10 ms·

Announcing Calibre 2.0

275 points by cleverjake 12y ago

maxerickson 12y ago
Does it still refuse to index without managing? A quick glance at the documentation says yes.
- isaacdl 12y ago
  What do you mean by that?
  - JadeNB 12y ago
    I suspect that the parent was asking whether Calibre will index books where you put them on your hard drive, rather than insisting on moving them into a directory that it manages. (For example, iTunes will index your music, but iBooks insists on managing your books.)
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    It comes with a library. A media library can read metadata from content and use that to build up an index, or it can monkey around with the location of the content by copying or moving it to some special folder and then read the metadata there. Ideally, software supports both ways of working (lots of people prefer to have the software take over, lots of people are worried this will make a mess, or don't want to live with some constraint the software imposes, or whatever). Calibre will only index content imported into its library.
  - zo1 12y ago
    It means: If you have an existing ebook library, with whichever folder structure. And you ask Calibre in import it, it will go ahead and copy every single file from your folder structure in to its own inside "My Documents" (or one of the other user folders, can't remember.
- volongoto 12y ago
  In the FAQ, it's clearly stated that this behavior will not change (http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#why-doesn-t-app-let-me-store-books-in-my-own-directory-structure http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#why-doesn-t-app-let...). And this is also the reason why I'm not using Calibre as a library manager (I occasionally use the command line tools). I would regularly donate to a FOSS ebook library manager that does library management (I would rather use other tools to make my morning coffee).
marianminds 12y ago
One thing that really sucks still is the conversion of PDFs (for e.g. journal articles) into formats suitable for e-ink readers. I've tinkered with its heuristic processing and regex formatting, but I'd never considered manually touching up the final .epub as it comes. If their ebook editor is any good I might start reading journal articles again.
- Maakuth 12y ago
  This converter is reasonable: http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ I wonder if someone has done a Calibre plugin for it.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    > "K2pdfopt works by converting each page of the PDF/DJVU file to a bitmap and then scanning the bitmap for viewable areas (rectangular regions) and cutting and cropping these regions and assembling them into multiple smaller pages without excess margins so that the viewing region is maximized. Making use of this method, k2pdfopt can re-flow text lines, even on scanned documents" Looks promising. Hopefully this would also remove javascript and executable code from the source PDF, although any exploits may run within the context of the converter. To be safe, conversion could be run from a livecd.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      More information on analysis of PDF malware: http://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/pdf-tools/ http://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/pdf-tools/ PDF malware can be used for economic espionage targeting commercial research. What would help is a single open registry which has: bibliographic metadata + hash of known-good PDF for each paper.
  - ibrahima 12y ago
    Hey, that's pretty neat, I was just thinking it shouldn't be that hard to do something like that. I would love to be able to read academic papers on my Kindle Paperwhite, this might help with that. Reading on a regular tablet is a bit annoying at times.
vj44 12y ago
I'm sure calibre 2.0 is a great technical feat, and kudos for all the work put into this product, but judging by the screenshot the user interface is equally clunky as in 1.0. This software does mostly everything I need it for to convert ebooks... but can you, the authors, please improve the UI?
- greyone 12y ago
  I agree the app is good - but the user interface has always needed simplifying.
  - johnchristopher 12y ago
    Do you mean you simplify the UI yourself with the configuration settings or that you wished it was simplified ? I found calibre less clunky and very clean once I hid icons, menus and submenus I don't use. Maybe there should be some kind of toggle mode (easy, god, expert, etc.).
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    More specificity on what you'd like simplified would be useful.
- josealicarte 12y ago
  True, the apps is Awesome, but the GUI must upgrade a bit, so far Calibre is good
- walterbell 12y ago
  What would you change first - the viewer, editor, cover browser, or config?
  - dmix 12y ago
    Preference menus need the most work and the giant toolbar with icons is nearly useless.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
