16 ms·

New in Calibre 6.0

446 points by anotherevan 4y ago

oxff 4y ago
Magical piece of software. I don't know how Android has couple of good e-readers but desktop only has Calibre.
- bebna 4y ago
  there is koreader for android. That even got a sync with calibre server feature or access web library feature if I remember right. I prefer it on my android phone, because it is one of the few that does true black as standard.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    koreader works on desktop too https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases
  - nicoco 4y ago
    koreader is great and also works on (some?) kobo devices.
- politelemon 4y ago
  Foliate on desktop is one of the best readers I've used. You can get Calibre to open books in Foliate instead of the internal viewer
matthberg 4y ago
Calibre does its job so well it's downright essential for anyone thinking about dealing with ebooks. Glad to hear that full text search is added in this version, using it with a bunch of reference books saved will be so useful. It might be worth splitting out the fiction books I have to clean up the results. Maybe it works with tag filtering, I'll have to check.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  I’ve long kept separate libraries (including one for academic papers and one for appliance manuals). This search functionality is going to come in quite handy.
  - Normille 4y ago
    Full text search sounds great. I'm just wondering what kind of overhead it will add to a big library? I think I have about 3000+ books in mine. Calibre is one of those excellent pieces of software that shows free and open source can sometimes be better than commercial software. My only gripe with it is that it is updated so often [sometimes it seems almost weekly] and every update involves visiting the site and downloading the whole app again. In-place auto-updates would be nice. I use Calibre along with Calibre-Web [0] to make my library available online, so I can always grab one of my books to read on my phone, whenever I'm stuck somewhere, thumb-twiddling. I have an rsync... command aliased in my terminal. So every time I add new books to Calibre on desktop, I just type that in a terminal and it's immediately synced to my online library. [0] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web PS: Top marks also to Calibre Dev for actually spelling the name of the app properly. It gladdens my heart no end to see the occasional piece of proper English flotsam still afloat on the massive tide of online Americanisms. UPDATE: Dammit! --just downloaded and Calibre 6 is OSX 10,15+ only. Another piece of software leaves me languishing, as I stick with Mojave. On the plus side, I'll no longer have to worry about the huge updates I was complaining about above!
- akho 4y ago
  > Calibre does its job so well it's downright essential for anyone thinking about dealing with ebooks. Its “job” is not well-defined. I read electronic books almost exclusively (for prose fiction; art and equations are a different bag) since 2008 or so, and never saw any point in it beyond format conversion. It does format conversion very well. The command-line converter requires a running graphical session for some reason, though.
  - blowski 4y ago
evanjonr 4y ago
Does it scale correctly on windows yet? Is that part of QT6?
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  We made an app in Qt 5 (all QML) that scales well on Windows, so I don't know what the problem would be. We did have to add special cases for font sizes on Windows, because auto-sized fonts looked like shit there, whereas on Mac they looked fine.
- squaresmile 4y ago
  6.0 scales correctly for me on win 11.
_the_special_ 4y ago
Calibre is awesome to use on desktop. But as someone who wants to sync his Calibre library with other devices (iphone + ipad), it gets really frustrating.
- alx__ 4y ago
  I've been using KyBook 3 http://kybook-reader.com http://kybook-reader.com Enable the Calibre web server, then use KyBook to connect to it and download the books you want while on the same network as the Calibre server. You can set up a public URL if you want to access them remotely
  - mattkevan 4y ago
    I do something similar by running Calibre Web on a raspberry pi and then using KyBooks on my devices. It works really well.
- Moru 4y ago
  Do you want to sync the whole library with the iphone or just search and download from the iphone? Calibre can be used to just transfer a few books by installing the calibre app on the phone and select books on the computer to transfer. There are also solutions for searching and downloading books from the phone but I haven't tried them much, found it much easier to use the computer to do that. I can't fit my library on the phone so haven't even thought of syncing the whole thing.
  - NonNefarious 4y ago
    I want to sync the whole thing. Apple Books ineptly forces you to manually copy all of the books themselves to each device, but then syncs collections that you've set up to organize them.
    - Moru 4y ago
      Have you tried Resilio Sync?[0] I'm using it on Android but seems to exist for iOS [1] too. I'm not syncing the library though, might want to make sure you only run the sync when Calibre isn't running to prevent data loss. [0] https://www.resilio.com/individuals/ https://www.resilio.com/individuals/ [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1126282325 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1126282325
gtsnexp 4y ago
Would love to see an Audio book plugin.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  plug-in
  - NonNefarious 4y ago
    Hahaha, look at the infants down-modding INFORMATION. Here's another worldview-shaker: You log into something. You don't "login" to something.
gexla 4y ago
