[HN Gopher] Calibre - New in Calibre 7.0
___________________________________________________________________
Calibre - New in Calibre 7.0
Author : xbmcuser
Score : 280 points
Date : 2023-11-18 08:14 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (calibre-ebook.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (calibre-ebook.com)
| troupo wrote:
| Calibre is seriously good. I used their cli tools for a project,
| and it just chews through weird ebooks and metadata without a
| hitch or a glitch
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| Calibre is outstanding - really one of my most important research
| tools. Fulltext search over the content of an entire library is a
| killer feature. I maintain a couple of hundreds books in PDF
| format and sync them automatically with a Samsung tablet.
|
| Version 7.0 crashes on my Ubuntu 23.10, unfortunately. Had to
| return to 6.29.0.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Wait, full text including into PDFs? I didn't know that, that's
| really big!
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| Yep! In the search field above the library window, press the
| "FT" button on the very left. You have to create the index
| the first time you use the feature. It takes a while and from
| there on new books are indexed automatically.
|
| FT search has word and phrase search, boolean operators and
| NEAR search abilities. And there is a really cool match list,
| giving some context of the match before you actually go to it
| in the PDF file.
|
| You cannot search across libraries, though.
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| Note: AS far as I know, Calibre does not do OCR, so a PDF
| with only scanned content will not work.
| ggpsv wrote:
| I've had good luck using Tesseract [0] for scanned PDFs.
| If you're not CLI-inclined, there are several GUIs for it
| available [1]. I have had good luck downloading scanned
| PDFs from archive.org and running them through Tesseract.
|
| Did not know about Calibre for this - I was relying on
| opening each search and searching it individually.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract [1]:
| https://www.opait.com/tessstudio/
| kristofferR wrote:
| OCRmyPDF is a tool using Tesseract, specifically designed
| for PDFs. I would recommend that over pure Tesseract.
|
| https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
| kristofferR wrote:
| I recommend running any such PDFs through OCRmyPDF.
|
| https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
| Fluorescence wrote:
| Oh, lol, I never knew that.
|
| I created a script that dumped my library of 1000s of books
| to .txt and then grepped them.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| If you run it from the terminal you can see the error. For me
| on 22.04 it was missing a dependency: sudo
| apt install libxcb-cursor0
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| Yess, thanks! Stupid me.
|
| Installer is also hinting for the missing dependency now
| before installation.
| Pepperating wrote:
| Could you tell me what software you are using for syncing?
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| I am using "Calibre Sync" on Android (Payware: US$ 5,49 and
| worth every penny).
|
| For viewing/annotating on Android I use Flexcil.
| Novosell wrote:
| Why not just use something like syncthing? Does it offer
| more advanced features than just syncing files?
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| > Does it offer more advanced features than just syncing
| files?
|
| Yes! Covers, Metadata (searchable and including custom
| columns and comments), reading progress, filters
| (important for me: tags), different layouts, virtual
| views.
|
| And it can use the full text search of Calibre (but only
| when connected to the Calibre content server).
| account-5 wrote:
| I utilise zotero for this. Was unaware that calibre could do
| this; the search bit.
| breakds wrote:
| Curious on "as research tools" - do you use it to manage
| research papers?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great news, time to do another donation.
| ivolimmen wrote:
| I use calibre as well and it's excellent. The only thing I think
| should have some attention is the awful interface.
| dewey wrote:
| That's the first thing I always check and think about when I
| see an update. It's an amazing tool otherwise though.
| paperhatwriter wrote:
| Yes I cringe whenever I see the logo. I use it too and it works
| well enough but it's so inelegant. I wish visual designers
| involved themselves more in open source development.
| bdeshi wrote:
| If you meant the splash screen when it starts up, this can be
| turned off in the settings.
|
| Otherwise the core app's UI looks fine to me personally,
| though some of the plugins make some, unusual, choices.
| stavros wrote:
| The UI is a mess of buttons and menus strewn about
| everywhere. I'm not complaining, Calibre is a great
| project, but let's not kid ourselves that the UI is even
| mediocre.
| __rito__ wrote:
| Use an icon pack, and it is very likely it has something
| different already there for Calibre. I use candy icons, and I
| like the Calibre "logo" in this icon pack.