I have a love-hate relationship with Calibre. As a way to manage my ebooks, and especially overcoming the insanity that is DRM, Calibre is a lifesaver. I wouldn't even be buying ebooks if it wasn't for Calibre. (I only bought a Kindle after making sure I could crack the DRM and actually own the books I paid for.) However, the user interface of Calibre is one of the worst I've ever encountered. It looks and feels like a teenagers first attempt at creating a desktop software prototype back in 1995. (Having to go to the website to download and install every single new minor release also feels like something from a bygone era.) I donate to Calibre because I need it to continue existing, but I have no love for it.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Calibre is open-source and seems to be a Qt +PyQt front-end to a sqlite database, fairly mainstream dev tools. But it doesn't seem to have an active development community with multiple contributors, except for plugins. Anyone know why?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Toxic maintainer. Kovid Goyal is known to be abrasive. I'm looking for good examples. But maybe I've just seen the other end of the arguments and he's okay? I'm guessing the best bits are hidden here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/ https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/ Like eg this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Now that you mention it, my one bug report was met with a frosty reception. Edit: thanks for posting that bug report. I was quite excited about contributing to Calibre at the time of filing my bug report, but got such a negative reaction that the thought vanished. How many other missed opportunities have there been, maybe a fork would bring them back?
yuribit 12y ago
Is there some Calibre plugin to convert scientific articles with math formulas to epub or mobi?
- x0x0 12y ago
  I'm guessing that's a very hard problem, but I'd love to hear otherwise. If you go the standard route: write in latex then pdflatex, you have no information in the pdf as to what those symbols are, right? So this is pretty close to mathematical ocr, with all of the weird symbols that math alone uses and the various meanings of different lengths of underbar or overbar in the article. Am I wrong? Is there more information left in the pdf? Obviously you can just extract images from the pdf and put that into epub, but it's a crappy solution at best. For a long time, I've wished for something that could ocr handwritten math and make even a shitty pass at ocr-ing to latex. There appears to be no such software. I doubt there's a big market, but there are a lot of people being paid $15+/hour to latex up written math...
  - josu 12y ago
    I think that the solution is much more simple. Print formula > Convert formula to image (screencap) > Paste image
    - x0x0 12y ago
      the whole point is to have vector math, not raster, particularly to well support zooming in and out on small devices
      - audreyt 12y ago
        Rasterize at 900dpi, then? Even on small devices that would support a ~3x zoom without compromising visual quality versus vector. In EPUB3 readers with full <canvas> support one can translate the paint primitives via pdf.js into JS, too.
necrodome 12y ago
I am trying to find a solution to ditch calibre(at least for library management) completely, and with the advent of cheap android eink devices, this seems more possible now. A simple app that communicates with a web backend to manage my library on such a device would be enough. one recently released such device is Boyue T62 (http://www.banggood.com/Boyue-T62-8G-Dual-Core-6-Inch-WIFI-Android-Ebook-Reader-p-942029.html http://www.banggood.com/Boyue-T62-8G-Dual-Core-6-Inch-WIFI-A...) Here is an overview (the review is for the same device, just rebranded and with previos generation specs) http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2014/08/11/icarus-illumina-hd-with-android-4-2-now-selling-on-amazon http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2014/08/11/icarus-illumina-... You also get much better pdf reading capabilities with these devices. Until the next generation displays for reading come into play, these look much better overall than kindle, nook, etc.
holychiz 12y ago
so much hate for the UI! personally, it works and works well for its intended purpose. To me, it's even intuitive at times. By that virtue, it's already better than 90% of software out there, free or not. Can it be better? sure, like everything else in life. Now that I know that the dev is abrasive from other HN comments, i've got even more respect for him, because of the heavier load he has to carried. :)
- d0mdo0ss 12y ago
  Yep so much love/hate/passion about the looks. I've been using it to convert into pdf and customize spacing, margins, fonts, page size, etc. Looks like a win95 application ok but works, it's free, gets the job done and then gets out of the way... maybe I'm missing something.
- philbarr 12y ago
  Agreed! Personally I feel that since he writes and maintains it himself he can be as argumentative as he likes. It's not like he's the first - check out Linus Torvalds for the canonical abrasive open source guy. And they're right. It's free, you don't like it, go bloody well right it yourself.
