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Calibre version 1.0 released
- b4d 13y agoAny way to automatize updates on Mac, every time I open Calibre there is a new version and going on the site, download and manually installing is so 199X? :)
- officemonkey 13y agoOne way to get over that is to simply not bother updating. Make a reminder for every three months or so.
- andrewpi 13y agoIndeed, Sparkle updates on the Mac would be very much appreciated.
- bowlofpetunias 13y agoCalibre (and the plugins to remove DRM) is the only thing that makes e-books worthwhile, despite still being overpriced. I wouldn't be wasting money on e-books if I couldn't use them as freely as physical books. iPad, Kindle, Nook etcetera, it's all the same incompatible DRM-crippled crap. Without the existence of Calibre it's pretty much impossible to have your own virtual library. This software should get way more credit and support. Especially from publishers that support DRM-free books, like O'Reilly.
- goldfeld 13y agoYeah calibre was a boon back in my Sony reader years. Plus Kovid (the project creator) is a really great and helpful guy. Dang it's been a while, good old times hanging around the MobileRead.com forums. The real shame is I've mostly become a dead tree book consumer, back from my enlightened epub ways. The status quo of ebooks is really bad, and as much as calibre helps, venturing out of the Kindle route was fairly high maintenance. I only hope we can take these freedoms back into the mainstream with all the 'own cloud' movements happening, that I may easily buy ebooks online straight into my cloud and serve them out to a smart ereader, to my phone, desktop browser, etc.
- vidarh 13y agoI don't know how hard it'd be to use Calibre for background/batch conversion, but Calibre + DRM plugins automatically pics up anything delivered to Kindle for PC now, which runs fine under Wine. So it should be reasonably simple to set up a script to run Kindle for PC under wine against a VNC server regularly, and run Calibre and trigger conversions now and again. I push my Kindle stuff straight to my Android devices without caring about DRM, but only because I semi-regularly dump any new books to my Kindle for PC install and make sure I get DRM free copies for backup purposes, but I currently do this manually. My "exposure" is never more than a handful of books. Otherwise I've bought a lot more than I otherwise would from O'Reilly because they're DRM free and happily sync my books directly to Dropbox etc. My "own cloud" I currently handle simply with rsync - storage capacity on my devices grow faster than the content I want to have on the go for the most part, other than video which I do need to manage a bit.
- VLM 13y ago"I've bought a lot more than I otherwise would from O'Reilly because they're DRM free and happily sync my books directly to Dropbox etc." Pragmatic does the same thing; there's a directory called "Pragmatic Bookshelf" on my dropbox and inside that they automatically make a directory for each title. Multiple editions, when published, magically appear in the same title directory and they send an email to let me know. Source for this information is looking at my phone's dropbox while I type this. Delivery of electronic goods via Dropbox seems to be turning into a standard.
- vidarh 13y agoGood to know. I've actually spent more money on books with O'Reilly than Amazon over the last year thanks to the DRM bit, and I might as well spread some of that love to Pragmatic as well. This is despite for many years spending maybe 90% of my "book budget" at Amazon with paper books, but partly I don't want to reward them for DRM and secondly that extra little tiny hassle to get my de-DRM'd archival copy adds just that little extra disincentive... And despite having a ton of Android devices, Google Play has gotten exactly $0 for books, videos or music, since it's a massive confusion of rental and DRM and I just don't can't be bothered verifying what is DRM free, and to keep (e.g. for books, I don't know if there is a way to verify if they're DRM free before purchasing - I can't find anything after a quick look).
- lukifer 13y agoNote that iPads and (some?) Nooks support DRM-free ePubs and PDFs. There are probably other readers that do as well. The Kindle is the worst when it comes to format support and vendor lock-in.
- Oletros 13y agoWell, Kindle supports PDF and DRM-free mobi files. What difference does it makes with the iPad when both of them have a proprietary DRM scheme? Nook or Sony accept standard DRM epubs, iPad doesn't
- chmars 13y agoWhat do you mean by 'standard DRM'?
- Oletros 13y agoThe one that is used by all of the great devices makers, Sony, Kobo, B&N or Google in Play Books. Change the wording to "de facto" standard
- chmars 13y agoI still don't get it. Do they use all the same DRM? Soft DRM is IMHO a possible way to go: You get freely usable files but the files get tagged with your name. It's AFAIK the kind of DRM Apple uses for music files from the iTunes Store.
