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Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app

338 points by phildenhoff 3y ago

Hey folks! This winter I've been building Citadel to scratch my itch of managing ebooks without using Calibre. Calibre is incredibly powerful, but it's slow and awkward to use. I dreamed of writing a native app (and originally tried this in Swift), but ran into issues building the UI. Plus, whatever I built would only work on macOS. I started writing Citadel using Tauri (Svelte on the frontend + Rust on the backend) to have a cross-platform desktop app. Plus, Citadel supports running in a headless / webbrowser mode. You can self-host a Citadel server that manages your library, and connect to it from anywhere with the web. This is SUPER early software. Honestly, I'm a bit embarrassed to post it here — but I wanted folks to know that I'm building a tool to replace Calibre. If you'd like to help build it, I'd love the help! If you just want to follow the journey, please do!

phildenhoff 3y ago
As an aside, some folks may ask "why write a new app instead of contributing to Calibre Web or a similar project?" It's a good question! Because I wanted to :) Right now, this is a hobby project — I'm more interested in having fun building (rough!!) software than worried about extending existing projects. Plus, with how Citadel is designed to be backwards compatible with Calibre, you can continue to use Calibre Web. As well, I've organized the backend so that all the Calibre-facing code is its own library, which (in the future!) others can use for their own projects. A Calibre library CLI, anyone?
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  > A Calibre library CLI, anyone? A nice idea I wrote a remarkably hacky cli for that rdr. Basically to - open the last book opened with the CLI - select from the last n books so opened - return the results of a query and narrow with rofi I figure this covers a huge portion of my normal usage. Pushing books to device would be useful too.
- inhumantsar 3y ago
  > "why write a new app" I'd imagine spearheading a ground up rewrite of their UI would be a lot more work too. thanks for taking this on! calibre is a pita for me to use, and I know what I'm doing. makes it impossible to recommend to anyone, whether they're my grandparents or asavvy tech person.
  - reddalo 3y ago
    Trust me, I'm tech savvy but I tried Calibre once and I couldn't figure it out, so I just gave up.
    - Snow_Falls 3y ago
      What part couldn't you figure out? Where you editing ebooks or just managing a library? Not a contributor here, just curious. Edit: I've read a few more comments and some a free with you, while others think it works fine. I'm wondering if there's something about the UI that clicks with some but not others.
      - flkiwi 3y ago
        Without taking away from the overall project and work that’s gone into it, the UI reminds me unpleasantly of the darkest days of Lotus Notes: things aren’t quite where they should be and they don’t look entirely baked when I find them.
        kwhitefoot 3y ago
        Can you be more specific? Or describe how it could be better? I'll grant that Calibre has a UI that doesn't look like other applications but it seems to work well enough for me.
      - pokeymcsnatch 3y ago
        I'll bite I guess. I use Calibre pretty regularly. I think a general way to put it is that it's not for "casuals". To understand a lot of the functionality outside of the basic inventory management stuff, you have to be a little bit of an enthusiast. For some examples: You have to know about different ereaders and their formats and how they differ, the differences between metadata sources, and dozens and dozens of configuration options if you're trying to convert a book to work well on your device. Also, there's definitely something "off" when it comes to using it intuitively. I have to devote a lot of brain power to searching for functionality AND trying to comprehend exactly how those pieces of functionality are going to affect my library data. Maybe it's too powerful of a tool up front or something. It could benefit from a "basic view" maybe? None of these are complaints from me, I'm a happy user. I'll just echo some other commenters in wishing for a more robust network interface (whether that's just an API, or a more hashed out front end). I'd like to easily share my library with people or just other devices while on-the-go, and Calibre has all the device formatting functionality built-in.
- Cockbrand 3y ago
  > Right now, this is a hobby project Gives me a bit of early Linus Thorvalds vibes: "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu" [0] - that said, I wish you all the best for the project :) [0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html
- fasterik 3y ago
  It's slightly sad that you have to give this disclaimer, especially on a forum for hackers. One of my favorite quotes about this comes from a John Carmack commencement speech: "In many areas, it's almost received wisdom that you shouldn't reinvent the wheel. But I would urge you to occasionally try anyways. You'll be better for the effort, and this is how eventually we get better wheels. By people just going ahead and trying." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZnqjHkULc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZnqjHkULc
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Reinventing the wheel is fine. However most attempts should be done "in your basement" and thrown away. Don't publish your attempt on the likes of github. Learn what you can from it and then throw it away. Apply lessons learned the the dominate project already there. There are many good open source projects that could be great if more developers would work on them. So instead of reinventing the wheel I strongly encourage everybody to work on an existing project and make it better. Note that I said "most" above. There are reasons to write a start a new project despite others in the same space existing. However this should not be done until you define what is wrong with existing projects.
    - sentientslug 3y ago
      Could not disagree more, with this attitude there would never be any new open source projects!
    - dabber 3y ago
      > Reinventing the wheel is fine. However most attempts should be done "in your basement" and thrown away. Don't publish your attempt on the likes of github. Learn what you can from it and then throw it away. Apply lessons learned the the dominate project already there. [...] > Note that I said "most" above. There are reasons to write a start a new project despite others in the same space existing. However this should not be done until you define what is wrong with existing projects. I couldn't disagree with this more. Reinventing something in public view can be extraordinarily valuable, even if without a clearly defined problem to address. Off the top of my head: - Learning in public can have benefits: I personally tend to write much better software if I know there is any chance someone else might see it and reinventing the wheel (Todo app anyone?) is a great way to focus on learning some new techniques or technology without the added overhead of also inventing a novel solution to some hard problem. - Contributing to the dominate project in any space requires working within the constraints of the existing code and project/user expectations, and if you just show up out of the blue trying to "apply lessons learned", you also need to make a convincing argument for why your way is the better way. On the other hand, reinventing the project allows the freedom to experiment and demonstrate some radical alternative and doing it in public allows anyone (including dominant project maintainers and users) to learn from it. - People that don't have any interest in the original project, but do have interest in aspects of the reinvention can benefit. For example, I haven't used Calibre in years and don't plan to now, but I'm grateful the author shared this because I hadn't heard of Tauri prior or seen a Bun project, and now I'm exploring the repo and learning something new. > There are many good open source projects that could be great if more developers would work on them. Eh. Sounds like a Zero-Sum Fallacy.
