app manually merely in order to gain a new formula for the automatic news downloader. Feels like I spend more time installing the program than using it.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  The issue here is compounded because you typically aren't using Calibre daily, so if you launch it once a month, there's basically a new version available every single time you launch it. I use Homebrew on macOS and Chocolatey on Windows to keep it updated, they both work well.
nirav72 7y ago
calibre was one of the first freeware apps that I donated money too. Been using it for years for storing manuals and books in pdf format
rexpop 7y ago
I absolutely love this program! I am so grateful for it. I read voraciously, and could not educate myself without Calibre.
nieve 7y ago
Full disclosure: I'm a sql & emacs geek so that may warp my views on interfaces. I suspect there are a lot of features that are used by no more than 5-10% of users, but we'd scream bloody murder if they were taken away. No two of my heavy Calibre user friends use exactly the same set of features and we're always swapping tricks. Calibre does a decent job for so many use cases that I'm not sure there's any way to have a completely coherent UI that covers them all. That doesn't mean it's not krufty and occasionally frustrating, but I've no exaggeration never seen an alternative that did even 20% of what I wanted. Calibre can seem pretty overgrown and I used for years without missing features like search-based virtual libraries, but now an ebook management app that doesn't let me slice and dice with that kind of power. For me it's a mix of how easy it is switching between tabbed views like new last 30 days, unread (custom tag automatically added on import), various reading lists from the Reading List plugin, author sets I tend to read together, missing metadata, etc. and the composability of virtual libraries. When you combine virtual libraries with the slightly misleadingly named FanFicFare plugin's metadata it's a lot easier to keep track of both original[1] & fan fictions from dozens of sites (out of several hundred supported) and separate it out from regular books. Similarly the Reading List & Import List plugins are great for pulling in info from outside calibre, but they need a lot of the features that people generally ignore to do their jobs. On the flip side most people don't seem to use multiple real libraries and they are great for topic-specific book collections or when I really don't want to see a book again, but don't want to just delete it. Even simple things like being able to arbitrarily color column text based on filters I ignored until I realized lets me set the titles of all books missing a description red. It makes cleaning up my library easier, but nothing else I've tried has a similar features. [1] https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFare/wiki/SupportedSites https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFare/wiki/SupportedSites It's the only thing that makes reading fiction from spacebattles.com not soul-destroyingly annoying.

552 points by sprague 7y ago

Does this still insist on making a copy of all my books on my local hard drive? I have about 10,000+ books on a network share. It would be nice to be able to search through them and download just the ones I'm interested in, but past versions of Calibre require the book to be downloaded to your local HDD before it pulls any metadata.

virtualritz 7y ago
Just mount the network share where Calibre expects its library and be ok with the way it organizes the books in there. No local copy happening then.
- ratherbefuddled 7y ago
  Calibre 3 advised very strongly in the docs not to put libraries on network shares.
  - konart 7y ago
    Well, I would imagine this being a blocker for many people who have their ssd only big enough to host the OS an apps + some space for 'just in case'.
    - kungtotte 7y ago
      Or people who have let's say an ebook reader, a phone, a laptop, and maybe a desktop that they want to share books between and don't want to eat up multiple GB of storage on each device by duplicating their library everywhere.
      - MagnumOpus 7y ago
        That's what the http content server is for?
- ivanb 7y ago
  This is a bad advice. Calibre (as of version 3) doesn't support this mode of operation. If the network disconnects you will most likely corrupt your library database.
  - pwinnski 7y ago
    This is bad advice. Using Calibre while knowing that certain circumstances surrounding a network disconnect might corrupt your library database is better than rejecting Calibre out of hand since it doesn't support network libraries well. Best of all would be in Calibre's library handling weren't so finicky, but in the absence of that, I use Calibre with a remote share and I'm just very careful about library backups, how long I leave it running, and am patient with the slowness.
  - peterloron 7y ago
    How often does your network disconnect? Sure, it would be great if the backend storage system was better at handling atomic operations, but I don't think this is really a huge problem assuming you're not using a really crappy network. I run Calibre with the library mounted from a NAS. Works fine for my ~2000 book collection. Not as speedy as local SSD, but it is ok.
    - nirvdrum 7y ago
      Does that work okay with multiple machines connected at the same time? I've been worried about what happens when there's a write conflict to the DB. I'd really like a way to easily share and manage my eBook library from both my laptop and desktop.
      - xbmcuser 7y ago
        You can now at least manage the library through the web interface because of the new server.
    - xbmcuser 7y ago
      If I recall correctly you can have the actual database file on the ssd while the books on the network share that would probably improve the speed a bit.
_coeus 7y ago
Could you tell calibre to open the network share as a library? Not quite the same, I'm currently using calibre with a library on a remote server (albeit samba share over VPN) and it doesn't download the books to my local device, unless i choose to save them from my library to it.
Hitton 7y ago
I don't think so, but there is inbuilt calibre-server which should suffice for most of your needs and apparently it was improved in last version. There is also calibre-web[0] project. And on Calibre's wikipedia page it lists quite a few Calibre related applications which could do what you want. [0]: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
rexpop 7y ago
I have had plenty of success running Calibre over sshfs.