- Oletros 13y agoYes, they use Adobe Digital Editions DRM
- Someone 13y agoThere is no stanard DRM format for EPUB. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB#Digital_rights_management http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB#Digital_rights_management: "An EPUB file can optionally contain DRM as an additional layer, but it is not required by the specifications.[24] In addition, the specification does not name any particular DRM system to use, so publishers can choose a DRM scheme to their liking."
- anonymouz 13y agoI find e-books very convenient to read, but am annoyed that it is harder to lend them to friends (if they themselves don't have a reader), and that I have nothing to put on my shelf. What I really wish for would be someone to offer physical books at price X and the combo physical book + DRM-free ebook at price X+0.50€ or X+1€ or something small like that. (I can understand that e-books by themselves are not dirt cheap, since most of the cost goes does not come from the printing and physical distribution process. But in a bundle with a physical book that is already paid for through the price of the physical book, so one just needs to tack on a little bit to make a nice profit). I'd take that option everytime, turning the small extra into almost 100% profit.
- mikevm 13y ago> and that I have nothing to put on my shelf. Why do you need anything to put on a shelf? I, for one, am glad that books don't need to take up physical space anymore.
- dagw 13y agoWhy do you need anything to put on a shelf? Because it adds to the room. I realize this is very much a question of personal taste, but I find that a room with a wall covered in books can be a beautiful design detail that adds warmth and character to a room. Plus physical books are pretty awesome in their own right.
- zanny 13y agoI get it is asthetic taste, but I love whenever I move somewhere and I literally have nothing but white walls, bare floors, a desk, a bed, and a few drawers of clothes and necesssary accessories. It feels very clean to me. I don't like cluttering up space for no reason than to occupy it.
- mikevm 13y agoSame here. Plus, those of us that do move once in a while know that books weigh a ton. When I helped my dad move, I think the boxes that had his books weighed more than his fridge ;-).
- dredmorbius 13y agoI've limited my consumption of eBooks to freely-available materials, or ePubs I've created on my own (from LaTeX sources, using Pandoc, from Calibre). I find they're an advantage over Web pages in that all the annoying formatting is removed, you're left with a basic text and can focus on the content. It's also amazing to have your entire library available (and indexed) at your fingertips. For research, use of plugins to create and maintain a bibliography is also tremendously useful. DRM is a zit on the face of knowledge. And I'll plug Moon+Reader, for mobile, a pretty slick ebook reader in my experience.
- erez 13y agoI've been using Calibre for several years now. It's managing my ebook library on every machine and I have yet to encounter a bug in any of its features. I use it to sync to my Nook, handle book metadata, convert from format to format, all without a hitch. In any ebook community Calibre has long since become the standard application. Many of the question are simply answered "install Calibre, it has what you need". Kovid Goyal, the creator of Calibre has been, for me, as much of a poster-child of FOSS as Firefox or Linux. He has a point release every week, and you could just update the software without worry - nothing would break. He's open and frank about the development process - nothing hidden, or "thrown over the wall" no open-core features to abuse the power user, no excuses for stuff that isn't ready to release. I have no idea why only now he reached 1.0 - it's been feature complete for my needs for a couple of years now. But as it stands, I wish to congratulate him for reaching the milestone and to thank him and everyone who supports the project - by submitting code, patches, bug reports, helping in the forums, donating money, and using the software.
- stevekemp 13y agoI have to admit I was soured on the development when I read the how security issues were handled: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027
- rogerbinns 13y agoLWN did an analysis of the bug and response [1]. This issue aside, what I don't like about Calibre is it trying to be a library and device management solution, with a small amount of conversion on the side, while all I am interested in is the conversion. (I use a dropbox folder for library management.) The device management is what led to the suid security holes in the first place. [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ http://lwn.net/Articles/465311/
- stevekemp 13y agoAgreed. I only want a tool that will convert from one format to another. My books are organized beneath ~/Books/ by author, series, and title. I don't need them "managed", I just want to be able to convert them, and once done I can copy them to the device via /bin/cp, etc. I'm using the command-line tools from calibre and they work, but the GUI itself is redundant for me.
- arocks 13y agoCalibre is not only great for ebook management but an excellent command-line tool for converting between several ebook formats. It is like the swiss-army knife for managing ebooks.