- EasyMark 3y ago
  I would say "it doesn't fit my needs and would require a complete backend rewrite". I think you never have to justify this sort of thing when youre desires for an app are so much different than what is available currently
- retrochameleon 3y ago
  Calibre is a champion of ebook management functionalities, but I have never been satisfied with its experience, nor its developer. It was never designed to be a hosted library accessible over the web, and it's a very poor experience in my opinion. If there was a solid competitor that was more open, more modern, and designed with the hosted library solution in mind, I would no doubt start using it.
deleted 3y ago
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phildenhoff 3y ago
Quick post about Citadel https://denhoff.ca/posts/replacing-calibre https://denhoff.ca/posts/replacing-calibre
stop50 3y ago
Interesting
ssivark 3y ago
Kudos on shipping your hobby project! Looks slick. And a calibre cli would definitely be appreciated -- I hate having to click five levels deep in a dozen menus :P If the "reader" and "editor" aspects are explicit non-goals (fair enough), then what actually does Citadel do for users? Is it mainly to be a portal to view/sort books and click on them? Is there a roadmap where you envision more features?
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  Good question! My main use for Calibre has been to collect my epubs (mostly) in one place, and occasionally sync them to my ereader. When I add books, I need to grab metadata for the book like title, ISBN, etc. Citadel will (and does) support editing metadata for books — titles, authors, (in future) tags, custom columns. That’s certain. Syncing to devices will come too, in time, as will downloading metadata from online sources. But what I don’t plan on adding is a way to edit book content or an embedded ereader. There are lots of great ereader apps & devices already, and I don’t think epub editing is commonly used (compared to keeping a collection). While I don’t have a road map, I’m always open to feedback and ideas! (Edit: other features like format conversion and stripping DRM are likely to happen too. Ideally with crates or plugins, to make it a bit easier to extend)
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    One feature that would be great is being able to sync/upload the metadata to something like a Bookwyrm[1] instance (there's apparently a `/create-book` endpoint for this) - trying to find and retype all the information from, e.g., Amazon is a pain. [1] https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm
    - phildenhoff 3y ago
      A BookWyrm plugin is a great idea!
  - singhrac 3y ago
    Do you think you’d make a plugin interface to get books? For example from Standard Ebooks, via some sort of API? My guess is that they’d be ok with that usage if you ask and you can solve some cold start problems that way. And, of course, get some more eyeballs on their fantastic project.
pathartl 3y ago
Love the project. Calibre is absolutely an amazing tool, but it never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era. I really like the focus on maintaining compatibility with the Calibre library. Personally the features I use the most are the folder watching and automatic book conversion. Now if there was support for multiple Calibre libraries...
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  Do you mean viewing multiple libraries at once? What would be the benefit of that over having one library with saved filter views?
  - walthamstow 3y ago
    I did once have segregated Calibre libraries. One for cookbooks, one for technical books in PDF and one for 'regular' books like novels and nonfiction in EPUB. The only reason I had it like that was so I could sync just the cookbook files to another device via Syncthing, or only the technical books. It didn't last, it was a pita to manager (three different auto-add folders) and I reunified them after 9 months or so.
  - pathartl 3y ago
    Being able to switch between multiple libraries under one application, and being able to assign those libraries based on a logged on user is sort of what I'm talking about. My partner and I have two very different tastes in books, and managing them under one library is a pain.
- pmontra 3y ago
  > [Calibre] never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era Could you explain that in more detail? It seems to me that Calibre is totally self hosted. I give an example. I use Calibre to import ebooks as epub (if they are not already epub, which they usually are,) maybe change their metadata and add a cover if they don't have one. The books go to Calibre's directory and then I sync to my phone using syncthing, like everything else I exchange between my laptop and my phone. I know that Calibre has a way to send books to devices but I think that it requires either a hardware reader or some interoperable app. I prefer working only with the file system. It always works no matter what I have on my phone. All of that seems self hosted to me, or do you mean having a server somewhere at home or on the internet with the ebook collection? I also use the editor to fix typos or to create ebooks from text files.
asimpletune 3y ago
Sometimes I feel that if Calibre just looked better people would realize how amazing it is. It’s honestly not that bad (I actually love it) but I think people can’t get past the aesthetic.
- RadiozRadioz 3y ago
  Agreed. Unfortunately rewriting the Calibre UI is probably more work than maintaining Python 2.
  - freddie_mercury 3y ago
    What does Python 2 have to do with anything? Calibre hasn't used Python 2 in years.
    - MikusR 3y ago
      Calibre author initially was so against Python 3 that he offered to maintain Python 2 by hinmself
      - gjvc 3y ago
        This is a pretty good sign
        jethro_tell 3y ago
        Of what?
        gjvc 3y ago
        "red flag" I meant
- smivan 3y ago
  The challenge that I face is Calibre absolutely craters after 20,000+ ebooks. I understand that most folks probably have 10-300 books, but in my case I have some large libraries I tried to use with Calibre, and it just absolutely DIES. The steadfast decision to exclusively use SQLite doesn't help. I opened a PR back in 2016 or so, but the maintainer was quite enthusiastically opposed to changing the DB layer or making it pluggable.
mvelbaum 3y ago
Does this support custom metadata? For example I have a custom field I call "Folders" to hierarchically label/organize my eBooks. Would be nice to be able to browse through that or search under a specific label/folder.
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  Not yet :) Custom Columns (if thats what you mean!) are on the todo list though — I have a couple in my library, one for tracking Read state and another for tracking word count. Filtering is only on author & title for now. I’m looking to rewrite filtering once I have support in libcalibre for more data, so that you can easily filter by custom columns. How do you search / organize your data in Calibre now? What would be ideal?
  - mvelbaum 3y ago
    > Custom Columns (if thats what you mean!) are on the todo list though — I have a couple in my library, one for tracking Read state and another for tracking word count. Yeah, I have a bunch of them, one is "Read Status" (read, reading, to-read), another is "Recommended By" to track books recommended by various people, and the last one is "Folders" which I use to arrange books in a folder-like hierarachy. For example, you could have a "Finance" folder, and then "Finance.Investing", "Finance.Personal Finance", "Finance.Trading" subfolders. The calibre content server does support searching and viewing these columns, and in the desktop app you see the tree on the left pane which you can quickly browse. To search a specific "folder" you'd use something like: #folder:"=Finance.Personal Finance" title:"happy money"