umvi 7y ago

Calibre CLI is awesome. I've used it to convert ebooks to PDF

robk 7y ago

Calibre is so darn useful. It gets hate for the eclectic ui but it's absolutely essential for any ebook Downloaders imo. Kovid is a real hero for as much work as he does on this. He must spend several hours a day every day of the year on it.

bambax 7y ago
Yeah, the UI is just bizarre but it doesn't really matter. What matters is whether the update supports DRM stripping extensions. Can't find that info anywhere; won't update without knowing...
- afiori 7y ago
  That is because for legal reason it is better if they stay completely unsupported from the main developer
- Santosh83 7y ago
  You can ask this in the forums and someone ought to have tested the plugin with 4.0 by now...
- jpindar 7y ago
  I just downloaded a book from Amazon and was able to convert it from azw3 to epub.
elwell 7y ago
Got to respect dedication and hard work. But why doesn't his homepage support Chrome? https://kovidgoyal.net https://kovidgoyal.net Edit: I was referring to the alert() upon loading the site: W A R N I N G! Your browser is not supported by this site. I cannot guarantee that things will work as they should. Consider downloading either Mozilla >=1.4 or Internet Explorer >= 6
- bla3 7y ago
  Works fine over here.

captn3m0 7y ago

Is it switching to Python 3?

duckerude 7y ago
Yes. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/blob/master/README.python3 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/blob/master/README.pyt... https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/pull/870 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/pull/870 > Yeah there are not a lot of low hanging fruit left. Now one just has to get betas out and have people test them and report bugs. And plugin developers use the betas to port their plugins. But it is going to have to wait until after the webengine migration is done and calibre 4 is released.
- slacka 7y ago
  This is great news. Last I heard, the author of Calibre's said: > I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself. Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase. [1] > calibre has half a MILLION lines of python and python extension code...calibre has lots and lots of code that deals with bytes -- network protocols, binary file formats, etc. Python 3 is simply worse than python 2 for this use case. It has a crippled bytes type among other unfelicities. [2] > There is just no way that calibre is ever going to be ported to python 3. [3] Glad to see some outsider, flaviut, stepped to to the challenge and kovidgoyal accepted his pull request. Looking at the pull request it seems that kovidgoyal's fear about external native functions, network protocols, binary file formats, and python3's byte type was not so insurmountable. [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107 [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1456642 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1456642 [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1756458 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1756458
- driverdan 7y ago
  870 has been open for over a year. It's clearly not high on the priority list.
  - icebraining 7y ago

konart 7y ago

Gonna give it another try on my mac. All previous attempts have failed because of how slow it was and many crashes. The reader was terrible too.

sigzero 7y ago
I use it on my Mac all the time. I've never had it crash on me. The reader...is not so good.
- konart 7y ago
  Some faulty pdf\epub files maybe, but none of them crash any of my other readers, so... I gave up at some point. I love Calibre as a project, but for now I can't really say the same for the product.
copperx 7y ago
When I had a Mac, I hated the Calibre reader for its slowness, and honestly, it was unnecessary because iBooks is pretty great regarding typography and formatting. However, on Windows, I've found that the Calibre reader is the best. I've found that Adobe Digital Editions and the Kindle reader have terrible formatting on a non-mobile screen.

agumonkey 7y ago

Calibre ui made me stay away, I don't mind different but sometimes you do need to get a bit more mainstream. Blender 2.80 did this move and it helped a lot I believe.