This is timely, I was looking for builds I could use on my Raspberry Pi yesterday. Thanks! Note: I'm not seeing the release available on the website, but it's available in the Github repo.
politelemon 4y ago
> Fortunately, plugin developers were given over half a year to port their plugins, so most have already been ported. I do admire this optimism and good faith. But no... many will not have ported until users start complaining that X plugin no longer works. Expect a few more months.
- Havoc 4y ago
  Specifically the amazon decryption ones are quite fussy - which to me seems quite critical
jray 4y ago
The negative news is that you need at least mac os 10.15.
- JohnTHaller 4y ago
  Given that 10.14 Mojave and prior are end of life and no longer supported by Apple, it's not that unusual. Similarly, Calibre 6.0 only supports 64-bit Windows 10/11.
- sleepless 4y ago
  Maybe https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/ https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/ is helpful to some.
- executesorder66 4y ago
  Actually I don't need any version of Mac OS at all.
joeman1000 4y ago
Why do people like calibre?
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  I've been using it for years and I begrudge/resent it every time I have to use it; I only use it as little as possible. I'm baffled by all the people who heap praise on it.
  - Cipater 4y ago
    I suspect the reason you have to use it is because it does things that no other piece of software does. Some people find that praiseworthy.
- phoronixrly 4y ago
  Despite the godawful UI, feature-wise it's a one of a kind software, so some people are forced to use it.
  - gaws 4y ago
    > Despite the godawful UI Simple is beautiful. It's also not that hard to use.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- snmx999 4y ago
  I really like the ability to email an ebook to my Kindle, even auto-converting it to the correct format.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  For way too many years, there was no other way to read Apple's own E-books on a Mac. It was baffling. That's how I discovered Calibre. Now that Books was finally added to Mac OS, I've put all of them in there so I can sync collections across all my (albeit Apple-only) devices.
submeta 4y ago
Kovid Goyal, the developer of Calibre, is a very responsive, very gentle person. Whenever I needed help, I have gotten help from him. [1] - Calibre is an indispensable tool for me to manage my digital library with close to 800 books. I support him regularly. Consinder doing it as well if you appreciate the app. Go to https://calibre-ebook.com/ https://calibre-ebook.com/ , there’s a support link on the top right. [1] This is the forum dedicated to Calibre https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166
- em500 4y ago
  OT, but he also happens to be the developer of kitty, my favorite terminal emulator on Linux: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty
  - kbd 4y ago
    Yeah kitty is amazing. I've been meaning to donate as a thank you. It's made so many things possible. In fact, because of it's flexibility, today I wrote a vscode extension that can use some of kitty's remote control features so I can execute things in my terminal of choice straight from my editor of choice.
    - patrick91 4y ago
      uh, that's interesting! what's the name of the extension?
      - kbd 4y ago
        https://github.com/kbd/binrun https://github.com/kbd/binrun I just wrote it today and still need to package it. I was tired of alt+tab + up arrow + enter constantly to execute builds etc. in my terminal. It calls out to a kitty wrapper script I wrote[1] that (eg) queries kitty for its running windows so that when I launch from vscode it can find the right kitty window for the vscode workspace and execute there... Point is, Kovid Goyal is awesome and the extensibility he wrote into kitty makes all that possible. I didn't know he was also the author of Calibre for a long time. [1] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/master/HOME/bin/kw https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/master/HOME/bin/kw
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Calibre is a great piece of software. Nothing substantial to add, just want to give a shout out as a long time user (about a decade now).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Agreed. Been using it over a decade. It is one of the first things that I install on my PCs.
frameset 4y ago
I pretty much have to use it for some things, but as sibling commenters have pointed out, there are some serious flaws with both it and its maintainer. I've mostly moved to using [Calibre Web](https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web) which is a software intended as a companion, but I use it almost exclusively. It has a web interface, and you can deploy it using a container. The killer feature for me that Calibre itself lacks is that has over the internet syncing with the native Kobo firmware. You essentially trick the Kobo into thinking it's calling home to get ebooks from their servers, but you're accessing your own instance of Calibre-web. This makes my workflow of adding a new ebook as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.
- nicoco 4y ago
  >as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it. Wow, sounds really nice, you got my attention! My stack to achieve the same result is a bit more complicated: I installed KOreader on my device, and it can read calibre's OPDS catalog feed. KOreader has some other niceties that I enjoy, mostly wallabag support. How do you trick the native kodo firmware? Does it work outside your home network?
  - frameset 4y ago
