8 ms·

Calibre replacement considerations (2019)

169 points by edward 3y ago

toenail 3y ago
This seems to be from 2019. Still no viable fork in sight. Yawn. Can't be so bad.
- RockRobotRock 3y ago
  fire up your IDE
  - JadeNB 3y ago
    I think toenail meant less "will no one rid me of this turbulent reader?", and more "if it were really so bad, then someone would have written some sort of alternative solution already." (I'm not sure I agree with the assertion, but, if I've read it correctly, then "fire up your IDE" doesn't seem to address it.)
    - RockRobotRock 3y ago
      good point! i see what they meant now.
  - CameronNemo 3y ago
    Not the original commenter, but if the code is as messy as the blog post states, a fork might not be the ideal choice. Might be better to start cutting out libraries, then implement bespoke, feature-specific applications on top of them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
MattPalmer1086 3y ago
I really only have 3 use cases for Calibre : "sync my device with my library", "convert format", and "strip DRM". I can never figure out how to do those things without massive research each time I need to do them. Maybe it's just me, but I do find the UI horribly confusing.
- stoolpigeon 3y ago
  Number 3 makes it worth it alone. If I buy something I want to be able to back it up and own it. Number 2 is awesome because when people publish without DRM, effectively I don't need to worry about the format. The first has never been that big a deal to me but I'll always have it on a machine I use for the other two.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  $ ebook-convert source.fb2 .epub I don't know about the other two, never needed them.
- ghostpepper 3y ago
  I think you can do most/all of that from the command line using tools like ebook-convert
  - Vivtek 3y ago
    ebook-convert is Calibre. But you're right that you can use it from command line (which is what I do as well).
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      Yes, but you avoid the interface. You figure out which command line flags you want to use (mainly for converting to PDF), save them somewhere, and then just use that command forever.
- freedomben 3y ago
  For the last several years I've had terrible luck with number 3, though I supect that's entirely amazon's fault rather than calibre. It's a real shame too because I used to buy a lot of books, but once I couldn't read them on the device I wanted (like Remarkable tablet) there's no point in buying anymore so I stopped. I still buy from DRM-free sellers, but most of the books I want to read are only available through the popular e-reader store.
davidgerard 3y ago
(2019) Calibre 6.x is in current Debian https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/calibre https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/calibre
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 3y ago
> I know almost exactly zero people that have an ebook reader that do not use Calibre. Calibre is like curl an important part of the foundation of the worlds knowledge base, except Kovid Goyal doesn't have a wiki page. While MIT blowhards came up with BS like OLPC, Calibre has helped spread books worldwide. It was great Kovid Goyal got Calibre to Python 3 as the sole (?) developer , I'm not sure if any of the complainers offered to pay to get it there quicker? I have no idea why the blog post is getting upvoted, but I'm sure helping Calibre along with bug fixes or $ is better than the most/all of the musings in the blog. Experiences in FOSS | Kovid Goyal (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-nFFtQt-Gg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-nFFtQt-Gg
- xref 3y ago
  I switched to Kitty terminal across all platforms about a year ago, a fantastic decision for me (initially I just wanted tmux-style windowing with no tmux) and Kovid built Kitty as well
- poulpy123 3y ago
  Except that people didn't complain that Goyal didn't port calibre to python 3 but that he refused for it to be ported and preferred backport librairies to python 3, which proved a very bad idea (obviously)
ilyagr 3y ago
I think installing Calibre is a good use case for installing Nix (https://www.nixos.org https://www.nixos.org). Unfortunately, you might also need https://github.com/guibou/nixGL https://github.com/guibou/nixGL to run graphical apps under Nix. It's a shell script to use the correct OpenGL library.
mcpackieh 3y ago
I don't use the Calibre GUI for anything, I have my own library management software, but the `ebook-convert` command-line tool which comes with Calibre is very useful. Much respect to Kovid Goyal for making these tools.
- doubleg72 3y ago