mmsimanga 7y ago
Perhaps I have a different use case. I spend very little time in Calibre but loads more time on my Kobo reader. The time I spend is so little that I have never really noticed the user interface. I use Calibre to transfer books to and from my reader and occasionally download meta data for books. I know Calibre has functionality to download blogs and so on but I use Kobo's integration with Pocket[0] to read online articles. [0]https://getpocket.com/ https://getpocket.com/
- esseti 7y ago
  do you integrate with pocket? i tried but miserably failed. it results in a mess of files and data that i can't read. do you have a source link or good link on how to setup?
  - jbeales 7y ago
    On your Kobo go to Hamburger Menu > Settings > Accounts, then do what it asks to sign in to Pocket. Once that's done you get a "My Articles" option in the hamburger menu, and that's your Pocket content.
    - esseti 7y ago
      damn, i'm using the kindle. i wish it has this easiness of integration.
      - jbeales 7y ago
        Thought you were on Kobo for some reason. Might be worth grabbing a cheap one as a Pocket + Overdrive device, it's a pretty great combo ;)

jimstr 7y ago

If you like it and want to support development, the main developer is on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/kovidgoyal https://www.patreon.com/kovidgoyal

ru999gol 7y ago
you might want to read up on the controversies surrounding him first though
- dexterdog 7y ago
  Do you mean because he's arrogant? Who cares? The software is great and saves me a ton of time and money.
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    I care. As developers we have the moral responsibility of not putting people at risk even if we don't have the legal one. The author has zero care for security and the product had plenty of vulnerabilities. This harms users and also other people. Furthermore, poor behaviors attracts blame on the whole open source community.
    - mmsimanga 7y ago
      Fork it.
      - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
        The codebase is horrible. I use something else.
        nieve 7y ago
        A something else that you're avoiding naming?

2rsf 7y ago

Is there a good replacement for Calibre ? one the converts from any format to any format, strips DRM (so I heard), adapts to different readers and if you really have to allows you to read (though the reader looks terrible)

KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago

Literally the worst damn mandatory app that I need to have installed on every computer.

Tomte 7y ago

I relly want to like and use Calibre, but none of my several tries to get started were successful. No idea how to browse my Kindle library, how to browse books on my Kindle, or do anything else. It's a totally non-intuitive GUI.

calcifer 7y ago
When you plug your Kindle in, a big Kindle icon appears on the top menu and you can browse the contents by clicking on it. How is that unintuitive?
- Tomte 7y ago
  Okay. Where are my bought books not currently on Kindle? I've already logged into my Kindle account.
  - calcifer 7y ago
    Amazon doesn't provide any APIs for querying your non-device Kindle library, so naturally you won't see those books in Calibre. But, you can integrate Amazon's email-to-Kindle feature with Calibre [1] so new books are automatically added to your Calibre library as well. [1] http://blog.calibre-ebook.com/2017/01/managing-your-kindle-library-is-easy.html http://blog.calibre-ebook.com/2017/01/managing-your-kindle-l...
    - Tomte 7y ago
      Okay. Would be great if Calibre told you that. After it prompts me for my Amazon password I sure expect those books to show up. As I said, the UI/UX is very confusing.

majkinetor 7y ago

For people who don't like its desktop GUI, you can also run integrated web server and access/edit books via browser.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago

There have been complaints about the UI since forever, and the developer is well-known for bristling at any constructive criticism and telling people to either accept the way he likes things, or simply don't use the application. Consequently, I am surprised that no one has forked Calibre, even if it was just to kept the backend but simply overhaul the UI. Something that I would like to see in a future version of Calibre (or a fork) is news-download recipes changed to a plugin system that can be updated separately of Calibre itself. It is not ideal that if a news recipe becomes obsolete due to changes on the respective news website, one has to upgrade Calibre to a new version. For users whose distros package only a certain version of Calibre, it would be nice to continue running that distro-supported version but simply be able to update the news recipes from within the Calibre settings.

TheCraiggers 7y ago
The code base is a nightmare and still uses Python 2. I'm not surprised it hasn't been forked, although I'm a little surprised it hasn't been replaced. Frankly, the software is just fine for most needs, and the person in charge is still active, so the desire to replace it just hasn't materialized. EDIT: Looks like somebody actually took the initiative to port it to Python 3.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- scrollaway 7y ago
  Calling the codebase a nightmare is the understatement of the year. I tried forking it at some point. I don't think I could reasonably even attempt describe the codebase in a way that wouldn't get me banned from HN, and most likely the rest of the internet. Needless to say I gave up.
  - Hendrikto 7y ago
    That makes me very curious. Could you write a blogpost on the topic by any chance?