- ebtalley 13y agoI have liked Calibre when I have used it a few times, but the GUI is pretty slow compared to most software these days. I attributed it to using python, but maybe thats not the case? has anyone else found some speed hacks that make it easier to use? (or maybe its time for me to upgrade the machine it resides on?)
- berkut 13y agoI'm pretty certain it's the Python side of things making it slow - I've been involved in a project which converted its PyQt interface to a native C++ Qt one, and the UI speed up in terms of responsiveness was significant.
- the_mitsuhiko 13y agoDropbox is written in Python too and the UI is far from sluggish.
- berkut 13y agoIt depends what the interface is doing - if it hasn't got deeply-nested layouts and widgets (like dropbox - it's just menus and simple dialogs), you can get away with it. If you've got resizable windows with split nested views containing things like column lists or trees, you notice the overhead a lot more.
- Blahah 13y agoThere are plenty of blazing fast GUIs written in python; that's not the problem.
- hnha 13y agoI just wish it would not insist on forcing the user to use its library and only its library. Just like my music I prefer to organise my ebook files myself. With calibre that is not possible.
- hannibal5 13y agoYou can export files into customizable directory structure. If you want to arrange files to directories, you can export documents into arbitary directory structure determined by big number of attributes and even tags.
- maxerickson 13y agoContent library tools that refuse to index arbitrary content should be considered broken. The mindset that you can only index content if the canonical copy of the data is in your database is just awful. It's also at least a little bit problematic that there is little support for treating source books as special, which would be a nice feature given the fact that the convertors are not yet perfect (and last I looked they didn't work very hard to make semantically sensible conversions, which makes knowing the source book that much more valuable...).
- hannibal5 13y agoCalibre is not just indexing. It's also modifying data. Of course, if Calibre would have source book concept, it could treat arbitrary directory as sources and map converted and massaged documents and metadata to them.
- kriro 13y agoCalibre is pretty awesome, congratulations to the team. "Unfortunately" most of my books are non-fictional/science/textbooks etc. For the few fiction books I read, I pretty much use ebooks unless it's a comicbook or maybe some fine leather collectors item. My main problem is that I scribble in, marker (multiple colors), take note, underline and do all kinds of stuff with my non-fiction books. I researched and the options to do all that were pretty underwhelming last time I checked. If any of you know about good "texbook tools" I'd be all ears. I think for textbooks I'll never get used to ebooks. I also like being able to flip through them quickly, scan the content on a quick flip and so forth. The one major advantage of ebooks for my typical use cases is full text search (and theoretically links to other books on quotes and so forth).
- Havoc 13y ago>If any of you know about good "texbook tools" I'd be all ears. Well the Kindle's support attaching notes to specific places in the book, but as you say its pretty underwhelming. Realistically though what you describe is not really the envisioned use of an ebook. Perhaps in future readers...
- DanBC 13y agoprint the page you need, scribble on that, stick it to the wall behind the monitor.
- nekopa 13y agoI use goodreader on the iPad the same way you use textbooks. Only on the PDFs, but you can type, highlight, write, scribble draw all over the PDF. One feature that I like is I can then export just the typed up notes, so I have my own kind of cliff notes version of a book. Good if you follow the 'How to read a book' methodology.
- kriro 13y agoThis sounds interesting. I'll check it out...have been thinking about an iPad anyways because it has good support for virtual baordgames :) Thx
- oleganza 13y agoCalibre accepts Bitcoin: http://calibre-ebook.com/donate http://calibre-ebook.com/donate
- mavhc 13y agoI don't use Calibre to manage my library, I just use the News option, every morning at 7am it downloads rss/websites, parses them into a book, and emails them to amazon, so my kindle downloads them. Does mean I hardly ever get around to reading actual books though.
- VaucGiaps 13y agoOn a related note, they now accept bitcoin: http://calibre-ebook.com/donate http://calibre-ebook.com/donate
- Havoc 13y agoCould someone help me understand why there is a x64 version? Naturally thats great, but I don't quite see why its a priority for an ebook tool.
- enscr 13y agoThe conversion with heuristics enabled benefits from it.
- pdfmnbvcxz 13y agoThis looks worth a look : https://register.blib.us https://register.blib.us It currently only supports PDF books (search/share/...), and is broader than a book library (includes photo album support/openid/...), something related to Calibre.
