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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 c

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.
- nekopa 3y ago
  What happens after 20K books? I am at about 13K books, and I haven't run into any issues yet. I make extensive use of virtual libraries in Calibre, and tags for organization.
- asymmetric 3y ago
  What makes you think SQLite is the bottleneck?
- bomewish 3y ago
  SQLite couldn’t be the problem. Scales well to millions and millions of rows. Clearly something else going on.
- Onavo 3y ago
  This is strange, Kovid Goyal, for all his apathy towards UI, is an excellent performance engineer. Check out his production terminal emulator kitty. He's more than capable of building extremely scalable systems. I would be surprised that this is a bottleneck caused by Calibre's core code. He is however an asshole on the level of Linus when it comes to bug reports and community support.
  - dns_snek 3y ago
    It wouldn't be a (sub-)thread about Calibre without someone pointing out the last bit. Made me chuckle.
  - flkiwi 3y ago
    That kitty and Calibre come from the same brain is a marvel of the open source world.
Cockbrand 3y ago
I assume you mean not just the aesthetics, but the entire UI/UX, and I agree. Calibre is a very powerful and capable app, hindered by its unintuitive and clunky UI.
- asimpletune 3y ago
  The UI is actually fine to me. I say that as someone who uses it a lot though. What specifically do you not like about it?
  - Cockbrand 3y ago
    The UI does not conform to any UI guidelines known to me, certainly not the macOS ones. In fact, the macOS UI guidelines are violated in a lot of places (e.g. icons in menus). The icons themselves are unfamiliar and kinda random, also with distracting colors. There are way too many options directly available, making the UI complicated and intimidating. I'd like the UI to be much sleeker and opinionated towards the layperson. Like I said, Calibre is a very powerful tool, and I appreciate that. Its advanced features are very welcome, but they should be presented differently in the UI.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Speaking personally it doesn’t seem to be designed with the same principles/patterns of most software out there (regardless of platform or era), making its UI operate in ways that run counter to expectations. It’s an odd duck, which doesn’t make it bad but does greatly increase friction in usage.
  - starkparker 3y ago
    Calibre has a "good UI" the way GIMP and QGIS have "good UI"s. They're opinionated, idiosyncratic power tools in spaces where a large part of the audience don't want to learn a UI that doesn't resemble those of more popular or initiative tools in the same space. It took me the better part of the year to figure out how and why QGIS wouldn't just let me draw geometry like I can in a vector drawing tool. I still have to read the docs every time to figure out most selection manipulation actions in GIMP or decode the icons. With Calibre and GIMP in particular, most people don't need most of its functionality, and easier but weaker tools exist that can do the same things. Almost all of my image editing is in Krita now because it's about as powerful and much more intuitive. If Citadel becomes the Krita of ebook readers, I'd readily use it just on the UI even if it's just as unstable.
konart 3y ago
Nah, it is bad. It's ok if you are using it to maintain something like a public library and want control over every little detail. But if you just want to store your personal lib - it's just too much of "how do I do X" every time. And why would anyone force themselves with its "aesthetic" when you can spin up calibre-web container and get a nice UI and an OPDS in a few seconds?
- Geezus_42 3y ago
  I still can't get Calibre-web to display any books. I followed the linuxserverio docs and can't find any errors. It even says it successfully connected to the calibre.db, but still no books.
para_parolu 3y ago
It is incredibly slow and unstable. I spent literally weeks adding large (100gb library) into it. I had to add chunk by chunk. It was crashing constantly and process was so slow that I moved it to a separate machine. Then I tried to use web interface to search and it was super slow. And I’m not even talking about non intuitive UI. For something that has supposed to be a library it’s nowhere near real library (alphabetical list of authors).
- ornornor 3y ago
  100gb of ebooks? I’ve used kindles and kobos for a decade at this point and I don’t think I have 8gb of ebooks. At a few mb per, 100gb is centuries of reading. Unless it’s comic books?
- yeeeloit 3y ago
  > ... be a library it’s nowhere near real library (alphabetical list of authors). What do you mean? I just click the 'Author' column header and it sorts. 100gb is very big though. I guess I'm not surprised you would have problems with a library that size. This post on reddit is relevant. https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/jl3wd2/how_large_is_your_calibre_library_does_calibre/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/jl3wd2/how_large_i...
wand3r 3y ago
I agree heavily as a casual ebook reader. If Calibre had a team of designers I think it would be extremely popular and widespread. Its not very intuitive and the UI/UX is quite bad. It suffers the curse of all powerful applications in that regard. I am going to try and use it again today and see if I can get used to it. It really is fantastic for a free product especially for a power user.
culopatin 3y ago
It’s not that it’s ugly, it’s that the terminology in the UI is not beginner friendly or cohesive. To send a book to a device I usually do it via the email feature of kindle, yet it’s not under “send to device”, it’s under “share “ or whatever. I have a list of books on the main UI. I convert one, it ends. Where is that? Do I now have two books? Is the one there in the new format? Same when I send a book and it gets converted before sending. Is that converted file somewhere? I don’t know. I just check the kindle and hope it was right.