RamblingCTO 3y ago
Looks super cool! What about kindle sync?
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  In the future, for sure!
spython 3y ago
Looks great! Just last week I tried to use Calibre again and fell into the black hole that is its UI.. Thought of donating some UI/UX work but felt like that would be a multi-year project. Perhaps I could support you with UI/UX instead?
- Modified3019 3y ago
  My understanding of the calibre project from watching it over the years, is that improvements are typically not welcome. Kovid Goyal already has what he wants, and if you any everyone one else want something else, you’ll need to fork (and then maintain) He’s done amazing work, but he’s one of those very opinionated people that can quickly and arbitrarily become weirdly hostile to things, even when others offer to do the work.
  - spython 3y ago
    I had the same impression. Calibre is immensely powerful but highly opinionated. A bit like a chaotic work bench, where you know exactly where everything is, if you are the originator of the chaos.
- generic92034 3y ago
  Just to offer a different opinion: I never had any issues with the Calibre UI and usually get stuff done quickly and efficiently in it. Honest question: Are there any examples of native smartphone apps which are offering such a functional wealth as Calibre does in a much better/easier way?
  - spython 3y ago
    Years ago I was very happy with the GoodReader app, haven't used it recently though.
  - msh 3y ago
    Goodreader comes close (ios)
- mmsimanga 3y ago
hamdouni 3y ago
Side note : this invocation bun dev -- -- -- -- --server ... made my day :-)
- berkes 3y ago
  Yeah. Made me wonder what's going on there.
  - quic5 3y ago
    From the README > Yes, that is 4 pairs of --s. This is because Bun will pass the first pair to another bun run command, the second will go to tauri dev, the third will go to vite dev, and finally the last set will go to Cargo when running the backend. It's a mess!
    - forty 3y ago
      pnpm realized how bad UX those -- when launching scripts were, and reorganized their arguments so that they are not needed anymore.
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
Is there a publicly accessible book catalog where books can be searched by isbn, title or author?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Yes: Amazon, Google Books, Anna's Archive and Wikipedia Book sources.
- cxr 3y ago
  There's the Open Library <https://openlibrary.org https://openlibrary.org> (a project of the Internet Archive) and OCLC WorldCat.
poulpy123 3y ago
Do you plan to handle custom folder hierarchy?
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  Not with Calibre libraries. If you ever go back to using Calibre, I’m not sure how it will respond to having all of the files “messed up” in the wrong spot — the docs are quite clear that there is ONE way to store books. That said, the end goal is to have a native Citadel way to manage libraries and that WOULD support custom folder hierarchies.
  - poulpy123 3y ago
    Great ! I will follow your project
carderne 3y ago
Would you mind explaining what is going on in the backend? You seem to be using both Rust and Bun/Typescript?
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  The backend is straight Rust. Bun is used as a package management tool & as a script runner, to invoke Tauri commands that start up a Vite webserver to provide the UI, and start something that rebuilds the binary when Rust files change. Typescript is used for the Svelte UI. Svelte talks to the Rust backend through Tauri (by default). Both support a headless/web mode where the Svelte frontend connects to the backend over HTTP.
  - carderne 3y ago
    Awesome, thanks for responding. Very keen to give Tauri a spin, seems like a happy middle way between native toolkits (which I'm just never going to spend the time to learn properly) and Electron (which I'm just never going to love).
romseb 3y ago
Awesome. I have been using calibre-web for many years, which (unlike Calibre) has a decent look and all the functionality I need.
pooralaska 3y ago
does it mangle japanese titles/authors by transcribing to pinyin chinese like calibre does? do the drm plugins work? might check it out and switch.
- Uvix 3y ago
  By mangling, you’re just referring to the folder/file names in the Calibre Library folder, right? The actual metadata in the app/book are fine?
  - LinguaBrowse 3y ago
    Likely referring to that, yeah. And yes, the metadata is fine - but it’s a joke that I can’t find any Japanese books I own on my file system because Calibre’s author has renamed them to something that makes sense neither in Japanese, nor English, nor even Chinese. It’s particularly dumb as it will have taken even more work on his part to map the characters to pīnyīn than it would’ve to just preserve the actual titles.
    - Uvix 3y ago
      With a modern filesystem, absolutely. With FAT32 that was prevalent when Calibre was first released in 2006... I'm not so sure.
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  Good lord, no. Does Calibre do that? My greatest fear is having to build bad things like that for backwards compatibility, because Calibre would require it. While I haven't tested non-ASCII titles, there is no reason it shouldn't support it. I'm planning on doing some perf testing today and I'll make sure I test global names.
- MrWB 3y ago
  I’ve been caught out by that recently - it’s not considered a bug! With the advised workaround changing Calibre’s interface into Japanese?!
justatroll2 3y ago
Rad - Good luck.
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  Thank you!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zaptheimpaler 3y ago
How was your experience with Tauri? I'm loving Rust and would like a lightweight web backend (like Flask in Python) to use with Rust.
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  Tauri has been excellent. Occasionally I have to do some GitHub issues spelunking to find answers to issues, but that's common with piece of tech. Overall it's been great and I'll happily use it again.
9dev 3y ago
Interesting! For a while now, I’ve started working on a similar project with the same general idea, although I settled for SvelteKit and browsers instead of native apps: https://github.com/project-kiosk/kiosk https://github.com/project-kiosk/kiosk I just can’t keep motivation up long enough to finish it…
- snats 3y ago
  it looks great. keep up the work, i would like to use it
j3d 3y ago
This looks really cool and I plan on checking it out. Ironically, I recently built a desktop app using the same stack (Rust + Tauri + Svelte) for managing audiobooks. Shameless plug in case anyone is interested: https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker#audiobook-locker https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker#audiobook-locker
- vinnymac 3y ago
  This is cool, I have toyed with Tauri in the past for some projects. Curious what brought you to pick Svelte and Tauri for this project? Were you already familiar with them?
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  I'll be looking at your project for inspo :) Thanks for sharing!
  - djfdat 3y ago
    If you guys could become best friends and integrate both projects into one ultimate ebook/audiobook tool, that would be great :)
    - zaptheimpaler 3y ago
      Seconded.. an ebook tool and an audiobook tool both incidentally made on the exact same stack?! Sounds like a match made in heaven.
oakhaven 3y ago
Yesterday I realized that I can just copy an epub to a directory on my Kobo reader to the `root/<auhtor's name>` of the mountpoint in /media/oakhaven/koboreader (on Ubunutu 22.04). It will show up in the list of books on the device. For some reason I thought that uploading books to the Kobo reader was somehow complicated, and I only used Caliber to get books from laptop to Kobo. I know Calibre has lots of other functions, but I didn't like the interface and I'm happy I don't have to use it, or any other application like that, anymore.