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

Great app. I know everyone likes to extol the UNIX "A program should do one thing and do it well" philosophy, but Calibre is one of the few "monolithic" apps I can think of that justifies the bulk. It does everything you could want it to do regarding eBooks: viewing, editing, management, delivery, etc.

paol 7y ago
Don't forget DRM stripping.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  I had mentally lumped that under "management," but maybe I should've added "conversion" as a category. Certainly DeDRM Tools has been worth the price of admission alone.
- hiram112 7y ago
  Do you know if the various 'add-ons' that were required to strip Kindle of DRM are still available and updated. Years ago, I enjoyed stripping my own purchased Kindle books to ePub with Calibre, so I could read them on my non-Kindle device, but it wasn't so easy as the patches became harder to find, and Amazon would constantly change their DRM.
  - skrowl 7y ago
    That's the primary reason I use it. Strip DRM from my purchased books and then upload to Google Books for viewing on all my devices.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      Have you considered that maybe you shouldn't be buying DRM content in the first place? If you are going to spend money buy a physical book and consider passing it on after you have read it if you don't want to reread or refer to later.

kennyadam 7y ago

Lots of people being very critical of a unique piece of software that is super powerful, free and regularly updated. Seemingly because their big SV brains can't handle a clunky interface. What a bunch of entitled jerks you sound like.

_coveredInBees 7y ago
Couldn't agree more. Calibre is Kovid's labor of love and he wouldn't be so active on it if it weren't, especially considering there is little to no monetary incentive for him to spend the amount of time he does on it. It's also open source. Literally every whiner has the opportunity to fork it and do with it what they please, but instead, they just want to sit by the sidelines and criticize him for his decisions. As Neil Gaiman so aptly wrote on his blog [1] - "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch". I feel the same needs to be reiterated in this case - "Kovid Goyal is not your bitch". Edit - Ouch, OP, I guess you struck a nerve with the HN crowd by saying it like it is... 1: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.htm...
- MagnumOpus 7y ago
  Comparing Goyal to GRRM is desultory. GRRM charged his book buyers a whole bunch of money in installments for decades, and when he got rich out of these fans, he happily screws them over by refusing to finish his story. Goyal provided a unique and complete piece of software, charging exactly zero, and continues to improve it even a decade after it released.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    I don't know much about GRRM, so are you referring to general book sales when you mention "whole bunch of money in installments"? If you start consuming an unfinished story and then entitle yourself to an ending, that's 100% your fault. As an outside observer who never even watched the show, GoT fans are just tantrum-throwing assholes. When you spend $X on a book, you are just buying that book, not that book + liens on the author's future output + a guarantee that there will be any. Such weird entitlement in that community. Also, you presumably also demand a really good book as well so that he doesn't "screw you over" (cmon) with a bad book where the fans now recommend dodging the final books (Rendezvous with Rama, Wheel of Time, etc).

sigzero 7y ago

If you use it, I hope you support the author.

billfruit 7y ago

An issue in the past was that books loaded into Kindles through Calibre appeared as 'personal documents' rather than as a 'book' in the Kindle, upsetting causing the reading state sync to not work if you were reading the same book for example through the Kindle app in your smartphone also, very annoying, and goes against the promise of ebooks. I hope they have a fix for this.

wahlis 7y ago
That must be a very long time ago. It worked fine with my Kindle 3 which was released in 2010
JonLim 7y ago
I've gone through the motions of emailing the book to my Kindle, which allows it to be downloadable on other Kindle devices or the app, and also syncs up reading location. Doesn't work for huge books, but has been a great boon for most books!
- colomon 7y ago
  Right, that's actually my standard Calibre use case: Load book into Calibre. Convert it to MOBI if needed. E-mail it to my Kindle address. It then pops up everywhere I have a Kindle app, mostly my iPad and Galaxy S9. Huh. Now that I'm thinking about it, it seems like this would be even easier to do from the command line...
  - input_sh 7y ago
    If you fill out the "Sharing books by email" in Calibre's settings, you can just right-click a book -> "Connect/share", "Email to example@kindle.com". It'll do the conversion for you (if necessary). I'd advise a separate email address for this functionality.