  I do use the GUI, but I have to agree in the ebook-covert tool being top notch. I once pulled a massive amount of books and videos from a particular publishers online platform. I can't remember the details but I wanna say the tool I used left me with html files with images stored in various folders or something. Ebook-convert handled thousands of books with very few having some formatting issues or outright failures. Most of the issues were the tables being way oversized and the text inside them not scaling correctly. I suspect I could fix this fairly easy, as I do still have all these books, but I just haven't gotten around to it. My data hoarding tendencies start to come out when scarcity is on the horizon and I will waste much time archiving something I'll never use on occasion.
redandblack 3y ago
Best is someone familiar with the LLM based coding tools to help the calibre team refactor their code. IMHO, calibre components can be replaced with other tools, but very difficult to assemble and engage an open source team successfully as they have shown. I have the same view on VLC also
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Are LLMs useful for large-scale refactoring? Seems like you'd need a specific model for that.
Aisen8010 3y ago
Calibre always had some update. It was annoying.
- themadturk 3y ago
  Yes, Calibre updates frequently, but a quick read of the release notes can tell you if you need that update. I usually update every couple of releases, but I can't remember a time (within a major version) that I had to update right away for any reason.
o1y32 3y ago
I tried to explain Calibre to someone else and an analogy I came up with was "iTunes for ebooks" which I found to be quite accurate. If Apple breaking up iTunes into different apps gives any hint about the shift in the way people manage their devices and contents and the general trends in software development, Calibre is probably not the ideal way for managing ebooks in 2023. (I started using kindle in 2011 and have been a long time user of Calibre, although I have used Calibre much less -- almost never unless I have to)
pmontra 3y ago
My use cases are convert format, edit ebook, create ebook from text. The last two with the editor which used to be a separate application. Maybe it was named Sigil? I send books to my phone with Syncthing. It would be nice if calibre had a way to receive the position in the file and if the reader on my phone had a way to send it to calibre. It would be easier to pick up a book on another device, maybe my tablet, but it's not really important. I always have my phone with me and for a typical fiction book a phone screen is really OK.
- anarcat 3y ago
  I use syncthing to sync my library around now, as mentioned in the article (I believe). This works great for Koreader, which stores read stats in a plain text file next to the ebook file. That can lead to syncthing conflicts sometimes, unfortunately but I suspect that might be more because of my combined use of git-annex and syncthing to archive my collection than anything specific to syncthing. It does mean I need to use koreader everywhere though, I don't have a way to sync read progress back into Calibre, but then I don't really have read progress there anyways. I have a "read/not read" flag there, but it's some custom thing I added somehow, Calibre doesn't support that out of the box anyway.
  - pmontra 3y ago
    I googled it and it seems that koreader has a selfhostable server that can be used to sync reading positions across devices https://github.com/koreader/koreader-sync-server https://github.com/koreader/koreader-sync-server I used koreader years ago. I'll give it a try again. If I like it I'll download the server and check if I can make it work.
    - anarcat 3y ago
      but see that's the thing, i don't even need that silly thing. i just run syncthing everywhere I need to (and it pretty much runs everywhere, including the kobo), and that's it. no middleman required (other than the syncthing meet-me infra of course, which is not as much as i expected: https://relays.syncthing.net/ https://relays.syncthing.net/).
alphanullmeric 3y ago
Foliate is excellent for epubs albeit much less powerful.
pigeons 3y ago
I love calibre's content server
anarcat 3y ago
Author here, fancy seeing this here (again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190657)! I keep updating that article as I find things, the most progress there is is in ebook readers. I mostly use Koreader on a Kobo now, but they also have an Android app which I used when I had a tablet (which has been unfortunately bricked recently). This meshes well with Syncthing as I have read progress propagate everywhere, and I use git-annex for archival / backup / redundancy. I still use Calibre for importing books. I think I could get rid of it if I had Something that would: 1. take a book and search for missing metadata (e.g. publication date, author, title, series, publisher, cover) 2. record addition date (git-annex or filesystem m/ctime could be used for that) 3. ... well, that really is it Really, I don't use Calibre for anything else anymore. In the article I talk about the book browser, but