- rraychaudhuri 13y agoThanks for checking us out :) We are at pre alpha stage right now and super excited about the opportunities. Please register with your Gmail id and we shall get an account in an hour. P.S. Also I have just posted a ShowHN link for Blib
- laureny 13y agoPython again, sadly. I understand the appeal but I'd really like to see such an app written in a faster language.
- pdfmnbvcxz 13y agoMost of this code is actually C/C++.
- driverdan 13y agoI use Calibre and it's great to see how far it has come. That said, let's not pretend it's all kittens and rainbows. It has all the problems people associate with GUI based FOSS. The UI is pretty terrible. It looks and feels like FOSS from seven years ago. It has about a million prefs / settings buried many layers down in a very confusing series of prefs dialogs. It shouldn't take you 3 hours to configure an ebook reader. It should just come with sane settings out of the box. As someone else remarked the UI often feels slow / sluggish. The app is 253MB (OS X version)! Is it just me or is that crazy?
- shadowmint 13y agoThe true culprit for the massive size is Qt. It weighs in at ~23Mb for the python library, and about 100Mb for the bundled framework. All in all python code and libraries accounts for 73Mb, and bundled frameworks for 143Mb. That's the price you pay for writing an app with a UI in python.
- crististm 13y agoYou say that as if it's his fault. He did not write the app - he's just using it.
- __david__ 13y ago> You say that as if it's his fault. I don't think he was. I read that as the unspecific "you", with the meaning being equivalent to "That's the price one pays for writing an app with a UI in python."
- sbarre 13y agoThe beauty of FOSS is you can take your criticism and turn it into action by contributing to make it better!
- MichaelGG 13y agoI'm not sure if this was sarcasm, or simple platitudes about open source, but this whole "contribute to make it better" is really a hit-and-miss affair. Best case scenario is that the code is clear, easy to update the UI, and the only reason it hasn't been done is because no one cares about the UI. That seems incredibly unlikely (the caring part - someone built it, maintains it, and will probably be upset if you "fix" it). On other projects, you first get a huge range of code complexity/quality, making contributing perhaps simply not feasible. After that, you can run into all sorts of stuff. My real world experience: "We won't take this because we use linked lists, not hashtables, because <original maintainer> likes linked lists." "We won't fix this broken XML parser because this code is fast." "Why did you fork and create those modules without telling us? That's really rude to all of us that spent so much time on this." (In response to an announcement a company had ported a project to another platform, and wanted feedback and was going to open all their work. They ended up just keeping it internally.) And some of that is on projects that are actually very friendly otherwise and to which I've contributed large and successful pieces. (To those involved if you happen to read this: you already know my criticisms ;)). In short, the whole "hey it's open so go fix it" is a rather trite simplification. It does not reflect the usual or even possible experience for the majority of users.
- AbhishekBiswal 13y agoSeven YEARS! Finally.
- hack_edu 13y agoNow, the real question is whether or not Kovid Goyal (the maintainer) releases his iron grip on development. For years, seemingly any bugs are features, EVERY TIME. Good luck getting a commit accepted! You'll probably get an incredibly passive aggressive reply about why he doesn't see a need for it, no matter how obvious and simple to execute. Can we get a real UI, autoupdates (and without needing to download the whole giant binary every time), a database that doesn't choke on realistically large libraries? How shaving some time off of the 45 seconds the application takes make an Amazon API call to grab metadata and a tiny cover image? These are just the obvious, major issues that have been present for years now. Calibre is already that half-assed community project cliche. One that has so much potential at first, but falls apart since no one can see the forest among the trees. Has been for a while now.
- dfc 13y agoA great example of this (IMHO) is the networkmanager bug: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=668899 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=668899 http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=125693 http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=125693 I gave up on calibre largely due to the irratation caused by this bug. Sure the UI is not great but I could deal with the UI. I keep networkmanager installed on my laptop to keep some oddball VPN profiles available. 80% of the time I have NM disabled, pidgin and a host of other apps have no problem with NM being disabled.
- quangquach 13y agoI've used Calibre over 5 years. It's being with me from Windows, then Linux, and now OS X, and always one of the first software installed when I setup a new computer. Thanks for your very hard work, Kovid Goyal and other contributors. Despite its first 1.0 hit, for a long time, the project has been developing too actively for me to update every minor release (every week less or more).