    Yes it does, I use a reverse proxy with ssl and have CW on its own subdomain. There's a plain text config file on the Kobo's memory and one of the config options is the store URL. CW generates you a new one tied to your local CW account in your instance and you replace the standard URL. You can do multi user stuff that way. You can also define a "shelf" and only books on that shelf will sync if you wish, handy if you have a large collection or a small memory Kobo. The guide on setting up the Kobo sync feature is here: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integration https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio...
  - input_sh 4y ago
    > How do you trick the native kodo firmware? You just change the API endpoint in some file in .kobo on the device. > Does it work outside your home network? If you expose calibre-web publicly, sure. In my experience it takes a bit of effort to do that right, but it's doable. Its wiki is fairly good and usually answers all the questions I have: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integration https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio...
submeta 4y ago
The full text search feature is surprisingly useful. Just searched my ~800 books for keywords like "tree traversal" or "assoc" to find books that I wouldn't have suspected to deal with these topics (`assoc` being a Lisp keyword searching for entries in association lists [1]). And I already had ways to search within contents of my books via "HoudahSpot" (an excelent MacOS tool that uses Spotlight search to sift through all my files and present the results in a tabular view), or via command line using `mdfind` [2] [1] https://jtra.cz/stuff/lisp/sclr/assoc.html https://jtra.cz/stuff/lisp/sclr/assoc.html [2] For example searching all PDF files for a certain keyword: mdfind "kMDItemKind='*PDF*' && kMDItemTextContent='*tree-traversal*'" | grep -Ev "Mail|Library" | sort | less
- bloaf 4y ago
  I wonder how well it scales, I have a rather large collection and would love to use this. As long as the index is much smaller than the source files, and it doesn't search by re-reading the files from disk I'll give it a go.
yodoolanne 4y ago
tristor 4y ago
I really love Calibre and I've been using it for more than a decade. But one thing I'd really hope to see that hasn't happened yet is support for alternative database backends. Unfortunately if you have enough ebooks, it becomes impossible for the Calibre software to scale to handling them and a big piece of this is internal limits placed on the size of its database file. I have such a large quantity of ebooks on my media server (terabytes of ebooks) and have never been able to successfully add all of them to Calibre to be managed as a single library. I'm glad to see that development continues, this has been an utterly essential tool as I've switched between different ebook readers over the years.
james-redwood 4y ago
This comment is from the perspective of a Calibre power-user, and someone who has been involved with the software for years now. I must admit, I'm slightly shocked at some of the comments here. Kovid puts in an extraordinary amount of work (nearly 80 hours a week) into Calibre - of which most is for free, in the name of open source software. Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the mobileread forums will also know him as a remarkably intelligent, dedicated, and all-round fantastic guy. He's very patient and kind with beginners, responsive to feedback, and rarely loses his cool with anyone. His only 'crime' was being blunt with a bug report around eleven years ago, and I'm struggling to see why people are so myopic as to turn that into their entire perception of him. Add to the fact that he eventually fixed every bug in that thread as well as second-language difficulties that he likely experiences, and the vitriol that people have for him is undeserved. The proof of the pudding is Calibre itself, which is a joy to use. It is hands down one of the most useful programs on my computer. It's rarely buggy, fast, logical to use, very feature-rich, and rather customisable. I'm perplexed as to whether some of the people in this thread and I are using the same software. It's very easy to set up, as all you do is either point to a pre-existing library of files or create a new one. Adding books is trivial, as is editing metadata, and the reader itself is splendid. That's really what most people need out of e-book software, but Calibre really does go above and beyond any e-book software on the market right now. The only close competitor is Foliate, which is not cross-platform like Calibre, and even then it simply lacks many useful features that I rely on with Calibre, despite having a much cleaner UI.
- AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
  I'm not aware of what he said 11 years ago. I'm more familiar with the collective dog-pile he suffered in 2017 when he said he would personally maintain Python 2 after its EOL date to avoid having to update Calibre to Python 3.[0] The internet has never forgiven him for that moment of hubris, it seems. Calibre eventually migrated to Python 3 anyway with the help of other developers. But yes, I frequent the MobileRead forums and by and large he's responsive and helpful. [0]https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107
  - 4y ago
TiredOfLife 4y ago
Warning! By default Calibre modifies files every time you open them. You have to disable reading position saving to stop that.
czottmann 4y ago
Solid update, thanks Kovid & contributors! Apple silicon support is ace, startup times on my M1 Pro have improved immensely from >6s down to 1s.
jxdxbx 4y ago