| d1l wrote:
| The last thing anyone needs is "visual" "designers" shitting
| up our useful applications.
|
| Stick to your todo list apps and stay in your lane.
| bigfudge wrote:
| This is such an aggressive way of saying something
| unhelpful. Visual/information/interaction. design -can- be
| an important part of an app team. I also think calibre is
| clunky and many of their interactions inelegant. That it's
| also ugly is not irrelevant - reading is or can be an
| aesthetic experience too. I'm grateful it exists but like
| Anki I really wish someone with real design skills could
| help them polish the rough edges - that would make it a
| pleasure to use rather than just ok.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Some designers are definitely terrible (e.g. whoever made
| the mind numbing decision to use hamburger menus in Gnome),
| but plenty are good at their jobs. Go and watch some
| Tantacruul videos on YouTube.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Meh. I find it charming. It's a product of passion not the
| product of hyper-optimised marketing designed to trick you
| into thinking it's good.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| With a bit of fiddling, it can be quite elegant:
|
| - dark theme and switch the icon theme to monstre
|
| - remove toolbar buttons you don't use like help/donate/news
| etc. so that it's quite minimal and streamlined
|
| - edit the ebook reader css to add some padding / line-spacing
| to fit your taste and use a font like Libre Baskerville
|
| - no splash-screen
|
| The preference pages remain a bit of a headache to navigate but
| it's not like you are fiddling with those too often and
| importantly, it does have plentiful configuration to do what
| you want.
|
| And if you run into a problem, you'll probably get a response
| from Kovid faster than any company. Overall, thank you Kovid
| for years of hard work!
| walteweiss wrote:
| Would love to see that upstream!
| pbowyer wrote:
| Thank you! That looks so much better withh these changes. I
| couldn't work out how to do this one though:
|
| > - edit the ebook reader css to add some padding / line-
| spacing to fit your taste and use a font like Libre
| Baskerville
|
| Where/how do I find those options? I found other CSS in the
| Preference pages, but not the ebook reader css.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| 1. Open an ebook (epub/mobi etc.) in the viewer.
|
| 2. Click the top or hit escape to show the menu and open up
| the preferences.
|
| My current settings are:
|
| - Colors: off-white background and dark grey text - I tend
| to pick these per device given different brightness /
| temperature of the display
|
| - Page Layout: margins - left/right: 100px, top/bottom:
| 75px
|
| - Fonts: I get Libre Baskerville from Google Fonts. I
| believe I choose a different font on Windows because each
| OS's rendering is slightly different. For me it's a matter
| of getting the font-weight just right so that it's not
| oppressive to the eye, distracting or hard to read but just
| right and it's a combination of the font, colour, size and
| how the OS renders. My goal is that it feels like the words
| on the page just fall into my eyes without effort.
|
| - Style: This is where you can write css. (complaints about
| how bad my css is will fall on deaf ears!) The hack job I
| have on this machine is: p {
| line-height: 1.5em !important; font-size: 0.854em
| !important; padding-bottom: 25px;
| text-indent: 35.868px !important; }
| div { line-height:1.5em;
| padding-top: 1em; } line-height:
| 1.5em;
|
| - and then I just zoom-in with ctrl-mousewheel for a decent
| text size and to me it looks roughly the same as Apple
| Books.
|
| Some ebooks have hardcoded styles that force ugly
| formatting. Fortunately Calibre lets you edit ebooks so you
| can just open them up and delete their custom css.
|
| 3. A few other things I remove are i) columns from the grid
| view like rating/publisher/series ii) categories on the
| left like language/format - I only use author/tags. Once
| you remove all the things you don't use, it's a neat
| minimal app.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| You're talking about appearance, when Calibre's issue is
| almost entirely UX design. It's actively user-hostile
| software that is on a fundamental level not designed to do
| the things most users want to do.
|
| Step a new user through setting up Calibre to do something as
| simple as syncing to a e-reader with the functionality a user
| would normally expect, like displaying/syncing their reading
| progress.
|
| Or just watch Goyal tell a new user "you can't do that, use
| the builtin reader if you want reading progress synced, fuck
| off" and then a bunch of other folks get into the weeds
| describing the mess of plugins and shit you need to do it.