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.

nekopa 3y ago
What happens after 20K books? I am at about 13K books, and I haven't run into any issues yet. I make extensive use of virtual libraries in Calibre, and tags for organization.
asymmetric 3y ago
What makes you think SQLite is the bottleneck?
bomewish 3y ago
SQLite couldn’t be the problem. Scales well to millions and millions of rows. Clearly something else going on.
Onavo 3y ago
This is strange, Kovid Goyal, for all his apathy towards UI, is an excellent performance engineer. Check out his production terminal emulator kitty. He's more than capable of building extremely scalable systems. I would be surprised that this is a bottleneck caused by Calibre's core code. He is however an asshole on the level of Linus when it comes to bug reports and community support.
- dns_snek 3y ago
  It wouldn't be a (sub-)thread about Calibre without someone pointing out the last bit. Made me chuckle.
- flkiwi 3y ago
  That kitty and Calibre come from the same brain is a marvel of the open source world.

Cockbrand 3y ago

I assume you mean not just the aesthetics, but the entire UI/UX, and I agree. Calibre is a very powerful and capable app, hindered by its unintuitive and clunky UI.

asimpletune 3y ago
The UI is actually fine to me. I say that as someone who uses it a lot though. What specifically do you not like about it?
- Cockbrand 3y ago
  The UI does not conform to any UI guidelines known to me, certainly not the macOS ones. In fact, the macOS UI guidelines are violated in a lot of places (e.g. icons in menus). The icons themselves are unfamiliar and kinda random, also with distracting colors. There are way too many options directly available, making the UI complicated and intimidating. I'd like the UI to be much sleeker and opinionated towards the layperson. Like I said, Calibre is a very powerful tool, and I appreciate that. Its advanced features are very welcome, but they should be presented differently in the UI.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Speaking personally it doesn’t seem to be designed with the same principles/patterns of most software out there (regardless of platform or era), making its UI operate in ways that run counter to expectations. It’s an odd duck, which doesn’t make it bad but does greatly increase friction in usage.
- starkparker 3y ago
  Calibre has a "good UI" the way GIMP and QGIS have "good UI"s. They're opinionated, idiosyncratic power tools in spaces where a large part of the audience don't want to learn a UI that doesn't resemble those of more popular or initiative tools in the same space. It took me the better part of the year to figure out how and why QGIS wouldn't just let me draw geometry like I can in a vector drawing tool. I still have to read the docs every time to figure out most selection manipulation actions in GIMP or decode the icons. With Calibre and GIMP in particular, most people don't need most of its functionality, and easier but weaker tools exist that can do the same things. Almost all of my image editing is in Krita now because it's about as powerful and much more intuitive. If Citadel becomes the Krita of ebook readers, I'd readily use it just on the UI even if it's just as unstable.

konart 3y ago

Nah, it is bad. It's ok if you are using it to maintain something like a public library and want control over every little detail. But if you just want to store your personal lib - it's just too much of "how do I do X" every time. And why would anyone force themselves with its "aesthetic" when you can spin up calibre-web container and get a nice UI and an OPDS in a few seconds?

Geezus_42 3y ago
I still can't get Calibre-web to display any books. I followed the linuxserverio docs and can't find any errors. It even says it successfully connected to the calibre.db, but still no books.

para_parolu 3y ago

It is incredibly slow and unstable. I spent literally weeks adding large (100gb library) into it. I had to add chunk by chunk. It was crashing constantly and process was so slow that I moved it to a separate machine. Then I tried to use web interface to search and it was super slow. And I’m not even talking about non intuitive UI. For something that has supposed to be a library it’s nowhere near real library (alphabetical list of authors).

ornornor 3y ago
100gb of ebooks? I’ve used kindles and kobos for a decade at this point and I don’t think I have 8gb of ebooks. At a few mb per, 100gb is centuries of reading. Unless it’s comic books?
yeeeloit 3y ago
> ... be a library it’s nowhere near real library (alphabetical list of authors). What do you mean? I just click the 'Author' column header and it sorts. 100gb is very big though. I guess I'm not surprised you would have problems with a library that size. This post on reddit is relevant. https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/jl3wd2/how_large_is_your_calibre_library_does_calibre/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/jl3wd2/how_large_i...

wand3r 3y ago

I agree heavily as a casual ebook reader. If Calibre had a team of designers I think it would be extremely popular and widespread. Its not very intuitive and the UI/UX is quite bad. It suffers the curse of all powerful applications in that regard. I am going to try and use it again today and see if I can get used to it. It really is fantastic for a free product especially for a power user.

culopatin 3y ago

It’s not that it’s ugly, it’s that the terminology in the UI is not beginner friendly or cohesive. To send a book to a device I usually do it via the email feature of kindle, yet it’s not under “send to device”, it’s under “share “ or whatever. I have a list of books on the main UI. I convert one, it ends. Where is that? Do I now have two books? Is the one there in the new format? Same when I send a book and it gets converted before sending. Is that converted file somewhere? I don’t know. I just check the kindle and hope it was right.