  - unfamiliar 12y ago
    There is a big difference between the kind of rudeness the Calibre developer is known for versus the zero-tolerance-for-bullshit that Linus is known for. Nobody is claiming he is obliged to act differently. Everyone is just agreeing that he is an asshole and that trying to work with him would be a waste of time. By all means adopt his attitude if you admire it; you'll get the same sentiment from the community.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
nebulous1 12y ago
I don't suppose he's backtracked on his awful position on auto-updates?
- akerl_ 12y ago
  For those of us missing context, care to share? I'm definitely not a fan of every launch of Calibre showing me a prompt to update, but I'm also not sold on apps that upgrade without my express consent.
- fineIllregister 12y ago
  Someone has packaged it for Windows using the Chocolatey NuGet package manager: http://chocolatey.org/packages/calibre http://chocolatey.org/packages/calibre I'm sure OS X has something similar, but I wouldn't know where to find it.
  - cooper12 12y ago
    OSX has homebrew-cask [0, 1], which is built on homebrew to distribute binaries. I checked and a formula for calibre is present. [2] [0]: http://caskroom.io/ http://caskroom.io/ [1]: https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask [2]: https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/blob/master/Casks/calibre.rb https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/blob/master/Casks/...
    - dewey 12y ago
      Unfortunately there's still no proper "upgrade" command for cask, there's a lengthy discussion on how to deal with that on their issue tracker [0] though. For now you'll still have to rely on a workaround. Currently I'm using an alias to clear the old binary and download the new one. [1] [0] https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/issues/309 https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/issues/309 [1] https://blog.notmyhostna.me/make-calibre-updates-less-annoying/ https://blog.notmyhostna.me/make-calibre-updates-less-annoyi...
- kinleyd 12y ago
  Too frequent updates have been an irritant for me, largely on account of my slow internet connection. I always felt that many of the updates could have been bundled, unless it was a major fix. But no, they kept flowing in![0] More recently my reading habits have changed and I much prefer to go directly for my books on my desktop. I've uninstalled calibre now. All I really need is a cli or a basic client (much like ncmpc for mpd) for my books. I'm looking for something along those lines, and am also planning to do a hobby project for that if the urge grows. [0] On every Arch Linux update.
skant 12y ago
The author of Calibre claims: In my opinion, calibre’s graphic interface is damn good [1] I don't think the author is going to make any strides towards improving/changing the UI [1]http://features.en.softonic.com/interview-kovid-goyal-creator-of-calibre http://features.en.softonic.com/interview-kovid-goyal-creato...
- droopyEyelids 12y ago
  I agree with him. It's usable, and easy to understand. It doesn't follow the fads of our time, and thats fine. I struggle to understand why such a superficial demand is at the top of hacker news. Asking every useful software project to hire designers so it fits the Apple Guidelines (yes I'm exaggerating) seems both unproductive and more likely to drive the programming endeavor further out of the apartments of inventive people and into VCistan
  - gareim 12y ago
    I found I had the exact opposite experience. There were just so many options everywhere that when I tried to change a few settings or edit book tags, I quickly got lost. I'd like it to be cleaned up a bit and streamlined, not necessarily conform to Apple/Microsoft/Google design guidelines.
  - ahknight 12y ago
    There's a place between hot as hell and cold as a witch's tit that we call Earth. Let's not forget that. The interface is an unmitigated disaster from tip to toe. There's too much going on. It doesn't need to get hit with the iBooks stick to make it better; it just needs someone with half a clue to delete half the buttons, tabs, modals, windows, panes, lists, checkboxes, and other crap. Put another way: Eclipse is not the program you want to base your design on.
  - claystu 12y ago
    Would you mind if car companies switched the gas and break pedals whenever they felt like it. After all, gas pedal on the right is no harder than gas pedal on the left. Except...the custom is already set. Most users would rather ignore a program than relearn yet another arbitrary interface when the standard one is good enough.
jrvarela56 12y ago
Does anyone have a decent webapp to replace this? Interested in building one since I haven't found a viable option. As of now I use Calibre and set my folder to Dropbox so I can access books.
- edent 12y ago
  I use COPS as a Web frontend. http://blog.slucas.fr/en/oss/calibre-opds-php-server http://blog.slucas.fr/en/oss/calibre-opds-php-server