- jwells89 3y ago
  This is actually one of the reasons why I bought a Kobo instead of a Kindle or whatever else was available a few years ago. When you plug them in they mount like any other USB mass storage and you copy your stuff to them… no need for special formats or anything either, standards like ePub work great. It kinda made me wonder how Kindles remain so popular. First mover’s advantage? I dunno, but an eReader that can’t read ePubs and PDFs feels a bit like an audio player that can’t play MP3s and AAC.
  - Uvix 3y ago
    Most readers only buy books from their device’s store, so they don’t need to worry about sideloading. And then once they’ve done so, they are hesitant to switch because it’s hard or impossible to extract yourself from Amazon or B&N or Apple’s ecosystem without losing content. Ideally everybody would only buy DRM-free ePubs and audiobooks but realistically people don’t care. And I don’t see a repeat of Apple forcing DRM-free music happening here.
    - jwells89 3y ago
      At least the Books app on Apple iOS/macOS will manage and read plain old epubs and PDFs without issue, even if you’ve already bought DRM’d books from Apple’s store. It’s really only big name e-ink readers other than Kobo that have this issue.
      - 3y ago
deafpolygon 3y ago
> Performant: Citadel should feel just as fast as Calibre. Pretty low bar to clear, honestly. Either way this is cool to see. Maybe we'll see more energy behind Calibre as a result.
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  Yes, that’s ehh not what I intended, really. Citadel has a lower bar of “no slower than Calibre” but I expect it to be MUCH faster. For example — Calibre takes 8s to start up on my laptop. Citadel is nearly instant. I’d like to keep it that way!
codpiece 3y ago
This is great, thank you! I really love Calibre, but like you, I find the UI difficult. I will download and install today! Good luck!
- Snow_Falls 3y ago
  What do you find difficult about the calibre interface? It seems quite intuitive to me. To be fair, I only add metadata (tags, scores, descriptions, covers, series info etc) and polish ebooks. I just add books to my ereader after that.
ebri 3y ago
Cudos for having Andreas malm at the front of the git repo ! :)
cxr 3y ago
> I dreamed of writing a native app[...] but ran into issues building the UI. Plus, whatever I built would only work on macOS. I started writing Citadel using Tauri[...] to have a cross-platform desktop app. Have you looked at Zotero? This would fit well within that ecosystem, and it's hard to think that shoring up its support for ebooks (and Calibre compatibility) would be poorly received. I could imagine Citadel being an opinionated Zotero "distribution"—in the vein of OS distros or the various Jetbrains IDEs—with its own landing page and downloads, to better cater towards and more tailored for people primarily interested in reading for pleasure (rather than an emphasis on academic research, which tends to throw people off when recommending it, even though most of the pieces are there for ebook management...)
janice1999 3y ago
Anyone else having trouble building and running it (Ubuntu 23.10)? > thread 'main' panicked at libcalibre/src/infrastructure/domain/book/repository.rs:20:62: called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: ()
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  Yes — sorry! I hadn't pushed local changes yet. I didn't expect a big reception! `main` is up-to-date now and SHOULD be building. Feel free to email me (phil at denhoff dot ca) if you run into issues, or add a GitHub issue.
  - mdaniel 3y ago
    I would be glad to help you set up GitHub Actions to build branches if that interests you. On the one hand, I'm for sure not a GHA (nor rust nor bun) ninja, but OTOH I do have a passion for painless builds :-)
    - phildenhoff 3y ago
      Thanks for the offer! If you'd like to, I've written up a quick issue outlining what I think we need for a build: https://github.com/every-day-things/citadel/issues/3 https://github.com/every-day-things/citadel/issues/3 It sounds like some folks have issues building on Linux, but FWIW I had no problems building in a Codespace.
  - janice1999 3y ago
    Thanks! I appreciate the response.
hermitdev 3y ago
Cool project, and best of luck to you. However, you might want to rethink the name as Citadel is also an established company - a large hedge fund with deep pockets that's not afraid of using it's lawyers.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  That's not how trademark works
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    One manages the books the other cooks the books. I can see how that could be confused...
b8 3y ago
Very cool project! I wish it would support old Calibre plugins though.
mdaniel 3y ago
As best I can tell there's no licensing information in the repo
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  Fixed: it's MIT licensed
gosub100 3y ago
Does anyone have advice to help my friend who has a few-hundred-k backup ebooks on a drive somewhere? I realize a calibre-style interface for this many books is out of the question, but I always felt bad that he can't easily access the material because just doing an ls or opening the directory in the file manager slows his system down. Has anyone found any solutions for this? Indexing the content isn't required, but would be an awesome plus.
dceddia 3y ago
Very nice! It’s great to see another Tauri + Svelte project too. I’ve been building a video editor with that stack for a while now and it’s been pretty awesome.
respot 3y ago
Nice project! I love Calibre's functionality, but I too was kind of frustrated by its UI and started designing an interface that kind of looks like a mixture of pre-Apple-Music iTunes and iBooks. I only created one screen so far, but feel free to take a look: https://www.figma.com/file/m8qaYbPSnxiFPDPbuYtz2w/Calibre-redesign?type=design&node-id=0%3A1&mode=design&t=VijuXmU30jgRNOeH-1 https://www.figma.com/file/m8qaYbPSnxiFPDPbuYtz2w/Calibre-re... My main question was, how could Calibre's main functionality be presented in a UI that feels native to macOS? Since this doesn't try to be cross-platform, I might try to build this as a SwiftUI app with your Rust backend if I find the time. Kudos on actually publishing this! It might be hard to maintain something that keeps up with Calibre's development, but it sure seems like a fun hobby project :)
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  This looks great! I'm no designer, so I always appreciate seeing other folks' ideas on how to design things. To shout out some other inspiration, there have been a few Calibre redesign projects. In particular, Kemie Guaida[1]'s redesign posted to Reddit has been a major design inspiration (and she deserves credit on the repo, which I will address shortly): https://old.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/udzumn/testing_a_new_interface_for_calibre/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/udzumn/testing_a_n... You're able to see the entire overview of the project here: https://www.figma.com/file/g4ntqXWa6C0PRGrG3WjyXM/Calibre-prototype-reddit?type=design&node-id=254-25204&mode=design&viewport=381,48,0.17&t=wJKcNJDtFt2ZjsPI-0 https://www.figma.com/file/g4ntqXWa6C0PRGrG3WjyXM/Calibre-pr... [1]: https://kemielikes.design/ https://kemielikes.design/
autotune 3y ago
This thing is incredible. I tried a competitors app before using this and found that they were mostly going around in circles all day long. This actually looks like it has promise.
yoyopa 3y ago
the problems i have with calibre are 1- i can't store my files in my own organizational structure 2- it doesn't tell you if an import for a particular file succeeded or not. sucks when trying to import hundreds of files.
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  Great insight, thank you! I've never run into issues importing but I don't import in bulk. That's certainly something to keep in mind!