I have used Calibre for years. It's utilitarian and I can usually get it to do what I need. The weird things I need--editing the metadata of ebooks, converting between formats (including to Amazon's weird KFX using a plugin that piggybacks on Amazon's official kindle tools). Yeah, it's not some pretty mainstream app. But managing media files of any kind is a power user / nerd activity. Frankly it's a relief to to have to help people out with their completely fucked iTunes anymore. Personally I use Calibre for ebooks, and Swinsian (and tools like MP3Tagger). Ideally I'd have some sort of app that was like classic file-management-only iTunes but instead of iPod syncing, it would be a Plex or similar server for music and video.
g051051 4y ago
I love the idea of Calibre, but I just have no idea how to use it. Whenever I try, I get stuck in some kind of confused loop where I've added things to it, but all attempts to access them just loop back to Calibre. In other words, I can't get it to let me actually read anything.
- lukewrites 4y ago
  That must be quite frustrating. FWIW, I have had the opposite experience - Calibre's always just worked. My various ereaders have been detected automatically, and plugins generally have worked without hassle. For me it's a been a great, reliable piece of software.
- jpindar 4y ago
  What are you trying? Do you want to read things with Calibre's built in reader, another desktop reader, sync them to a device (i.e. use the desktop GUI to copy files to a device), download them to a device via the content server or what?
  - g051051 4y ago
    I don't care how I read my stuff, I just want to read it. Calibre says it supports lots of formats, but somehow I can't find or figure out the magic inputs or config options to have it display something to me so I can read it.
    - jpindar 4y ago
      OK, first make sure the books are really there. Right click on a book entry, and click "open containing folder". Make sure the book file is there and isn't corrupted. If it's OK, you should be able to read any non-DRM'd file of most formats by right click > View > "View with calibre e-book viewer". You can also try any other ebook reader by clicking the "Configure Calibre" icon to open the Preferences dialog. Under "Behavior" find "Use internal viewer for" and uncheck the file format. Then when you right-click > View > View, Calibre will use your OS default viewer for that file format. If you have DRM'd files (such as from Amazon), you will need a plugin to remove the DRM. The best way to find these is to look on https://www.mobileread.com https://www.mobileread.com which is a good place for Calibre discussion in general. I used to know how to do the Amazon ones but it's been a while, there might be a new way by now.
citruscomputing 4y ago
Full-text search is huge!! I've been using ripgrep-all, and running up against issues with the maximum cache size. Can't wait to try this out, hope it supports virtual libraries, hope it works with PDFs.
- superkuh 4y ago
  Calibre is great but if you specifically want full text search of ebooks and a multitude of document types then check out Recoll: http://www.recoll.org/ http://www.recoll.org/
heurisko 4y ago
I haven't used Calibre GUI but have many times used its tool ebook-convert. Really very useful. https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert.html https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert....
vzaliva 4y ago
I love Calibre but "sudo && wget | sh" installation on Linux makes me cringe. I wish there is an apk or snap.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.calibre_ebook.calibre https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.calibre_ebook.calibre
- executesorder66 4y ago
  I mean, you could just install it from your package manager like a normal person. Those instructions are for when your are on some some obscure distro that doesn't package it, but you still want some way of getting it on your system. Edit: I know on the download page it says "Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below." But that is bad advice. If you want a recent package, then use a distro that frequently updates it's packages. Most people using distros with ancient packages, (Debian, Slackware) _want_ it that way!
JohnTHaller 4y ago
Heads up for Windows users that Calibre 6 now requires Windows 11 or Windows 10 64-bit.
Larrikin 4y ago
Whenever I see Calibre mentioned, I always think that I'd like to take the time and organize my hundreds of eBooks with all the metadata but can never seem to justify the effort since I will be reading on a different device that will lose that information. I have an Android phone and an iPad. The only cross platform solution I've found for syncing reading position between those ecosystems is Google Play Books, but they don't really like large PDF uploads and epubs sometimes fail. It feels kind of gross uploading my own books to Google and having them track that information and would like to remove them from my reading habits. Calibre-Web has been mentioned in this thread and seemed like a good solution, but apparently doesn't support saving reading position. Is there any solution that lets me read the same book on my phone and my tablet and keep them in sync?
- tomComb 4y ago
  FBReader is cross-platform and I believe it sync's the way you want.
  - Larrikin 4y ago
    This looks like it might be really good, there's no PDF support on iOS though sadly.
infogulch 4y ago
Where do you like to find ebooks? I found: https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://www.gutenberg.org/ | The classic source for free ebooks https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/ | Sources hosted on GitHub Others?
- fbcx 4y ago
  https://libgen.rs https://libgen.rs
account42 4y ago
Odd to see a "We value your privacy" popup on the website for an open source project. Both that they do feel the need to annoy their users at all when they could just not collect any data and that they resort to the insincere business speak wording. And of course none of the listed "legitimate interests" are actually legitimate.