dredmorbius 12y ago
I'll take a look at this, as my long rant on what's wrong with browsers[1] basically ends up with the admission that something along the lines of Calibre or Zotero is probably more of what I want from a reading app: the ability to manage a library of works, local, networked, or on the Web, with a highly uniform presentation (ignore virtually all document formatting in favor of my own preferences). From my relatively light explorations of Calibre to date (v. 1.25 on Debian jessie/sid): ⚫ The UI is clunky. Especially when trying to edit / capture bibliographic information I've found it beyond frustrating. ⚫ The built-in readers are severely brain-damaged and I've found no way to change them. The PDF reader is complete and total fail, the eBook reader isn't much better, and I seem to recall that accessing HTML docs is similarly frustrating. By contrast, I've been impressed by the Moon+Reader Android eBook reader, generally like the Readability online (Web) reader and Android app, and had found a Debian eBook reader that was fairly decent client -- fbreader. Its main disadvantage is in not having the ability to set a maximum content width. I find that 40-45 em is my preferred width in general. Among fbreader's frustrations: I cannot define a stylesheet, though I can apply a selected set of styles (defining margin widths, e.g., but not the _text_ width, which is frustrating). The book I've presently got loaded is either right or center justified -- the left margin is ragged, again, frustrating. And text doesn't advance on a <space>, like virtually any other Linux pager. If calibre readily supported alternative clients, I'd be a lot happier with it. ⚫ The ability to include / reference / convert Web content would be somewhere north of awesome. There's still a large amount of information online that I reference, but would prefer to archive or cache locally, and/or convert to more useful formats (usually ePub or PDF). ⚫ Optimizing viewing experiences for wide-format, vertically-challenged screens would be hugely useful. 16:9 display ratios mean vertical space is at an absolute premium. Most PDF viewers are utterly brain-dead in this regard (evince, for example, requires four manual repositionings to view a typical 2-up document). The Internet Archive's BookReader does an excellent job of consider positioning content and paging through it as two separate functions. I strongly recommend taking some UI notes from it. https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader Alternatively, the old 'gv' ghostscript Postscript and PDF reader will page through documents in a highly sensible fashion: top-bottom, left-right. Why this was achieved in 1992 while PDF readers of the subsequent 22 years have utterly blundered in this regard escapes me. That said, I'm looking forward to this showing up in Debian's repos (I've got v1.25 presently). ________________________________ Notes: 1. http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_b...
llasram 12y ago
In 2008-2009 I was probably the second biggest commiter to Calibre (still #4 according to github), focusing entirely on the conversion pipeline and format support. I'm still proud of the OEB modeling as some of the finest OO code I've written, or probably will write now that I've moved on to functional. For everyone complaining about the UI and management functionality, realize that you are not the target audience. Head over to www.mobileread.com, look at the Calibre forum and the praise Kovid gets, and you'll see that he's largely catering directly to what his core users want. It is interesting that Calibre and mobileread are still around, and relatively little changed. I lost interest and moved on once pretty much every commercially-available e-book became available in EPUB format. What's left is a very, very specialized core of enthusiasts.
- izacus 12y ago
  I don't understand, how can a sane UI have a target audience?
dredmorbius 12y ago
Can someone point to a good Calibre tutorial? My use-case: I download material in various formats from online, mostly in PDF, ePub, or some markup format (LaTeX, Markdown, HTML, etc.) I've got a large set of downloads, which I then try to import into Calibre. This is in support of a large research project. 1. It's difficult to tell what I've imported and what I haven't. 2. The import process itself is slow. Enough so that I'll fire it up, get caught up in other stuff, and ... well, tend not to get back to it. 3. The corpus is fairly large: around 1000 books and papers, plus another 5,000 others pulled from web archives. 4. Tracking this by metadata is crucial. Title, author, publication date, and tags. Managing _that_ is a headache on its own, especially adding metadata to works / confirming automatically extracted content is accurate. 5. Once I've got the information organized, reading, referencing, annotating, and other tasks should be supported. Again: calibre is about the only tool out there I'm familiar with, but it's a pain. Zotero and various LaTeX bibliographic tools are also of some use.