I don't really use that anyway. I'm actually considering "flattening" my archive so that all books are in the same directory. That would make Koreader possibly more usable as it would directly show book covers while browsing around. It might also make navigating through a file manager better for exactly the same reason. More broadly, I wish we had better file managers on the Linux desktop. What I'm looking for, repeatedly, is something that would show me a preview of what's inside a folder, kind of a photo gallery / music browser / ebook browser all rolled into one. The generic idea is that if there's a `cover.jpg` or whatever it's named inside a folder, use that as a icon or at least some sort of overlay when displaying the folder. I'm not sure how that would work, I'm not a designer, but I can't help but think there Must Be A Better Way here.
- majora2007 3y ago
  Hey, Kavita creator here and noticed you don't have any mentions of Kavita for epub readers. Kavita is not a Calibre replacement, but has a built-in epub/pdf reader along with some series-based organization. https://www.kavitareader.com/ https://www.kavitareader.com/
  - anarcat 3y ago
    interesting project! added, thanks!
- gryf73 3y ago
ipcress_file 3y ago
I use Calibre regularly to strip DRM and convert books from one format to another. For reading, I like epr, but epy is apparently an upgrade. https://github.com/wustho/epr https://github.com/wustho/epr https://github.com/wustho/epy https://github.com/wustho/epy
mrdude42 3y ago
I've definitely been trying to find a good alternative for a while. Still haven't found one though…
synergy20 3y ago
Calibre is essential to me to manage all my ebooks and pdfs, thanks for the great work.
eviks 3y ago
Surprised to not have seen one of my pet peeves in this thorough article: Calibre doesn't allow manual folder organization of your books
- anarcat 3y ago
  This is actually what I want Calibre the most for. It sorts things in folders quite nicely. I am one of those weirdos that really appreciated iTunes setting up my music by Artist/Album/Track.mp3 format back in the days... until I realized how much badly-tagged garbage I had in there at which point, yeah, I was upset. :p But nowadays I just have books setup by Author/Book/book.epub and that ... works okay. I mean it's one way to sort things around. I am actually considering a fully flat structure now so that koreader can show me previews, and I think Calibre could allow that, as I can customize its naming patterns... But yeah, it can be kind of annoying for software to rename files for you especially if you're not starting from scratch. But Calibre is the first thing I used to sync books on my ebook reader (a sony PRS-T2 i think!) so i did start from scratch and just kept going, so i didn't get many bad surprises, and it in fact forced me to keep my metadata clean to a certain extent (otherwise books end up in the wrong folder).
- sfRattan 3y ago
  Any software that re-arranges my files and folders without asking is a non-starter. So is any software that copies my files into its own set of folders and obscures any attempt to understand those folders. Calibre isn't as bad as iTunes, which will silently delete classical music ripped from a CD and replace the tracks with other orchestras performing the same piece... But Calibre has no concept of, "this user's files are already organized the way the user wants them to be." It's a manifestation of developer arrogance to not even give the end user the option.
  - allarm 3y ago
    > It's a manifestation of developer arrogance to not even give the end user the option. Calibre is a free, open source software. If it doesn’t fit your flow - don’t use it. The author doesn’t owe you anything. You should be thanking him for his great job that he does for free, instead you decide that you’re somehow entitled to more of his lifetime dedicated to the features important to you personally.
iamacyborg 3y ago
One of the more useful things you can do in Calibre I’ve found is full text search. I’m a Warhammer fan and enjoy their fiction and being able to search across hundreds of books for character names is rather handy, particularly when the flagship book series has 70+ books.
- walthamstow 3y ago
  It's brilliant for my 200+ cookbook collection as well, I can basically search for recipes by ingredient.
poulpy123 3y ago
My main grip with calibre is that I can't use my already defined folder structure, so I'm not using it. Unfortunately there is no alternative for managing metadata including automatic download and batch edition, even as a command line. I sometimes toy with the idea to develop one, but I realise that I don't have the competence or the dedication to do it
paradox460 3y ago
I've mostly moved to Calibre web, and use sshfs to mount the library when I need to do things that can only be done in the "real" version It's been really nice, and KOreader syncs nicely with it