thrower123 7y ago

Surprised to see so much hate for Calibre's UI here. I'm not sure I understand. I can load damn near anything that pretends to be an ebook into it, and then I can double-click on the row for that item, and it pops open a reader window. That's all I need it to do. At least on Windows, I've been pretty underwhelmed with other ebook viewer apps I have tried. The various Kindle apps tend to blow for anything you don't obtain through Amazon, and often don't work great for syncing even Kindle ebooks. I still have a bunch of Microsoft Reader .lit files kicking around, and Calibre is one of the only things that will open them. The Calibre PDF reader is pretty terrible, but setting is up to pop open to Adobe or whatever instead doesn't take much ceremony.

hestipod 7y ago
Seeing how many people prioritize fashion over function...in this topic, and life in general, depresses me. Calibre works very well and you have people saying they "can't" use it because it's not pretty enough. It's one guy, does SO much, and it's free. I don't care what it looks like. It's amazing.
sundarurfriend 7y ago
I'm not exactly surprised because that was my original response to the UI as well, several years ago, but the surprising thing to me now is why exactly I considered it such a terrible UI back then. One thing I can remember is that if you start a conversion or a download, often it silently starts in the background with apparently no indication anything is going on, unless you know to look for "Jobs" in the lower right corner. But I think I had a bunch more complaints which have apparently become invisible to me now.

ryanmercer 7y ago

I love Calibre, been using it since way back in my kindle keyboard days.

snvzz 7y ago

Calibre does the trick. It's a shame there's no good hardware ereader to use it with. Every e-ink device is closed hardware, runs only closed software, and is trying to lock you into some DRM-rich ecosystem.

codq 7y ago
FWIW, I've never had a problem with my kindle, which has never been connected to the internet. Even the 'special offers' dissipate after being in airplane mode for a certain length of time. I see no value in using any online feature—I've never taken my kindle off of airplane mode, and use Calibre to load all content.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  I wouldn't have paid for the ad-free version of the kindle had I known it was just a lock-screen promo for a book. I'm exposed to so few new books in my life that I kinda like the feature. Then again, I also wouldn't have bought the ad-free version had I known I was going to keep it in airplane-mode since the day I bought it. Back when I first bought my kindle and made this decision, I was thinking the ads would be something like a "checkout these deals on Bose speakers!" interstitials every three page turns.
Hitton 7y ago
Actually there are ways to install software on many ereaders. About 10 years ago I used PRS+ on Sony's PRS-500. Nowadays Sony's ereaders are pretty much dead, but there is alternative software for Kindle, Kobo and others. By quick googling I just found: https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/ccoffing/OcherBook https://github.com/ccoffing/OcherBook https://github.com/lgeek/okreader https://github.com/lgeek/okreader https://fread.ink/ https://fread.ink/ Also: https://onyxboox.com/ https://onyxboox.com/ - this is Android so I guess it's bit more hackable https://the-digital-reader.com/2015/06/19/is-the-booq-cervantes-the-first-open-source-ereader/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2015/06/19/is-the-booq-cervan...
- 7y ago

corbet 7y ago

Does it still phone home every time you fire it up?

the_af 7y ago

Kudos to Calibre and its author. It's one of the first programs I install on any Linux machine I own. Yes, the UI is a bit quirky, but who cares? I spend my time actually reading the books, and for managing my library and converting between formats Calibre is ace. That useful software like this exists makes me very happy.

bananamerica 7y ago

Calibre is the worst piece of software thar I also happen to love.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pwinnski 7y ago

Surveying this thread, I see an amazingly wide range of uses for Calibre. Yes, the UI is really bad, perhaps especially on a Mac, but it is so mind-bogglingly good at so many different things that it is difficult to believe that Kovid Goyal manages all of this by himself. Other people have different use-cases than I do, and Calibre satisfies us all. Excellent, amazing, wonderful work, Mr. Goyal!

ece 7y ago
This used to be called function over form.

fortran77 7y ago

I love Calibre. Yes, It's a little clunky, but it solves problems nobody else does. I have a lot of eBooks, because I built a DIY Book Scanner and scanned all my books in a couple of years ago.

zczc 7y ago

Just updated. Alas, the new viewer still does not provide nondestructive viewing. Open file, press PgDn, exit, and the viewed file is silently changed. The viewer writes current position in the viewed file itself (META-INF/calibre_bookmarks.txt). UPDATE: just found out there is now a checkbox in the viewer preferences: "Keep a copy of annotations/bookmarks in the e-book file, for easy sharing". If unchecked, the viewed files are kept intact. Nice!