275 points by cleverjake 12y ago

maxerickson 12y ago

Does it still refuse to index without managing? A quick glance at the documentation says yes.

isaacdl 12y ago
What do you mean by that?
- JadeNB 12y ago
  I suspect that the parent was asking whether Calibre will index books where you put them on your hard drive, rather than insisting on moving them into a directory that it manages. (For example, iTunes will index your music, but iBooks insists on managing your books.)
- maxerickson 12y ago
  It comes with a library. A media library can read metadata from content and use that to build up an index, or it can monkey around with the location of the content by copying or moving it to some special folder and then read the metadata there. Ideally, software supports both ways of working (lots of people prefer to have the software take over, lots of people are worried this will make a mess, or don't want to live with some constraint the software imposes, or whatever). Calibre will only index content imported into its library.
- zo1 12y ago
  It means: If you have an existing ebook library, with whichever folder structure. And you ask Calibre in import it, it will go ahead and copy every single file from your folder structure in to its own inside "My Documents" (or one of the other user folders, can't remember.
volongoto 12y ago
In the FAQ, it's clearly stated that this behavior will not change (http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#why-doesn-t-app-let-me-store-books-in-my-own-directory-structure http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#why-doesn-t-app-let...). And this is also the reason why I'm not using Calibre as a library manager (I occasionally use the command line tools). I would regularly donate to a FOSS ebook library manager that does library management (I would rather use other tools to make my morning coffee).

marianminds 12y ago

One thing that really sucks still is the conversion of PDFs (for e.g. journal articles) into formats suitable for e-ink readers. I've tinkered with its heuristic processing and regex formatting, but I'd never considered manually touching up the final .epub as it comes. If their ebook editor is any good I might start reading journal articles again.

Maakuth 12y ago
This converter is reasonable: http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ I wonder if someone has done a Calibre plugin for it.
- walterbell 12y ago
  > "K2pdfopt works by converting each page of the PDF/DJVU file to a bitmap and then scanning the bitmap for viewable areas (rectangular regions) and cutting and cropping these regions and assembling them into multiple smaller pages without excess margins so that the viewing region is maximized. Making use of this method, k2pdfopt can re-flow text lines, even on scanned documents" Looks promising. Hopefully this would also remove javascript and executable code from the source PDF, although any exploits may run within the context of the converter. To be safe, conversion could be run from a livecd.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    More information on analysis of PDF malware: http://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/pdf-tools/ http://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/pdf-tools/ PDF malware can be used for economic espionage targeting commercial research. What would help is a single open registry which has: bibliographic metadata + hash of known-good PDF for each paper.
- ibrahima 12y ago
  Hey, that's pretty neat, I was just thinking it shouldn't be that hard to do something like that. I would love to be able to read academic papers on my Kindle Paperwhite, this might help with that. Reading on a regular tablet is a bit annoying at times.

vj44 12y ago

I'm sure calibre 2.0 is a great technical feat, and kudos for all the work put into this product, but judging by the screenshot the user interface is equally clunky as in 1.0. This software does mostly everything I need it for to convert ebooks... but can you, the authors, please improve the UI?

greyone 12y ago
I agree the app is good - but the user interface has always needed simplifying.
- johnchristopher 12y ago
  Do you mean you simplify the UI yourself with the configuration settings or that you wished it was simplified ? I found calibre less clunky and very clean once I hid icons, menus and submenus I don't use. Maybe there should be some kind of toggle mode (easy, god, expert, etc.).
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  More specificity on what you'd like simplified would be useful.
josealicarte 12y ago
True, the apps is Awesome, but the GUI must upgrade a bit, so far Calibre is good
walterbell 12y ago
What would you change first - the viewer, editor, cover browser, or config?
- dmix 12y ago
  Preference menus need the most work and the giant toolbar with icons is nearly useless.
w1ntermute 12y ago