338 points by phildenhoff 3y ago

phildenhoff 3y ago

As an aside, some folks may ask "why write a new app instead of contributing to Calibre Web or a similar project?" It's a good question! Because I wanted to :) Right now, this is a hobby project — I'm more interested in having fun building (rough!!) software than worried about extending existing projects. Plus, with how Citadel is designed to be backwards compatible with Calibre, you can continue to use Calibre Web. As well, I've organized the backend so that all the Calibre-facing code is its own library, which (in the future!) others can use for their own projects. A Calibre library CLI, anyone?

michaelmrose 3y ago
> A Calibre library CLI, anyone? A nice idea I wrote a remarkably hacky cli for that rdr. Basically to - open the last book opened with the CLI - select from the last n books so opened - return the results of a query and narrow with rofi I figure this covers a huge portion of my normal usage. Pushing books to device would be useful too.
inhumantsar 3y ago
> "why write a new app" I'd imagine spearheading a ground up rewrite of their UI would be a lot more work too. thanks for taking this on! calibre is a pita for me to use, and I know what I'm doing. makes it impossible to recommend to anyone, whether they're my grandparents or asavvy tech person.
- reddalo 3y ago
  Trust me, I'm tech savvy but I tried Calibre once and I couldn't figure it out, so I just gave up.
  - Snow_Falls 3y ago
    What part couldn't you figure out? Where you editing ebooks or just managing a library? Not a contributor here, just curious. Edit: I've read a few more comments and some a free with you, while others think it works fine. I'm wondering if there's something about the UI that clicks with some but not others.
    - flkiwi 3y ago
      Without taking away from the overall project and work that’s gone into it, the UI reminds me unpleasantly of the darkest days of Lotus Notes: things aren’t quite where they should be and they don’t look entirely baked when I find them.
      - kwhitefoot 3y ago
        Can you be more specific? Or describe how it could be better? I'll grant that Calibre has a UI that doesn't look like other applications but it seems to work well enough for me.
    - pokeymcsnatch 3y ago
      I'll bite I guess. I use Calibre pretty regularly. I think a general way to put it is that it's not for "casuals". To understand a lot of the functionality outside of the basic inventory management stuff, you have to be a little bit of an enthusiast. For some examples: You have to know about different ereaders and their formats and how they differ, the differences between metadata sources, and dozens and dozens of configuration options if you're trying to convert a book to work well on your device. Also, there's definitely something "off" when it comes to using it intuitively. I have to devote a lot of brain power to searching for functionality AND trying to comprehend exactly how those pieces of functionality are going to affect my library data. Maybe it's too powerful of a tool up front or something. It could benefit from a "basic view" maybe? None of these are complaints from me, I'm a happy user. I'll just echo some other commenters in wishing for a more robust network interface (whether that's just an API, or a more hashed out front end). I'd like to easily share my library with people or just other devices while on-the-go, and Calibre has all the device formatting functionality built-in.
Cockbrand 3y ago
> Right now, this is a hobby project Gives me a bit of early Linus Thorvalds vibes: "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu" [0] - that said, I wish you all the best for the project :) [0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html
fasterik 3y ago
It's slightly sad that you have to give this disclaimer, especially on a forum for hackers. One of my favorite quotes about this comes from a John Carmack commencement speech: "In many areas, it's almost received wisdom that you shouldn't reinvent the wheel. But I would urge you to occasionally try anyways. You'll be better for the effort, and this is how eventually we get better wheels. By people just going ahead and trying." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZnqjHkULc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZnqjHkULc
- bluGill 3y ago
  Reinventing the wheel is fine. However most attempts should be done "in your basement" and thrown away. Don't publish your attempt on the likes of github. Learn what you can from it and then throw it away. Apply lessons learned the the dominate project already there. There are many good open source projects that could be great if more developers would work on them. So instead of reinventing the wheel I strongly encourage everybody to work on an existing project and make it better. Note that I said "most" above. There are reasons to write a start a new project despite others in the same space existing. However this should not be done until you define what is wrong with existing projects.
  - sentientslug 3y ago
    Could not disagree more, with this attitude there would never be any new open source projects!
  - dabber 3y ago
    > Reinventing the wheel is fine. However most attempts should be done "in your basement" and thrown away. Don't publish your attempt on the likes of github. Learn what you can from it and then throw it away. Apply lessons learned the the dominate project already there. [...] > Note that I said "most" above. There are reasons to write a start a new project despite others in the same space existing. However this should not be done until you define what is wrong with existing projects. I couldn't disagree with this more. Reinventing something in public view can be extraordinarily valuable, even if without a clearly defined problem to address. Off the top of my head: - Learning in public can have benefits: I personally tend to write much better software if I know there is any chance someone else might see it and reinventing the wheel (Todo app anyone?) is a great way to focus on learning some new techniques or technology without the added overhead of also inventing a novel solution to some hard problem. - Contributing to the dominate project in any space requires working within the constraints of the existing code and project/user expectations, and if you just show up out of the blue trying to "apply lessons learned", you also need to make a convincing argument for why your way is the better way. On the other hand, reinventing the project allows the freedom to experiment and demonstrate some radical alternative and doing it in public allows anyone (including dominant project maintainers and users) to learn from it. - People that don't have any interest in the original project, but do have interest in aspects of the reinvention can benefit. For example, I haven't used Calibre in years and don't plan to now, but I'm grateful the author shared this because I hadn't heard of Tauri prior or seen a Bun project, and now I'm exploring the repo and learning something new. > There are many good open source projects that could be great if more developers would work on them. Eh. Sounds like a Zero-Sum Fallacy.
EasyMark 3y ago
I would say "it doesn't fit my needs and would require a complete backend rewrite". I think you never have to justify this sort of thing when youre desires for an app are so much different than what is available currently
retrochameleon 3y ago
Calibre is a champion of ebook management functionalities, but I have never been satisfied with its experience, nor its developer. It was never designed to be a hosted library accessible over the web, and it's a very poor experience in my opinion. If there was a solid competitor that was more open, more modern, and designed with the hosted library solution in mind, I would no doubt start using it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

phildenhoff 3y ago

Quick post about Citadel https://denhoff.ca/posts/replacing-calibre https://denhoff.ca/posts/replacing-calibre

stop50 3y ago

Interesting

ssivark 3y ago

Kudos on shipping your hobby project! Looks slick. And a calibre cli would definitely be appreciated -- I hate having to click five levels deep in a dozen menus :P If the "reader" and "editor" aspects are explicit non-goals (fair enough), then what actually does Citadel do for users? Is it mainly to be a portal to view/sort books and click on them? Is there a roadmap where you envision more features?