Santosh83 7y ago
Where on Earth is this setting inside the Calibre preferences menu?? I just spent about 5 minutes looking and simply couldn't find it anywhere!
- thesimp 7y ago
  It is not in the Calibre preferences but in the Viewer preferences. Open an ebook in the Viewer and while in the Viewer press ESC to get to the menu, then the option is under Miscellaneous.
  - coldacid 7y ago
    Of course. So you still have to destructively edit your books before you can tell Calibre to stop destructively editing your books. Genius!
    - pritambaral 7y ago
      I just checked and I can open the E-Book Viewer standalone, without a book. I also checked that the destructive edit happens upon viewer close, not open or page turn.
      - Santosh83 7y ago
        That behaviour was for the old viewer with version 3. The new version 4 one reverts to what GP is saying: you have to open an ebook before you can even access the settings through pressing ESC or right click. Also the version 4 ebook viewer is step back from the old one, as it stands now. It is slower, more resource hungry and buggier. The only arguable improvement is it now uses a 'flat' theme that doesn't look dated. I'm even considering reverting back to Calibre 3 because of the ebook viewer randomly freezing on large epubs with equations and so on.

ausjke 7y ago

I wish ebook-viewer added highlight annotation capability, I can use PDF viewers to highlight texts but not ebook-viewer, so I had to convert all of epub etc to PDF under calibre. for technical books annotation is essential for me, it's my notes so I do not need re-read the book from start to end each time.

mwsfc 7y ago

Well, given the subject here, it seems relevant to ask how everyone is organizing their libraries in Calibre. Is there such a thing as "best practices"? Would really love to hear ideas as I've found library mgmt in Calibre to be cumbersome, sluggish, and rather none intuitive compared to something like Plex for movies & TV shows.

dzmien 7y ago
The library function is my biggest gripe about calibre. It makes you copy all of your ebooks into a new directory if you want to use it.
input_sh 7y ago
Check out Calibre-Web (https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/ https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/). I'm only mentioning it because you've mentioned Plex, because it comes with a theme that's a clone of Plex: https://github.com/leram84/layer.Cake/tree/master/caliBlur https://github.com/leram84/layer.Cake/tree/master/caliBlur

QuadrupleA 7y ago

It's interesting, my complaint with Calibre was always performance rather than UI - it can be surprisingly slow for processing & converting mostly-text formats. But the sheer number of features & formats makes it worth the downsides. Indeed it's probably a good reminder to me as a developer, I can get too focused on making things snappy, efficient and pretty where perhaps I could have delivered twice the features if I took a little more of an 80/20 approach.

AdrianB1 7y ago
I am very curious if the performance problems come from the architecture, the code or from being written in Python.

ValentineC 7y ago

My (only!) gripe with Calibre is that it checks for updates, but doesn't have a feature to automatically update after that. Thankfully, I just make do with running: brew cask reinstall calibre

Havoc 7y ago

Are the DRM removal plugins compatible with v4?

filmgirlcw 7y ago

As others have said, this is an app I have an absolute love/hate relationship with. I really appreciate all the work the dev puts into it, but it’s a slow app that just isn’t very usable. It’s not just that it’s ugly, it’s that it’s poorly designed. And yet, nothing else even comes close to doing what it does. I even wrote out a spec for a similar app that was built using a more modern framework/usable interface, that some friends and I could potentially build, but the task was so monumental and the return on investment (and I’m not even talking about money) seemed so small, we shelved it. That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that DeDRM is the reason a lot of us use the app — I know it’s a key for me — and that does have an excellent CLI tool. There are also some good iOS apps that work with the book server, for accessing lots of ebooks. Even then tho, those apps are labors of love where the core audience is both critical and shockingly cheap (I say shockingly b/c many pay thousands on ebooks and ereaders a year — it’s an enthusiast market). One look at the MobileReads forums (a fantastic resource) for any specific app, and I kind of understand why we don’t have a “good” Calibre that is OSS for paid for that matter.

tomc1985 7y ago
> modern framework/usable interface, Let me guess, some Electron monstrosity that looks like a web site but runs on a desktop?
- horsawlarway 7y ago
  Let me guess, you're the type of person that doesn't understand ROI? Let me guess, you'd rather have a holy war about shit your users don't give a flying fuck about? Let me guess, you want it to run in QT and use nothing but C++ despite the fact that it will take 4 times longer to reach users, and when it does it will be less stable, less usable, and harder to hire resources for? But it's cool, cause electron is slow, amirite guise!!?!?!?!
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    Honestly if someone doesn't like Calibre so much it would be better to contribute to it, or fork it. And yes, electron sucks and it ruined desktop software because a bunch of business brats have to cut costs on software craftsmanship. This "modern UI" crap is a lie. Software using native widgets (or even JVM) is fine, but hey take it to extremes