New in Calibre 6.0

446 points by anotherevan 4y ago

oxff 4y ago

Magical piece of software. I don't know how Android has couple of good e-readers but desktop only has Calibre.

bebna 4y ago
there is koreader for android. That even got a sync with calibre server feature or access web library feature if I remember right. I prefer it on my android phone, because it is one of the few that does true black as standard.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  koreader works on desktop too https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases
- nicoco 4y ago
  koreader is great and also works on (some?) kobo devices.
politelemon 4y ago
Foliate on desktop is one of the best readers I've used. You can get Calibre to open books in Foliate instead of the internal viewer

matthberg 4y ago

Calibre does its job so well it's downright essential for anyone thinking about dealing with ebooks. Glad to hear that full text search is added in this version, using it with a bunch of reference books saved will be so useful. It might be worth splitting out the fiction books I have to clean up the results. Maybe it works with tag filtering, I'll have to check.

rcarmo 4y ago
I’ve long kept separate libraries (including one for academic papers and one for appliance manuals). This search functionality is going to come in quite handy.
- Normille 4y ago
  Full text search sounds great. I'm just wondering what kind of overhead it will add to a big library? I think I have about 3000+ books in mine. Calibre is one of those excellent pieces of software that shows free and open source can sometimes be better than commercial software. My only gripe with it is that it is updated so often [sometimes it seems almost weekly] and every update involves visiting the site and downloading the whole app again. In-place auto-updates would be nice. I use Calibre along with Calibre-Web [0] to make my library available online, so I can always grab one of my books to read on my phone, whenever I'm stuck somewhere, thumb-twiddling. I have an rsync... command aliased in my terminal. So every time I add new books to Calibre on desktop, I just type that in a terminal and it's immediately synced to my online library. [0] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web PS: Top marks also to Calibre Dev for actually spelling the name of the app properly. It gladdens my heart no end to see the occasional piece of proper English flotsam still afloat on the massive tide of online Americanisms. UPDATE: Dammit! --just downloaded and Calibre 6 is OSX 10,15+ only. Another piece of software leaves me languishing, as I stick with Mojave. On the plus side, I'll no longer have to worry about the huge updates I was complaining about above!
akho 4y ago
> Calibre does its job so well it's downright essential for anyone thinking about dealing with ebooks. Its “job” is not well-defined. I read electronic books almost exclusively (for prose fiction; art and equations are a different bag) since 2008 or so, and never saw any point in it beyond format conversion. It does format conversion very well. The command-line converter requires a running graphical session for some reason, though.
- blowski 4y ago

evanjonr 4y ago

Does it scale correctly on windows yet? Is that part of QT6?

NonNefarious 4y ago
We made an app in Qt 5 (all QML) that scales well on Windows, so I don't know what the problem would be. We did have to add special cases for font sizes on Windows, because auto-sized fonts looked like shit there, whereas on Mac they looked fine.
squaresmile 4y ago
6.0 scales correctly for me on win 11.

_the_special_ 4y ago

Calibre is awesome to use on desktop. But as someone who wants to sync his Calibre library with other devices (iphone + ipad), it gets really frustrating.

alx__ 4y ago
I've been using KyBook 3 http://kybook-reader.com http://kybook-reader.com Enable the Calibre web server, then use KyBook to connect to it and download the books you want while on the same network as the Calibre server. You can set up a public URL if you want to access them remotely
- mattkevan 4y ago
  I do something similar by running Calibre Web on a raspberry pi and then using KyBooks on my devices. It works really well.
Moru 4y ago
Do you want to sync the whole library with the iphone or just search and download from the iphone? Calibre can be used to just transfer a few books by installing the calibre app on the phone and select books on the computer to transfer. There are also solutions for searching and downloading books from the phone but I haven't tried them much, found it much easier to use the computer to do that. I can't fit my library on the phone so haven't even thought of syncing the whole thing.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  I want to sync the whole thing. Apple Books ineptly forces you to manually copy all of the books themselves to each device, but then syncs collections that you've set up to organize them.
  - Moru 4y ago
    Have you tried Resilio Sync?[0] I'm using it on Android but seems to exist for iOS [1] too. I'm not syncing the library though, might want to make sure you only run the sync when Calibre isn't running to prevent data loss. [0] https://www.resilio.com/individuals/ https://www.resilio.com/individuals/ [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1126282325 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1126282325

gtsnexp 4y ago

Would love to see an Audio book plugin.