phildenhoff 3y ago
Good question! My main use for Calibre has been to collect my epubs (mostly) in one place, and occasionally sync them to my ereader. When I add books, I need to grab metadata for the book like title, ISBN, etc. Citadel will (and does) support editing metadata for books — titles, authors, (in future) tags, custom columns. That’s certain. Syncing to devices will come too, in time, as will downloading metadata from online sources. But what I don’t plan on adding is a way to edit book content or an embedded ereader. There are lots of great ereader apps & devices already, and I don’t think epub editing is commonly used (compared to keeping a collection). While I don’t have a road map, I’m always open to feedback and ideas! (Edit: other features like format conversion and stripping DRM are likely to happen too. Ideally with crates or plugins, to make it a bit easier to extend)
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  One feature that would be great is being able to sync/upload the metadata to something like a Bookwyrm[1] instance (there's apparently a `/create-book` endpoint for this) - trying to find and retype all the information from, e.g., Amazon is a pain. [1] https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm
  - phildenhoff 3y ago
    A BookWyrm plugin is a great idea!
- singhrac 3y ago
  Do you think you’d make a plugin interface to get books? For example from Standard Ebooks, via some sort of API? My guess is that they’d be ok with that usage if you ask and you can solve some cold start problems that way. And, of course, get some more eyeballs on their fantastic project.

pathartl 3y ago

Love the project. Calibre is absolutely an amazing tool, but it never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era. I really like the focus on maintaining compatibility with the Calibre library. Personally the features I use the most are the folder watching and automatic book conversion. Now if there was support for multiple Calibre libraries...

phildenhoff 3y ago
Do you mean viewing multiple libraries at once? What would be the benefit of that over having one library with saved filter views?
- walthamstow 3y ago
  I did once have segregated Calibre libraries. One for cookbooks, one for technical books in PDF and one for 'regular' books like novels and nonfiction in EPUB. The only reason I had it like that was so I could sync just the cookbook files to another device via Syncthing, or only the technical books. It didn't last, it was a pita to manager (three different auto-add folders) and I reunified them after 9 months or so.
- pathartl 3y ago
  Being able to switch between multiple libraries under one application, and being able to assign those libraries based on a logged on user is sort of what I'm talking about. My partner and I have two very different tastes in books, and managing them under one library is a pain.
pmontra 3y ago
> [Calibre] never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era Could you explain that in more detail? It seems to me that Calibre is totally self hosted. I give an example. I use Calibre to import ebooks as epub (if they are not already epub, which they usually are,) maybe change their metadata and add a cover if they don't have one. The books go to Calibre's directory and then I sync to my phone using syncthing, like everything else I exchange between my laptop and my phone. I know that Calibre has a way to send books to devices but I think that it requires either a hardware reader or some interoperable app. I prefer working only with the file system. It always works no matter what I have on my phone. All of that seems self hosted to me, or do you mean having a server somewhere at home or on the internet with the ebook collection? I also use the editor to fix typos or to create ebooks from text files.

asimpletune 3y ago

Sometimes I feel that if Calibre just looked better people would realize how amazing it is. It’s honestly not that bad (I actually love it) but I think people can’t get past the aesthetic.

RadiozRadioz 3y ago
Agreed. Unfortunately rewriting the Calibre UI is probably more work than maintaining Python 2.
- freddie_mercury 3y ago
  What does Python 2 have to do with anything? Calibre hasn't used Python 2 in years.
  - MikusR 3y ago
    Calibre author initially was so against Python 3 that he offered to maintain Python 2 by hinmself
    - gjvc 3y ago
      This is a pretty good sign
      - jethro_tell 3y ago
        Of what?
        gjvc 3y ago
        "red flag" I meant
smivan 3y ago
The challenge that I face is Calibre absolutely craters after 20,000+ ebooks. I understand that most folks probably have 10-300 books, but in my case I have some large libraries I tried to use with Calibre, and it just absolutely DIES. The steadfast decision to exclusively use SQLite doesn't help. I opened a PR back in 2016 or so, but the maintainer was quite enthusiastically opposed to changing the DB layer or making it pluggable.

mvelbaum 3y ago

Does this support custom metadata? For example I have a custom field I call "Folders" to hierarchically label/organize my eBooks. Would be nice to be able to browse through that or search under a specific label/folder.

phildenhoff 3y ago
Not yet :) Custom Columns (if thats what you mean!) are on the todo list though — I have a couple in my library, one for tracking Read state and another for tracking word count. Filtering is only on author & title for now. I’m looking to rewrite filtering once I have support in libcalibre for more data, so that you can easily filter by custom columns. How do you search / organize your data in Calibre now? What would be ideal?
- mvelbaum 3y ago
  > Custom Columns (if thats what you mean!) are on the todo list though — I have a couple in my library, one for tracking Read state and another for tracking word count. Yeah, I have a bunch of them, one is "Read Status" (read, reading, to-read), another is "Recommended By" to track books recommended by various people, and the last one is "Folders" which I use to arrange books in a folder-like hierarachy. For example, you could have a "Finance" folder, and then "Finance.Investing", "Finance.Personal Finance", "Finance.Trading" subfolders. The calibre content server does support searching and viewing these columns, and in the desktop app you see the tree on the left pane which you can quickly browse. To search a specific "folder" you'd use something like: #folder:"=Finance.Personal Finance" title:"happy money"

RamblingCTO 3y ago

Looks super cool! What about kindle sync?

phildenhoff 3y ago
In the future, for sure!

spython 3y ago

Looks great! Just last week I tried to use Calibre again and fell into the black hole that is its UI.. Thought of donating some UI/UX work but felt like that would be a multi-year project. Perhaps I could support you with UI/UX instead?