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

I have a love-hate relationship with Calibre. As a way to manage my ebooks, and especially overcoming the insanity that is DRM, Calibre is a lifesaver. I wouldn't even be buying ebooks if it wasn't for Calibre. (I only bought a Kindle after making sure I could crack the DRM and actually own the books I paid for.) However, the user interface of Calibre is one of the worst I've ever encountered. It looks and feels like a teenagers first attempt at creating a desktop software prototype back in 1995. (Having to go to the website to download and install every single new minor release also feels like something from a bygone era.) I donate to Calibre because I need it to continue existing, but I have no love for it.

walterbell 12y ago
Calibre is open-source and seems to be a Qt +PyQt front-end to a sqlite database, fairly mainstream dev tools. But it doesn't seem to have an active development community with multiple contributors, except for plugins. Anyone know why?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- DanBC 12y ago
  Toxic maintainer. Kovid Goyal is known to be abrasive. I'm looking for good examples. But maybe I've just seen the other end of the arguments and he's okay? I'm guessing the best bits are hidden here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/ https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/ Like eg this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Now that you mention it, my one bug report was met with a frosty reception. Edit: thanks for posting that bug report. I was quite excited about contributing to Calibre at the time of filing my bug report, but got such a negative reaction that the thought vanished. How many other missed opportunities have there been, maybe a fork would bring them back?

yuribit 12y ago

Is there some Calibre plugin to convert scientific articles with math formulas to epub or mobi?

x0x0 12y ago
I'm guessing that's a very hard problem, but I'd love to hear otherwise. If you go the standard route: write in latex then pdflatex, you have no information in the pdf as to what those symbols are, right? So this is pretty close to mathematical ocr, with all of the weird symbols that math alone uses and the various meanings of different lengths of underbar or overbar in the article. Am I wrong? Is there more information left in the pdf? Obviously you can just extract images from the pdf and put that into epub, but it's a crappy solution at best. For a long time, I've wished for something that could ocr handwritten math and make even a shitty pass at ocr-ing to latex. There appears to be no such software. I doubt there's a big market, but there are a lot of people being paid $15+/hour to latex up written math...
- josu 12y ago
  I think that the solution is much more simple. Print formula > Convert formula to image (screencap) > Paste image
  - x0x0 12y ago
    the whole point is to have vector math, not raster, particularly to well support zooming in and out on small devices
    - audreyt 12y ago
      Rasterize at 900dpi, then? Even on small devices that would support a ~3x zoom without compromising visual quality versus vector. In EPUB3 readers with full <canvas> support one can translate the paint primitives via pdf.js into JS, too.

necrodome 12y ago

I am trying to find a solution to ditch calibre(at least for library management) completely, and with the advent of cheap android eink devices, this seems more possible now. A simple app that communicates with a web backend to manage my library on such a device would be enough. one recently released such device is Boyue T62 (http://www.banggood.com/Boyue-T62-8G-Dual-Core-6-Inch-WIFI-Android-Ebook-Reader-p-942029.html http://www.banggood.com/Boyue-T62-8G-Dual-Core-6-Inch-WIFI-A...) Here is an overview (the review is for the same device, just rebranded and with previos generation specs) http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2014/08/11/icarus-illumina-hd-with-android-4-2-now-selling-on-amazon http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2014/08/11/icarus-illumina-... You also get much better pdf reading capabilities with these devices. Until the next generation displays for reading come into play, these look much better overall than kindle, nook, etc.

holychiz 12y ago

so much hate for the UI! personally, it works and works well for its intended purpose. To me, it's even intuitive at times. By that virtue, it's already better than 90% of software out there, free or not. Can it be better? sure, like everything else in life. Now that I know that the dev is abrasive from other HN comments, i've got even more respect for him, because of the heavier load he has to carried. :)

d0mdo0ss 12y ago
Yep so much love/hate/passion about the looks. I've been using it to convert into pdf and customize spacing, margins, fonts, page size, etc. Looks like a win95 application ok but works, it's free, gets the job done and then gets out of the way... maybe I'm missing something.
philbarr 12y ago
Agreed! Personally I feel that since he writes and maintains it himself he can be as argumentative as he likes. It's not like he's the first - check out Linus Torvalds for the canonical abrasive open source guy. And they're right. It's free, you don't like it, go bloody well right it yourself.
- unfamiliar 12y ago
  There is a big difference between the kind of rudeness the Calibre developer is known for versus the zero-tolerance-for-bullshit that Linus is known for. Nobody is claiming he is obliged to act differently. Everyone is just agreeing that he is an asshole and that trying to work with him would be a waste of time. By all means adopt his attitude if you admire it; you'll get the same sentiment from the community.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

nebulous1 12y ago

I don't suppose he's backtracked on his awful position on auto-updates?