NonNefarious 4y ago
plug-in
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  Hahaha, look at the infants down-modding INFORMATION. Here's another worldview-shaker: You log into something. You don't "login" to something.

gexla 4y ago

This is timely, I was looking for builds I could use on my Raspberry Pi yesterday. Thanks! Note: I'm not seeing the release available on the website, but it's available in the Github repo.

politelemon 4y ago

> Fortunately, plugin developers were given over half a year to port their plugins, so most have already been ported. I do admire this optimism and good faith. But no... many will not have ported until users start complaining that X plugin no longer works. Expect a few more months.

Havoc 4y ago
Specifically the amazon decryption ones are quite fussy - which to me seems quite critical

jray 4y ago

The negative news is that you need at least mac os 10.15.

JohnTHaller 4y ago
Given that 10.14 Mojave and prior are end of life and no longer supported by Apple, it's not that unusual. Similarly, Calibre 6.0 only supports 64-bit Windows 10/11.
sleepless 4y ago
Maybe https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/ https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/ is helpful to some.
executesorder66 4y ago
Actually I don't need any version of Mac OS at all.

joeman1000 4y ago

Why do people like calibre?

KennyBlanken 4y ago
I've been using it for years and I begrudge/resent it every time I have to use it; I only use it as little as possible. I'm baffled by all the people who heap praise on it.
- Cipater 4y ago
  I suspect the reason you have to use it is because it does things that no other piece of software does. Some people find that praiseworthy.
phoronixrly 4y ago
Despite the godawful UI, feature-wise it's a one of a kind software, so some people are forced to use it.
- gaws 4y ago
  > Despite the godawful UI Simple is beautiful. It's also not that hard to use.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
snmx999 4y ago
I really like the ability to email an ebook to my Kindle, even auto-converting it to the correct format.
NonNefarious 4y ago
For way too many years, there was no other way to read Apple's own E-books on a Mac. It was baffling. That's how I discovered Calibre. Now that Books was finally added to Mac OS, I've put all of them in there so I can sync collections across all my (albeit Apple-only) devices.

submeta 4y ago

Kovid Goyal, the developer of Calibre, is a very responsive, very gentle person. Whenever I needed help, I have gotten help from him. [1] - Calibre is an indispensable tool for me to manage my digital library with close to 800 books. I support him regularly. Consinder doing it as well if you appreciate the app. Go to https://calibre-ebook.com/ https://calibre-ebook.com/ , there’s a support link on the top right. [1] This is the forum dedicated to Calibre https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166

em500 4y ago
OT, but he also happens to be the developer of kitty, my favorite terminal emulator on Linux: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty
- kbd 4y ago
  Yeah kitty is amazing. I've been meaning to donate as a thank you. It's made so many things possible. In fact, because of it's flexibility, today I wrote a vscode extension that can use some of kitty's remote control features so I can execute things in my terminal of choice straight from my editor of choice.
  - patrick91 4y ago
    uh, that's interesting! what's the name of the extension?
    - kbd 4y ago
      https://github.com/kbd/binrun https://github.com/kbd/binrun I just wrote it today and still need to package it. I was tired of alt+tab + up arrow + enter constantly to execute builds etc. in my terminal. It calls out to a kitty wrapper script I wrote[1] that (eg) queries kitty for its running windows so that when I launch from vscode it can find the right kitty window for the vscode workspace and execute there... Point is, Kovid Goyal is awesome and the extensibility he wrote into kitty makes all that possible. I didn't know he was also the author of Calibre for a long time. [1] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/master/HOME/bin/kw https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/master/HOME/bin/kw

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Calibre is a great piece of software. Nothing substantial to add, just want to give a shout out as a long time user (about a decade now).

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Agreed. Been using it over a decade. It is one of the first things that I install on my PCs.

frameset 4y ago

I pretty much have to use it for some things, but as sibling commenters have pointed out, there are some serious flaws with both it and its maintainer. I've mostly moved to using [Calibre Web](https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web) which is a software intended as a companion, but I use it almost exclusively. It has a web interface, and you can deploy it using a container. The killer feature for me that Calibre itself lacks is that has over the internet syncing with the native Kobo firmware. You essentially trick the Kobo into thinking it's calling home to get ebooks from their servers, but you're accessing your own instance of Calibre-web. This makes my workflow of adding a new ebook as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.