Modified3019 3y ago
My understanding of the calibre project from watching it over the years, is that improvements are typically not welcome. Kovid Goyal already has what he wants, and if you any everyone one else want something else, you’ll need to fork (and then maintain) He’s done amazing work, but he’s one of those very opinionated people that can quickly and arbitrarily become weirdly hostile to things, even when others offer to do the work.
- spython 3y ago
  I had the same impression. Calibre is immensely powerful but highly opinionated. A bit like a chaotic work bench, where you know exactly where everything is, if you are the originator of the chaos.
generic92034 3y ago
Just to offer a different opinion: I never had any issues with the Calibre UI and usually get stuff done quickly and efficiently in it. Honest question: Are there any examples of native smartphone apps which are offering such a functional wealth as Calibre does in a much better/easier way?
- spython 3y ago
  Years ago I was very happy with the GoodReader app, haven't used it recently though.
- msh 3y ago
  Goodreader comes close (ios)
mmsimanga 3y ago

hamdouni 3y ago

Side note : this invocation bun dev -- -- -- -- --server ... made my day :-)

berkes 3y ago
Yeah. Made me wonder what's going on there.
- quic5 3y ago
  From the README > Yes, that is 4 pairs of --s. This is because Bun will pass the first pair to another bun run command, the second will go to tauri dev, the third will go to vite dev, and finally the last set will go to Cargo when running the backend. It's a mess!
  - forty 3y ago
    pnpm realized how bad UX those -- when launching scripts were, and reorganized their arguments so that they are not needed anymore.

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

Is there a publicly accessible book catalog where books can be searched by isbn, title or author?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
carlosjobim 3y ago
Yes: Amazon, Google Books, Anna's Archive and Wikipedia Book sources.
cxr 3y ago
There's the Open Library <https://openlibrary.org https://openlibrary.org> (a project of the Internet Archive) and OCLC WorldCat.

poulpy123 3y ago

Do you plan to handle custom folder hierarchy?

phildenhoff 3y ago
Not with Calibre libraries. If you ever go back to using Calibre, I’m not sure how it will respond to having all of the files “messed up” in the wrong spot — the docs are quite clear that there is ONE way to store books. That said, the end goal is to have a native Citadel way to manage libraries and that WOULD support custom folder hierarchies.
- poulpy123 3y ago
  Great ! I will follow your project

carderne 3y ago

Would you mind explaining what is going on in the backend? You seem to be using both Rust and Bun/Typescript?

phildenhoff 3y ago
The backend is straight Rust. Bun is used as a package management tool & as a script runner, to invoke Tauri commands that start up a Vite webserver to provide the UI, and start something that rebuilds the binary when Rust files change. Typescript is used for the Svelte UI. Svelte talks to the Rust backend through Tauri (by default). Both support a headless/web mode where the Svelte frontend connects to the backend over HTTP.
- carderne 3y ago
  Awesome, thanks for responding. Very keen to give Tauri a spin, seems like a happy middle way between native toolkits (which I'm just never going to spend the time to learn properly) and Electron (which I'm just never going to love).

romseb 3y ago

Awesome. I have been using calibre-web for many years, which (unlike Calibre) has a decent look and all the functionality I need.

pooralaska 3y ago

does it mangle japanese titles/authors by transcribing to pinyin chinese like calibre does? do the drm plugins work? might check it out and switch.

Uvix 3y ago
By mangling, you’re just referring to the folder/file names in the Calibre Library folder, right? The actual metadata in the app/book are fine?
- LinguaBrowse 3y ago
  Likely referring to that, yeah. And yes, the metadata is fine - but it’s a joke that I can’t find any Japanese books I own on my file system because Calibre’s author has renamed them to something that makes sense neither in Japanese, nor English, nor even Chinese. It’s particularly dumb as it will have taken even more work on his part to map the characters to pīnyīn than it would’ve to just preserve the actual titles.
  - Uvix 3y ago
    With a modern filesystem, absolutely. With FAT32 that was prevalent when Calibre was first released in 2006... I'm not so sure.
phildenhoff 3y ago
Good lord, no. Does Calibre do that? My greatest fear is having to build bad things like that for backwards compatibility, because Calibre would require it. While I haven't tested non-ASCII titles, there is no reason it shouldn't support it. I'm planning on doing some perf testing today and I'll make sure I test global names.
MrWB 3y ago
I’ve been caught out by that recently - it’s not considered a bug! With the advised workaround changing Calibre’s interface into Japanese?!

justatroll2 3y ago

Rad - Good luck.

phildenhoff 3y ago
Thank you!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

zaptheimpaler 3y ago

How was your experience with Tauri? I'm loving Rust and would like a lightweight web backend (like Flask in Python) to use with Rust.

phildenhoff 3y ago
Tauri has been excellent. Occasionally I have to do some GitHub issues spelunking to find answers to issues, but that's common with piece of tech. Overall it's been great and I'll happily use it again.

9dev 3y ago

Interesting! For a while now, I’ve started working on a similar project with the same general idea, although I settled for SvelteKit and browsers instead of native apps: https://github.com/project-kiosk/kiosk https://github.com/project-kiosk/kiosk I just can’t keep motivation up long enough to finish it…

snats 3y ago
it looks great. keep up the work, i would like to use it

j3d 3y ago

This looks really cool and I plan on checking it out. Ironically, I recently built a desktop app using the same stack (Rust + Tauri + Svelte) for managing audiobooks. Shameless plug in case anyone is interested: https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker#audiobook-locker https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker#audiobook-locker

vinnymac 3y ago
This is cool, I have toyed with Tauri in the past for some projects. Curious what brought you to pick Svelte and Tauri for this project? Were you already familiar with them?
phildenhoff 3y ago
I'll be looking at your project for inspo :) Thanks for sharing!
- djfdat 3y ago
  If you guys could become best friends and integrate both projects into one ultimate ebook/audiobook tool, that would be great :)
  - zaptheimpaler 3y ago
    Seconded.. an ebook tool and an audiobook tool both incidentally made on the exact same stack?! Sounds like a match made in heaven.

oakhaven 3y ago

Yesterday I realized that I can just copy an epub to a directory on my Kobo reader to the `root/<auhtor's name>` of the mountpoint in /media/oakhaven/koboreader (on Ubunutu 22.04). It will show up in the list of books on the device. For some reason I thought that uploading books to the Kobo reader was somehow complicated, and I only used Caliber to get books from laptop to Kobo. I know Calibre has lots of other functions, but I didn't like the interface and I'm happy I don't have to use it, or any other application like that, anymore.