akerl_ 12y ago
For those of us missing context, care to share? I'm definitely not a fan of every launch of Calibre showing me a prompt to update, but I'm also not sold on apps that upgrade without my express consent.
fineIllregister 12y ago
Someone has packaged it for Windows using the Chocolatey NuGet package manager: http://chocolatey.org/packages/calibre http://chocolatey.org/packages/calibre I'm sure OS X has something similar, but I wouldn't know where to find it.
- cooper12 12y ago
  OSX has homebrew-cask [0, 1], which is built on homebrew to distribute binaries. I checked and a formula for calibre is present. [2] [0]: http://caskroom.io/ http://caskroom.io/ [1]: https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask [2]: https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/blob/master/Casks/calibre.rb https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/blob/master/Casks/...
  - dewey 12y ago
    Unfortunately there's still no proper "upgrade" command for cask, there's a lengthy discussion on how to deal with that on their issue tracker [0] though. For now you'll still have to rely on a workaround. Currently I'm using an alias to clear the old binary and download the new one. [1] [0] https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/issues/309 https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/issues/309 [1] https://blog.notmyhostna.me/make-calibre-updates-less-annoying/ https://blog.notmyhostna.me/make-calibre-updates-less-annoyi...
kinleyd 12y ago
Too frequent updates have been an irritant for me, largely on account of my slow internet connection. I always felt that many of the updates could have been bundled, unless it was a major fix. But no, they kept flowing in![0] More recently my reading habits have changed and I much prefer to go directly for my books on my desktop. I've uninstalled calibre now. All I really need is a cli or a basic client (much like ncmpc for mpd) for my books. I'm looking for something along those lines, and am also planning to do a hobby project for that if the urge grows. [0] On every Arch Linux update.

skant 12y ago

The author of Calibre claims: In my opinion, calibre’s graphic interface is damn good [1] I don't think the author is going to make any strides towards improving/changing the UI [1]http://features.en.softonic.com/interview-kovid-goyal-creator-of-calibre http://features.en.softonic.com/interview-kovid-goyal-creato...

droopyEyelids 12y ago
I agree with him. It's usable, and easy to understand. It doesn't follow the fads of our time, and thats fine. I struggle to understand why such a superficial demand is at the top of hacker news. Asking every useful software project to hire designers so it fits the Apple Guidelines (yes I'm exaggerating) seems both unproductive and more likely to drive the programming endeavor further out of the apartments of inventive people and into VCistan
- gareim 12y ago
  I found I had the exact opposite experience. There were just so many options everywhere that when I tried to change a few settings or edit book tags, I quickly got lost. I'd like it to be cleaned up a bit and streamlined, not necessarily conform to Apple/Microsoft/Google design guidelines.
- ahknight 12y ago
  There's a place between hot as hell and cold as a witch's tit that we call Earth. Let's not forget that. The interface is an unmitigated disaster from tip to toe. There's too much going on. It doesn't need to get hit with the iBooks stick to make it better; it just needs someone with half a clue to delete half the buttons, tabs, modals, windows, panes, lists, checkboxes, and other crap. Put another way: Eclipse is not the program you want to base your design on.
- claystu 12y ago
  Would you mind if car companies switched the gas and break pedals whenever they felt like it. After all, gas pedal on the right is no harder than gas pedal on the left. Except...the custom is already set. Most users would rather ignore a program than relearn yet another arbitrary interface when the standard one is good enough.

jrvarela56 12y ago

Does anyone have a decent webapp to replace this? Interested in building one since I haven't found a viable option. As of now I use Calibre and set my folder to Dropbox so I can access books.