nicoco 4y ago
>as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it. Wow, sounds really nice, you got my attention! My stack to achieve the same result is a bit more complicated: I installed KOreader on my device, and it can read calibre's OPDS catalog feed. KOreader has some other niceties that I enjoy, mostly wallabag support. How do you trick the native kodo firmware? Does it work outside your home network?
- frameset 4y ago
  Yes it does, I use a reverse proxy with ssl and have CW on its own subdomain. There's a plain text config file on the Kobo's memory and one of the config options is the store URL. CW generates you a new one tied to your local CW account in your instance and you replace the standard URL. You can do multi user stuff that way. You can also define a "shelf" and only books on that shelf will sync if you wish, handy if you have a large collection or a small memory Kobo. The guide on setting up the Kobo sync feature is here: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integration https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio...
- input_sh 4y ago
  > How do you trick the native kodo firmware? You just change the API endpoint in some file in .kobo on the device. > Does it work outside your home network? If you expose calibre-web publicly, sure. In my experience it takes a bit of effort to do that right, but it's doable. Its wiki is fairly good and usually answers all the questions I have: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integration https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio...

submeta 4y ago

The full text search feature is surprisingly useful. Just searched my ~800 books for keywords like "tree traversal" or "assoc" to find books that I wouldn't have suspected to deal with these topics (`assoc` being a Lisp keyword searching for entries in association lists [1]). And I already had ways to search within contents of my books via "HoudahSpot" (an excelent MacOS tool that uses Spotlight search to sift through all my files and present the results in a tabular view), or via command line using `mdfind` [2] [1] https://jtra.cz/stuff/lisp/sclr/assoc.html https://jtra.cz/stuff/lisp/sclr/assoc.html [2] For example searching all PDF files for a certain keyword: mdfind "kMDItemKind='*PDF*' && kMDItemTextContent='*tree-traversal*'" | grep -Ev "Mail|Library" | sort | less

bloaf 4y ago
I wonder how well it scales, I have a rather large collection and would love to use this. As long as the index is much smaller than the source files, and it doesn't search by re-reading the files from disk I'll give it a go.

yodoolanne 4y ago

tristor 4y ago

I really love Calibre and I've been using it for more than a decade. But one thing I'd really hope to see that hasn't happened yet is support for alternative database backends. Unfortunately if you have enough ebooks, it becomes impossible for the Calibre software to scale to handling them and a big piece of this is internal limits placed on the size of its database file. I have such a large quantity of ebooks on my media server (terabytes of ebooks) and have never been able to successfully add all of them to Calibre to be managed as a single library. I'm glad to see that development continues, this has been an utterly essential tool as I've switched between different ebook readers over the years.

james-redwood 4y ago

This comment is from the perspective of a Calibre power-user, and someone who has been involved with the software for years now. I must admit, I'm slightly shocked at some of the comments here. Kovid puts in an extraordinary amount of work (nearly 80 hours a week) into Calibre - of which most is for free, in the name of open source software. Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the mobileread forums will also know him as a remarkably intelligent, dedicated, and all-round fantastic guy. He's very patient and kind with beginners, responsive to feedback, and rarely loses his cool with anyone. His only 'crime' was being blunt with a bug report around eleven years ago, and I'm struggling to see why people are so myopic as to turn that into their entire perception of him. Add to the fact that he eventually fixed every bug in that thread as well as second-language difficulties that he likely experiences, and the vitriol that people have for him is undeserved. The proof of the pudding is Calibre itself, which is a joy to use. It is hands down one of the most useful programs on my computer. It's rarely buggy, fast, logical to use, very feature-rich, and rather customisable. I'm perplexed as to whether some of the people in this thread and I are using the same software. It's very easy to set up, as all you do is either point to a pre-existing library of files or create a new one. Adding books is trivial, as is editing metadata, and the reader itself is splendid. That's really what most people need out of e-book software, but Calibre really does go above and beyond any e-book software on the market right now. The only close competitor is Foliate, which is not cross-platform like Calibre, and even then it simply lacks many useful features that I rely on with Calibre, despite having a much cleaner UI.

AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
I'm not aware of what he said 11 years ago. I'm more familiar with the collective dog-pile he suffered in 2017 when he said he would personally maintain Python 2 after its EOL date to avoid having to update Calibre to Python 3.[0] The internet has never forgiven him for that moment of hubris, it seems. Calibre eventually migrated to Python 3 anyway with the help of other developers. But yes, I frequent the MobileRead forums and by and large he's responsive and helpful. [0]https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107
- 4y ago

TiredOfLife 4y ago

Warning! By default Calibre modifies files every time you open them. You have to disable reading position saving to stop that.

czottmann 4y ago

Solid update, thanks Kovid & contributors! Apple silicon support is ace, startup times on my M1 Pro have improved immensely from >6s down to 1s.