jwells89 3y ago
This is actually one of the reasons why I bought a Kobo instead of a Kindle or whatever else was available a few years ago. When you plug them in they mount like any other USB mass storage and you copy your stuff to them… no need for special formats or anything either, standards like ePub work great. It kinda made me wonder how Kindles remain so popular. First mover’s advantage? I dunno, but an eReader that can’t read ePubs and PDFs feels a bit like an audio player that can’t play MP3s and AAC.
- Uvix 3y ago
  Most readers only buy books from their device’s store, so they don’t need to worry about sideloading. And then once they’ve done so, they are hesitant to switch because it’s hard or impossible to extract yourself from Amazon or B&N or Apple’s ecosystem without losing content. Ideally everybody would only buy DRM-free ePubs and audiobooks but realistically people don’t care. And I don’t see a repeat of Apple forcing DRM-free music happening here.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    At least the Books app on Apple iOS/macOS will manage and read plain old epubs and PDFs without issue, even if you’ve already bought DRM’d books from Apple’s store. It’s really only big name e-ink readers other than Kobo that have this issue.
    - 3y ago

deafpolygon 3y ago

> Performant: Citadel should feel just as fast as Calibre. Pretty low bar to clear, honestly. Either way this is cool to see. Maybe we'll see more energy behind Calibre as a result.

phildenhoff 3y ago
Yes, that’s ehh not what I intended, really. Citadel has a lower bar of “no slower than Calibre” but I expect it to be MUCH faster. For example — Calibre takes 8s to start up on my laptop. Citadel is nearly instant. I’d like to keep it that way!

codpiece 3y ago

This is great, thank you! I really love Calibre, but like you, I find the UI difficult. I will download and install today! Good luck!

Snow_Falls 3y ago
What do you find difficult about the calibre interface? It seems quite intuitive to me. To be fair, I only add metadata (tags, scores, descriptions, covers, series info etc) and polish ebooks. I just add books to my ereader after that.

ebri 3y ago

Cudos for having Andreas malm at the front of the git repo ! :)

cxr 3y ago

> I dreamed of writing a native app[...] but ran into issues building the UI. Plus, whatever I built would only work on macOS. I started writing Citadel using Tauri[...] to have a cross-platform desktop app. Have you looked at Zotero? This would fit well within that ecosystem, and it's hard to think that shoring up its support for ebooks (and Calibre compatibility) would be poorly received. I could imagine Citadel being an opinionated Zotero "distribution"—in the vein of OS distros or the various Jetbrains IDEs—with its own landing page and downloads, to better cater towards and more tailored for people primarily interested in reading for pleasure (rather than an emphasis on academic research, which tends to throw people off when recommending it, even though most of the pieces are there for ebook management...)

janice1999 3y ago

Anyone else having trouble building and running it (Ubuntu 23.10)? > thread 'main' panicked at libcalibre/src/infrastructure/domain/book/repository.rs:20:62: called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: ()

phildenhoff 3y ago
Yes — sorry! I hadn't pushed local changes yet. I didn't expect a big reception! `main` is up-to-date now and SHOULD be building. Feel free to email me (phil at denhoff dot ca) if you run into issues, or add a GitHub issue.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  I would be glad to help you set up GitHub Actions to build branches if that interests you. On the one hand, I'm for sure not a GHA (nor rust nor bun) ninja, but OTOH I do have a passion for painless builds :-)
  - phildenhoff 3y ago
    Thanks for the offer! If you'd like to, I've written up a quick issue outlining what I think we need for a build: https://github.com/every-day-things/citadel/issues/3 https://github.com/every-day-things/citadel/issues/3 It sounds like some folks have issues building on Linux, but FWIW I had no problems building in a Codespace.
- janice1999 3y ago
  Thanks! I appreciate the response.

hermitdev 3y ago

Cool project, and best of luck to you. However, you might want to rethink the name as Citadel is also an established company - a large hedge fund with deep pockets that's not afraid of using it's lawyers.

ethanbond 3y ago
That's not how trademark works
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  One manages the books the other cooks the books. I can see how that could be confused...

b8 3y ago

Very cool project! I wish it would support old Calibre plugins though.

mdaniel 3y ago

As best I can tell there's no licensing information in the repo

phildenhoff 3y ago
Fixed: it's MIT licensed

gosub100 3y ago

Does anyone have advice to help my friend who has a few-hundred-k backup ebooks on a drive somewhere? I realize a calibre-style interface for this many books is out of the question, but I always felt bad that he can't easily access the material because just doing an ls or opening the directory in the file manager slows his system down. Has anyone found any solutions for this? Indexing the content isn't required, but would be an awesome plus.

dceddia 3y ago

Very nice! It’s great to see another Tauri + Svelte project too. I’ve been building a video editor with that stack for a while now and it’s been pretty awesome.

respot 3y ago

Nice project! I love Calibre's functionality, but I too was kind of frustrated by its UI and started designing an interface that kind of looks like a mixture of pre-Apple-Music iTunes and iBooks. I only created one screen so far, but feel free to take a look: https://www.figma.com/file/m8qaYbPSnxiFPDPbuYtz2w/Calibre-redesign?type=design&node-id=0%3A1&mode=design&t=VijuXmU30jgRNOeH-1 https://www.figma.com/file/m8qaYbPSnxiFPDPbuYtz2w/Calibre-re... My main question was, how could Calibre's main functionality be presented in a UI that feels native to macOS? Since this doesn't try to be cross-platform, I might try to build this as a SwiftUI app with your Rust backend if I find the time. Kudos on actually publishing this! It might be hard to maintain something that keeps up with Calibre's development, but it sure seems like a fun hobby project :)

phildenhoff 3y ago
This looks great! I'm no designer, so I always appreciate seeing other folks' ideas on how to design things. To shout out some other inspiration, there have been a few Calibre redesign projects. In particular, Kemie Guaida[1]'s redesign posted to Reddit has been a major design inspiration (and she deserves credit on the repo, which I will address shortly): https://old.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/udzumn/testing_a_new_interface_for_calibre/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/udzumn/testing_a_n... You're able to see the entire overview of the project here: https://www.figma.com/file/g4ntqXWa6C0PRGrG3WjyXM/Calibre-prototype-reddit?type=design&node-id=254-25204&mode=design&viewport=381,48,0.17&t=wJKcNJDtFt2ZjsPI-0 https://www.figma.com/file/g4ntqXWa6C0PRGrG3WjyXM/Calibre-pr... [1]: https://kemielikes.design/ https://kemielikes.design/

autotune 3y ago

This thing is incredible. I tried a competitors app before using this and found that they were mostly going around in circles all day long. This actually looks like it has promise.

yoyopa 3y ago

the problems i have with calibre are 1- i can't store my files in my own organizational structure 2- it doesn't tell you if an import for a particular file succeeded or not. sucks when trying to import hundreds of files.

phildenhoff 3y ago
Great insight, thank you! I've never run into issues importing but I don't import in bulk. That's certainly something to keep in mind!