169 points by edward 3y ago

toenail 3y ago

This seems to be from 2019. Still no viable fork in sight. Yawn. Can't be so bad.

RockRobotRock 3y ago
fire up your IDE
- JadeNB 3y ago
  I think toenail meant less "will no one rid me of this turbulent reader?", and more "if it were really so bad, then someone would have written some sort of alternative solution already." (I'm not sure I agree with the assertion, but, if I've read it correctly, then "fire up your IDE" doesn't seem to address it.)
  - RockRobotRock 3y ago
    good point! i see what they meant now.
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  Not the original commenter, but if the code is as messy as the blog post states, a fork might not be the ideal choice. Might be better to start cutting out libraries, then implement bespoke, feature-specific applications on top of them.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

MattPalmer1086 3y ago

I really only have 3 use cases for Calibre : "sync my device with my library", "convert format", and "strip DRM". I can never figure out how to do those things without massive research each time I need to do them. Maybe it's just me, but I do find the UI horribly confusing.

stoolpigeon 3y ago
Number 3 makes it worth it alone. If I buy something I want to be able to back it up and own it. Number 2 is awesome because when people publish without DRM, effectively I don't need to worry about the format. The first has never been that big a deal to me but I'll always have it on a machine I use for the other two.
5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
$ ebook-convert source.fb2 .epub I don't know about the other two, never needed them.
ghostpepper 3y ago
I think you can do most/all of that from the command line using tools like ebook-convert
- Vivtek 3y ago
  ebook-convert is Calibre. But you're right that you can use it from command line (which is what I do as well).
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Yes, but you avoid the interface. You figure out which command line flags you want to use (mainly for converting to PDF), save them somewhere, and then just use that command forever.
freedomben 3y ago
For the last several years I've had terrible luck with number 3, though I supect that's entirely amazon's fault rather than calibre. It's a real shame too because I used to buy a lot of books, but once I couldn't read them on the device I wanted (like Remarkable tablet) there's no point in buying anymore so I stopped. I still buy from DRM-free sellers, but most of the books I want to read are only available through the popular e-reader store.

davidgerard 3y ago

(2019) Calibre 6.x is in current Debian https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/calibre https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/calibre

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

aaron695 3y ago

> I know almost exactly zero people that have an ebook reader that do not use Calibre. Calibre is like curl an important part of the foundation of the worlds knowledge base, except Kovid Goyal doesn't have a wiki page. While MIT blowhards came up with BS like OLPC, Calibre has helped spread books worldwide. It was great Kovid Goyal got Calibre to Python 3 as the sole (?) developer , I'm not sure if any of the complainers offered to pay to get it there quicker? I have no idea why the blog post is getting upvoted, but I'm sure helping Calibre along with bug fixes or $ is better than the most/all of the musings in the blog. Experiences in FOSS | Kovid Goyal (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-nFFtQt-Gg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-nFFtQt-Gg

xref 3y ago
I switched to Kitty terminal across all platforms about a year ago, a fantastic decision for me (initially I just wanted tmux-style windowing with no tmux) and Kovid built Kitty as well
poulpy123 3y ago
Except that people didn't complain that Goyal didn't port calibre to python 3 but that he refused for it to be ported and preferred backport librairies to python 3, which proved a very bad idea (obviously)

ilyagr 3y ago

I think installing Calibre is a good use case for installing Nix (https://www.nixos.org https://www.nixos.org). Unfortunately, you might also need https://github.com/guibou/nixGL https://github.com/guibou/nixGL to run graphical apps under Nix. It's a shell script to use the correct OpenGL library.

mcpackieh 3y ago

I don't use the Calibre GUI for anything, I have my own library management software, but the `ebook-convert` command-line tool which comes with Calibre is very useful. Much respect to Kovid Goyal for making these tools.