jxdxbx 4y ago

I have used Calibre for years. It's utilitarian and I can usually get it to do what I need. The weird things I need--editing the metadata of ebooks, converting between formats (including to Amazon's weird KFX using a plugin that piggybacks on Amazon's official kindle tools). Yeah, it's not some pretty mainstream app. But managing media files of any kind is a power user / nerd activity. Frankly it's a relief to to have to help people out with their completely fucked iTunes anymore. Personally I use Calibre for ebooks, and Swinsian (and tools like MP3Tagger). Ideally I'd have some sort of app that was like classic file-management-only iTunes but instead of iPod syncing, it would be a Plex or similar server for music and video.

g051051 4y ago

I love the idea of Calibre, but I just have no idea how to use it. Whenever I try, I get stuck in some kind of confused loop where I've added things to it, but all attempts to access them just loop back to Calibre. In other words, I can't get it to let me actually read anything.

lukewrites 4y ago
That must be quite frustrating. FWIW, I have had the opposite experience - Calibre's always just worked. My various ereaders have been detected automatically, and plugins generally have worked without hassle. For me it's a been a great, reliable piece of software.
jpindar 4y ago
What are you trying? Do you want to read things with Calibre's built in reader, another desktop reader, sync them to a device (i.e. use the desktop GUI to copy files to a device), download them to a device via the content server or what?
- g051051 4y ago
  I don't care how I read my stuff, I just want to read it. Calibre says it supports lots of formats, but somehow I can't find or figure out the magic inputs or config options to have it display something to me so I can read it.
  - jpindar 4y ago
    OK, first make sure the books are really there. Right click on a book entry, and click "open containing folder". Make sure the book file is there and isn't corrupted. If it's OK, you should be able to read any non-DRM'd file of most formats by right click > View > "View with calibre e-book viewer". You can also try any other ebook reader by clicking the "Configure Calibre" icon to open the Preferences dialog. Under "Behavior" find "Use internal viewer for" and uncheck the file format. Then when you right-click > View > View, Calibre will use your OS default viewer for that file format. If you have DRM'd files (such as from Amazon), you will need a plugin to remove the DRM. The best way to find these is to look on https://www.mobileread.com https://www.mobileread.com which is a good place for Calibre discussion in general. I used to know how to do the Amazon ones but it's been a while, there might be a new way by now.

citruscomputing 4y ago

Full-text search is huge!! I've been using ripgrep-all, and running up against issues with the maximum cache size. Can't wait to try this out, hope it supports virtual libraries, hope it works with PDFs.

superkuh 4y ago
Calibre is great but if you specifically want full text search of ebooks and a multitude of document types then check out Recoll: http://www.recoll.org/ http://www.recoll.org/

heurisko 4y ago

I haven't used Calibre GUI but have many times used its tool ebook-convert. Really very useful. https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert.html https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert....

vzaliva 4y ago

I love Calibre but "sudo && wget | sh" installation on Linux makes me cringe. I wish there is an apk or snap.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.calibre_ebook.calibre https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.calibre_ebook.calibre
executesorder66 4y ago
I mean, you could just install it from your package manager like a normal person. Those instructions are for when your are on some some obscure distro that doesn't package it, but you still want some way of getting it on your system. Edit: I know on the download page it says "Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below." But that is bad advice. If you want a recent package, then use a distro that frequently updates it's packages. Most people using distros with ancient packages, (Debian, Slackware) _want_ it that way!

JohnTHaller 4y ago

Heads up for Windows users that Calibre 6 now requires Windows 11 or Windows 10 64-bit.

Larrikin 4y ago

Whenever I see Calibre mentioned, I always think that I'd like to take the time and organize my hundreds of eBooks with all the metadata but can never seem to justify the effort since I will be reading on a different device that will lose that information. I have an Android phone and an iPad. The only cross platform solution I've found for syncing reading position between those ecosystems is Google Play Books, but they don't really like large PDF uploads and epubs sometimes fail. It feels kind of gross uploading my own books to Google and having them track that information and would like to remove them from my reading habits. Calibre-Web has been mentioned in this thread and seemed like a good solution, but apparently doesn't support saving reading position. Is there any solution that lets me read the same book on my phone and my tablet and keep them in sync?

tomComb 4y ago
FBReader is cross-platform and I believe it sync's the way you want.
- Larrikin 4y ago
  This looks like it might be really good, there's no PDF support on iOS though sadly.

infogulch 4y ago

Where do you like to find ebooks? I found: https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://www.gutenberg.org/ | The classic source for free ebooks https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/ | Sources hosted on GitHub Others?

fbcx 4y ago
https://libgen.rs https://libgen.rs

account42 4y ago

Odd to see a "We value your privacy" popup on the website for an open source project. Both that they do feel the need to annoy their users at all when they could just not collect any data and that they resort to the insincere business speak wording. And of course none of the listed "legitimate interests" are actually legitimate.