_el 7y ago

Other commenters are pretty ruthless. Calibre's great for managing e-books and putting them onto an e-reader. It works reliably and I've never had an issue. Imagine writing a useful (free!) tool and the best thing people can say is "well, the code is a nightmare and the UI is ugly". Shameful - remember that there's a real, hard-working person on the other side of your comments.

nottorp 7y ago
Yeah, what's the problem with the UI? You use it 3 minutes to convert/upload a book that will keep you busy for hours. I really don't think they need a redesign or anything.

zmix 7y ago

While Calibre is not what I'd consider to be a "beautiful" program, I do not care. It's functionality is unbeaten. What I really hate about it is the directory structure, it forces upon you. I have my books sorted in topical directories and Calibre sorts them by author. That sucks. If this single issue would be addressed, I couldn't be happier with Calibre, especially, since Kovid is a very helpful person.

pnutjam 7y ago
Do you tag your books? The metadata can be very helpful. You could also consider libraries by topic.
- zmix 7y ago
  I tag my files on macOS since the OpenMeta days. But I refuse to access any library with an application frontend, it's the file system or nothing. These Librarian apps are good for metadata management. That's what I use them for. However, I am mostly on Windows, these days, so no chance for filesystem tags, even worse now, that I have all my eBooks on a home server.
  - pnutjam 7y ago
    The DB frontend is very useful for metadata, short descriptions, and finding duplicates. I run a headless version of Calibre in the cloud, so I can read in the browser and do other stuff.
  - _Microft 7y ago
    Afaik there are tools that use Alternate Data Streams (ADS) to store metadata for files (on NTFS drives).

scarejunba 7y ago

I used this for a bit ages ago. Useful tool. Funnily, I think it's a great example of how building some things is way harder than people think. For instance, everyone has complained about Calibre since the beginning of time. Code, UI, everything. And yet, no one has come up with a replacement. Maybe pandoc captures some use cases. It's like OpenSSL in that respect alone. Everyone wants something like it but it's too hard to build so they'll just use what they think is an inferior solution (when really it's superiority as a solution is that it exists).

hombre_fatal 7y ago
Well put. Another comment here exemplifies this by reminiscing how they worked up a design draft for their Calibre competitor yet never even started it because it's just too hard and unrewarding. I also think people are too hard on the author's personality quirks. Yes, they can be grating, but this quirky person is presumably the sort of person who can build it and continue shepherding and maintaining it for over a decade. None of us with our infinite patience and epic social skillz apparently are doing it. How many here have even maintained a popular, complex product for any real duration? Or had to be your own product's customer service agent? It's not easy. I've seen people break down just fielding customer demands at Target during one summer job.

michaelmrose 7y ago

I love calibre but I find that a lot of the time I want to open a recently read book or one I know by name. Cold starting calibre, finding the book, opening the book, minimizing or closing calibre is a 4 step process that takes 15-30 seconds. Further it takes up about 250MB in memory to avoid that 4-8 second wait for it to start. By default without specifying a field it finds results in text describing the book which is almost never what I want as well. Calibre has a cli interface calibredb. One could use that but it would be vastly more cumbersome than using the gui. It isn't at all designed to be used interactively unless you like typing switches like --for-machine and mixing in a lot of jq in preparation for opening a book. What I really wanted to do was type a quick command with a search query just like I would type at the calibre search box have it pop open a list that I could narrow by typing hit enter and open a book. One step and 1 - 10 seconds to open a book instead of 15-30 without a process taking up ram all the time for no reason. https://github.com/michaelmrose/rdr https://github.com/michaelmrose/rdr Written in clojure and compiled to a portable executable with graal next to no requirements outside of rofi or dmenu and currently being tied to linux. Could presumably be be compiled for mac if I had one. It uses 19MB of ram for the and starts about instantly. -q [query] => pass query with the same syntax as calibredb or calibregui accepts -l => open the last book read -r => filter the most recent 30 distinct books opened via rdr via rofi or dmenu query string => If a string is passed in without -q -h -l -r specified it is treated as a query -o [file] => open with default reader and record in recent reads if part of a calibre library -S [options] => save options passed to disk Options -p [list] => list of formats in order of preference eg pdf,epub,mobi -k [number] => number of recent reads to keep --port PORT --server URL --user USER --password PASSWORD" The recommended usage is to pass the desired defaults with -S then omit them on future invocations. Example: rdr -S -L /path/to/library -p pdf,epub,mobi -k 10 -p 8090 --user me --password hunter2 then rdr -q query string here I currently have a keybinding tied directly to rdr -l and rdr -r and use it all the time. 1 button to go back to the most recently read book is nice. I'd also love any feedback anyone wanted to provide about the code.