edent 12y ago
I use COPS as a Web frontend. http://blog.slucas.fr/en/oss/calibre-opds-php-server http://blog.slucas.fr/en/oss/calibre-opds-php-server

dredmorbius 12y ago

I'll take a look at this, as my long rant on what's wrong with browsers[1] basically ends up with the admission that something along the lines of Calibre or Zotero is probably more of what I want from a reading app: the ability to manage a library of works, local, networked, or on the Web, with a highly uniform presentation (ignore virtually all document formatting in favor of my own preferences). From my relatively light explorations of Calibre to date (v. 1.25 on Debian jessie/sid): ⚫ The UI is clunky. Especially when trying to edit / capture bibliographic information I've found it beyond frustrating. ⚫ The built-in readers are severely brain-damaged and I've found no way to change them. The PDF reader is complete and total fail, the eBook reader isn't much better, and I seem to recall that accessing HTML docs is similarly frustrating. By contrast, I've been impressed by the Moon+Reader Android eBook reader, generally like the Readability online (Web) reader and Android app, and had found a Debian eBook reader that was fairly decent client -- fbreader. Its main disadvantage is in not having the ability to set a maximum content width. I find that 40-45 em is my preferred width in general. Among fbreader's frustrations: I cannot define a stylesheet, though I can apply a selected set of styles (defining margin widths, e.g., but not the _text_ width, which is frustrating). The book I've presently got loaded is either right or center justified -- the left margin is ragged, again, frustrating. And text doesn't advance on a <space>, like virtually any other Linux pager. If calibre readily supported alternative clients, I'd be a lot happier with it. ⚫ The ability to include / reference / convert Web content would be somewhere north of awesome. There's still a large amount of information online that I reference, but would prefer to archive or cache locally, and/or convert to more useful formats (usually ePub or PDF). ⚫ Optimizing viewing experiences for wide-format, vertically-challenged screens would be hugely useful. 16:9 display ratios mean vertical space is at an absolute premium. Most PDF viewers are utterly brain-dead in this regard (evince, for example, requires four manual repositionings to view a typical 2-up document). The Internet Archive's BookReader does an excellent job of consider positioning content and paging through it as two separate functions. I strongly recommend taking some UI notes from it. https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader Alternatively, the old 'gv' ghostscript Postscript and PDF reader will page through documents in a highly sensible fashion: top-bottom, left-right. Why this was achieved in 1992 while PDF readers of the subsequent 22 years have utterly blundered in this regard escapes me. That said, I'm looking forward to this showing up in Debian's repos (I've got v1.25 presently). ________________________________ Notes: 1. http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_b...

llasram 12y ago

In 2008-2009 I was probably the second biggest commiter to Calibre (still #4 according to github), focusing entirely on the conversion pipeline and format support. I'm still proud of the OEB modeling as some of the finest OO code I've written, or probably will write now that I've moved on to functional. For everyone complaining about the UI and management functionality, realize that you are not the target audience. Head over to www.mobileread.com, look at the Calibre forum and the praise Kovid gets, and you'll see that he's largely catering directly to what his core users want. It is interesting that Calibre and mobileread are still around, and relatively little changed. I lost interest and moved on once pretty much every commercially-available e-book became available in EPUB format. What's left is a very, very specialized core of enthusiasts.

izacus 12y ago
I don't understand, how can a sane UI have a target audience?

dredmorbius 12y ago

Can someone point to a good Calibre tutorial? My use-case: I download material in various formats from online, mostly in PDF, ePub, or some markup format (LaTeX, Markdown, HTML, etc.) I've got a large set of downloads, which I then try to import into Calibre. This is in support of a large research project. 1. It's difficult to tell what I've imported and what I haven't. 2. The import process itself is slow. Enough so that I'll fire it up, get caught up in other stuff, and ... well, tend not to get back to it. 3. The corpus is fairly large: around 1000 books and papers, plus another 5,000 others pulled from web archives. 4. Tracking this by metadata is crucial. Title, author, publication date, and tags. Managing _that_ is a headache on its own, especially adding metadata to works / confirming automatically extracted content is accurate. 5. Once I've got the information organized, reading, referencing, annotating, and other tasks should be supported. Again: calibre is about the only tool out there I'm familiar with, but it's a pain. Zotero and various LaTeX bibliographic tools are also of some use.