doubleg72 3y ago
I do use the GUI, but I have to agree in the ebook-covert tool being top notch. I once pulled a massive amount of books and videos from a particular publishers online platform. I can't remember the details but I wanna say the tool I used left me with html files with images stored in various folders or something. Ebook-convert handled thousands of books with very few having some formatting issues or outright failures. Most of the issues were the tables being way oversized and the text inside them not scaling correctly. I suspect I could fix this fairly easy, as I do still have all these books, but I just haven't gotten around to it. My data hoarding tendencies start to come out when scarcity is on the horizon and I will waste much time archiving something I'll never use on occasion.

redandblack 3y ago

Best is someone familiar with the LLM based coding tools to help the calibre team refactor their code. IMHO, calibre components can be replaced with other tools, but very difficult to assemble and engage an open source team successfully as they have shown. I have the same view on VLC also

nerdponx 3y ago
Are LLMs useful for large-scale refactoring? Seems like you'd need a specific model for that.

Aisen8010 3y ago

Calibre always had some update. It was annoying.

themadturk 3y ago
Yes, Calibre updates frequently, but a quick read of the release notes can tell you if you need that update. I usually update every couple of releases, but I can't remember a time (within a major version) that I had to update right away for any reason.

o1y32 3y ago

I tried to explain Calibre to someone else and an analogy I came up with was "iTunes for ebooks" which I found to be quite accurate. If Apple breaking up iTunes into different apps gives any hint about the shift in the way people manage their devices and contents and the general trends in software development, Calibre is probably not the ideal way for managing ebooks in 2023. (I started using kindle in 2011 and have been a long time user of Calibre, although I have used Calibre much less -- almost never unless I have to)

pmontra 3y ago

My use cases are convert format, edit ebook, create ebook from text. The last two with the editor which used to be a separate application. Maybe it was named Sigil? I send books to my phone with Syncthing. It would be nice if calibre had a way to receive the position in the file and if the reader on my phone had a way to send it to calibre. It would be easier to pick up a book on another device, maybe my tablet, but it's not really important. I always have my phone with me and for a typical fiction book a phone screen is really OK.

anarcat 3y ago
I use syncthing to sync my library around now, as mentioned in the article (I believe). This works great for Koreader, which stores read stats in a plain text file next to the ebook file. That can lead to syncthing conflicts sometimes, unfortunately but I suspect that might be more because of my combined use of git-annex and syncthing to archive my collection than anything specific to syncthing. It does mean I need to use koreader everywhere though, I don't have a way to sync read progress back into Calibre, but then I don't really have read progress there anyways. I have a "read/not read" flag there, but it's some custom thing I added somehow, Calibre doesn't support that out of the box anyway.
- pmontra 3y ago
  I googled it and it seems that koreader has a selfhostable server that can be used to sync reading positions across devices https://github.com/koreader/koreader-sync-server https://github.com/koreader/koreader-sync-server I used koreader years ago. I'll give it a try again. If I like it I'll download the server and check if I can make it work.
  - anarcat 3y ago
    but see that's the thing, i don't even need that silly thing. i just run syncthing everywhere I need to (and it pretty much runs everywhere, including the kobo), and that's it. no middleman required (other than the syncthing meet-me infra of course, which is not as much as i expected: https://relays.syncthing.net/ https://relays.syncthing.net/).

alphanullmeric 3y ago

Foliate is excellent for epubs albeit much less powerful.

pigeons 3y ago

I love calibre's content server

anarcat 3y ago

Author here, fancy seeing this here (again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190657)! I keep updating that article as I find things, the most progress there is is in ebook readers. I mostly use Koreader on a Kobo now, but they also have an Android app which I used when I had a tablet (which has been unfortunately bricked recently). This meshes well with Syncthing as I have read progress propagate everywhere, and I use git-annex for archival / backup / redundancy. I still use Calibre for importing books. I think I could get rid of it if I had Something that would: 1. take a book and search for missing metadata (e.g. publication date, author, title, series, publisher, cover) 2. record addition date (git-annex or filesystem m/ctime could be used for that) 3. ... well, that really is it Really, I don't use Calibre for anything else anymore. In the article I talk about the book browser, but I don't really use that anyway. I'm actually considering "flattening" my archive so that all books are in the same directory. That would make Koreader possibly more usable as it would directly show book covers while browsing around. It might also make navigating through a file manager better for exactly the same reason. More broadly, I wish we had better file managers on the Linux desktop. What I'm looking for, repeatedly, is something that would show me a preview of what's inside a folder, kind of a photo gallery / music browser / ebook browser all rolled into one. The generic idea is that if there's a `cover.jpg` or whatever it's named inside a folder, use that as a icon or at least some sort of overlay when displaying the folder. I'm not sure how that would work, I'm not a designer, but I can't help but think there Must Be A Better Way here.