crooked-v 7y ago

What I'd really like is an iOS app that can plug directly into a Calibre library (via iCloud or Dropbox or whatever). It seems like everything that's existed in that space requires an explicit download step rather than being able to sync/cache stuff in the background.

cheaprentalyeti 7y ago

Not meaning to sound ungrateful, but does anyone know of any _good_ dark themes for Calibre's ebook viewer? I found one on the web, but found it's generally easier to just use calibre to manage the files, but Atril or something similar to actually view it. This seems to especially be the case for books with code snippets and the like, like the ones I'm often getting via the Humble Bundle store.

qwerty456127 7y ago

I wish it was more unix-way-ish so I could write my own UI with just the features I need, my own back-end (I'd like a less-bloated library storage convention without directories for every book, without title transliteration, with support for multiple files of same format (e.g. .code.zip, audio.zip, .html.zip) for plain HTML files and embedded metadata) and ony use Calibre for tagging and conversion (with conversion customization, and I can also see no reason why conversion tools should not be a separate project). Calibre is by far the best yet still could be made a way better.

nirvdrum 7y ago

I appreciate letting me know what the license is, but I'm not convinced I should be required to agree to the terms of it before the (Windows) installer progresses. I'm not redistributing anything as a consumer of the software.

suchoudh 7y ago

This is one of those things that has made my life easier. Especially avoiding multiple copies of same pdf files. It helps me organize my e-Library much better than I have my home library. Thanks for the updated version

prvc 7y ago

Since we're sharing gripes, I wish it would only push updates when there is a significant user-facing change (such as a fix for a major bug). It's not worth the bother to update the app manually merely in order to gain a new formula for the automatic news downloader. Feels like I spend more time installing the program than using it.

Marsymars 7y ago
The issue here is compounded because you typically aren't using Calibre daily, so if you launch it once a month, there's basically a new version available every single time you launch it. I use Homebrew on macOS and Chocolatey on Windows to keep it updated, they both work well.

nirav72 7y ago

calibre was one of the first freeware apps that I donated money too. Been using it for years for storing manuals and books in pdf format

rexpop 7y ago

I absolutely love this program! I am so grateful for it. I read voraciously, and could not educate myself without Calibre.

nieve 7y ago

Full disclosure: I'm a sql & emacs geek so that may warp my views on interfaces. I suspect there are a lot of features that are used by no more than 5-10% of users, but we'd scream bloody murder if they were taken away. No two of my heavy Calibre user friends use exactly the same set of features and we're always swapping tricks. Calibre does a decent job for so many use cases that I'm not sure there's any way to have a completely coherent UI that covers them all. That doesn't mean it's not krufty and occasionally frustrating, but I've no exaggeration never seen an alternative that did even 20% of what I wanted. Calibre can seem pretty overgrown and I used for years without missing features like search-based virtual libraries, but now an ebook management app that doesn't let me slice and dice with that kind of power. For me it's a mix of how easy it is switching between tabbed views like new last 30 days, unread (custom tag automatically added on import), various reading lists from the Reading List plugin, author sets I tend to read together, missing metadata, etc. and the composability of virtual libraries. When you combine virtual libraries with the slightly misleadingly named FanFicFare plugin's metadata it's a lot easier to keep track of both original[1] & fan fictions from dozens of sites (out of several hundred supported) and separate it out from regular books. Similarly the Reading List & Import List plugins are great for pulling in info from outside calibre, but they need a lot of the features that people generally ignore to do their jobs. On the flip side most people don't seem to use multiple real libraries and they are great for topic-specific book collections or when I really don't want to see a book again, but don't want to just delete it. Even simple things like being able to arbitrarily color column text based on filters I ignored until I realized lets me set the titles of all books missing a description red. It makes cleaning up my library easier, but nothing else I've tried has a similar features. [1] https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFare/wiki/SupportedSites https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFare/wiki/SupportedSites It's the only thing that makes reading fiction from spacebattles.com not soul-destroyingly annoying.