majora2007 3y ago
Hey, Kavita creator here and noticed you don't have any mentions of Kavita for epub readers. Kavita is not a Calibre replacement, but has a built-in epub/pdf reader along with some series-based organization. https://www.kavitareader.com/ https://www.kavitareader.com/
- anarcat 3y ago
  interesting project! added, thanks!
gryf73 3y ago

ipcress_file 3y ago

I use Calibre regularly to strip DRM and convert books from one format to another. For reading, I like epr, but epy is apparently an upgrade. https://github.com/wustho/epr https://github.com/wustho/epr https://github.com/wustho/epy https://github.com/wustho/epy

mrdude42 3y ago

I've definitely been trying to find a good alternative for a while. Still haven't found one though…

synergy20 3y ago

Calibre is essential to me to manage all my ebooks and pdfs, thanks for the great work.

eviks 3y ago

Surprised to not have seen one of my pet peeves in this thorough article: Calibre doesn't allow manual folder organization of your books

anarcat 3y ago
This is actually what I want Calibre the most for. It sorts things in folders quite nicely. I am one of those weirdos that really appreciated iTunes setting up my music by Artist/Album/Track.mp3 format back in the days... until I realized how much badly-tagged garbage I had in there at which point, yeah, I was upset. :p But nowadays I just have books setup by Author/Book/book.epub and that ... works okay. I mean it's one way to sort things around. I am actually considering a fully flat structure now so that koreader can show me previews, and I think Calibre could allow that, as I can customize its naming patterns... But yeah, it can be kind of annoying for software to rename files for you especially if you're not starting from scratch. But Calibre is the first thing I used to sync books on my ebook reader (a sony PRS-T2 i think!) so i did start from scratch and just kept going, so i didn't get many bad surprises, and it in fact forced me to keep my metadata clean to a certain extent (otherwise books end up in the wrong folder).
sfRattan 3y ago
Any software that re-arranges my files and folders without asking is a non-starter. So is any software that copies my files into its own set of folders and obscures any attempt to understand those folders. Calibre isn't as bad as iTunes, which will silently delete classical music ripped from a CD and replace the tracks with other orchestras performing the same piece... But Calibre has no concept of, "this user's files are already organized the way the user wants them to be." It's a manifestation of developer arrogance to not even give the end user the option.
- allarm 3y ago
  > It's a manifestation of developer arrogance to not even give the end user the option. Calibre is a free, open source software. If it doesn’t fit your flow - don’t use it. The author doesn’t owe you anything. You should be thanking him for his great job that he does for free, instead you decide that you’re somehow entitled to more of his lifetime dedicated to the features important to you personally.

iamacyborg 3y ago

One of the more useful things you can do in Calibre I’ve found is full text search. I’m a Warhammer fan and enjoy their fiction and being able to search across hundreds of books for character names is rather handy, particularly when the flagship book series has 70+ books.

walthamstow 3y ago
It's brilliant for my 200+ cookbook collection as well, I can basically search for recipes by ingredient.

poulpy123 3y ago

My main grip with calibre is that I can't use my already defined folder structure, so I'm not using it. Unfortunately there is no alternative for managing metadata including automatic download and batch edition, even as a command line. I sometimes toy with the idea to develop one, but I realise that I don't have the competence or the dedication to do it

paradox460 3y ago

I've mostly moved to Calibre web, and use sshfs to mount the library when I need to do things that can only be done in the "real" version It's been really nice, and KOreader syncs nicely with it