|
| https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=296205
|
| I managed to get my e-reader to sync reading position to
| Calibre but it required a lot of frustrating work trying to
| follow tutorials on mobiread...creating custom fields and
| code snippets and praying that the whole thing won't break
| some time in the future.
|
| It's probably the single most commonly wanted feature for a
| user looking at an e-book library management tool. That and
| syncing to their e-reader's shelves.
|
| God help you if you want to use Goodreads...
| alsodumb wrote:
| People reading your comment would think that Goyal was
| actually super hostile to the user but the thread you
| linked doesn't seem nowhere as hostile as you claim it to
| be.
|
| Truth is, Calibre is a hard project to run, the man has
| been doing it himself, and he is super responsive and
| helpful in forums.
|
| Every thread about Calibre a has a comment like this
| shitting on Goyal based on one or two of his comments, and
| then there are some comments that talk about how helpful he
| is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32052669
| bdeshi wrote:
| > God help you if you want to use Goodreads...
|
| How could anyone support Goodreads seeing as their api is
| closed off? Thankfully calibre has the goodreads-sync
| plugin which still works as well as it does.
| gerardpg wrote:
| Screenshot?
| sigzero wrote:
| Set "User interface style" to "system default".
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Give thorium a try. Probably the best least bloated reader for
| windows there is. I guess on osx and linux too. I switched to
| it couple of months ago. Haven't looked back.
| arkitaip wrote:
| I used Calibre with my Kobo and while it made the Kobo so much
| more useful, the interface is somewhat complicated and gets worse
| as you add plugins. Didn't matter in the end because I stopped
| using the Cobo in favor of my phone (ReadEra is great in creating
| a good enough reading experience).
| telmo wrote:
| I love Calibre, and I am very thankful to the people who work on
| it. It's a shiny example of an open source project that creates a
| common good.
|
| I just wish it didn't have updates so often. Since you have to do
| it manually, I feel that every time I start it, this little chore
| is imposed on me, without any reward. If you really must release
| updates at this rate for some reason, then I would say that an
| auto-updater that runs in the background would be a huge huge
| improvement to the overall experience.
| vvillena wrote:
| Package managers are the way to go for this kind of software.
| Brew, scoop, snap...
| huytersd wrote:
| This is already possible...
| thek3nger wrote:
| I update it with Brew on macOS and Scoop [1] on Windows (but I
| guess it is included in other package managers such as
| chocolatey).
|
| Of course, a built-in auto-updater would be good, but a
| packaged version is a nice workaround for me.
|
| [1]: https://scoop.sh/
| crtasm wrote:
| It is: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages?q=calibre
| dopa42365 wrote:
| It's also on the official microsoft package manager (winget).
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
| globular-toast wrote:
| I think it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
| If releases weren't frequent people would have to build their
| own from the master branch. A system package manager makes
| updates really low friction. Ubuntu seems to be only a few
| months behind the upstream releases. IMO individual packages
| should not be reinventing the package manager wheel.
|
| The main problem with Calibre is it's quite hard to package and
| many distros seem to have given up.
| telmo wrote:
| > If releases weren't frequent people would have to build
| their own from the master branch.
|
| But why??? What in the world of Calibre demands such urgent
| updates? I use a variety of software (some quite complex)
| that do a great job with much less frequent updates. Why not
| Calibre?
| caslon wrote:
| A big portion of what people use Calibre for is parsing,
| converting, and generating HTML. The epub file format, in
| practice, is zipped, poorly-specified and poorly-generated
| HTML. It is far from an exact science, and minor
| improvements to this can result in countless lives being
| saved slight amounts of discomfort from terrible HTML-
| handling or poorly-handled OCR.
|
| To give an example, I once needed to reference a 2003 book
| that was out of print for a long-running project I was
| working on at the time, and the publisher who released it
| digitally had gone out of business, and the author's
| mailserver had gone dark. I checked the usual suspects for
| the PDF or hard copy of the book, but the only remaining
| copy of it I could find was a Calibre automated epub
| conversion from quite a few years in the past. A few years
| later, I once again looked for a better copy, only to find
| another Calibre epub conversion, but still no PDF in sight.
| This one, seemingly generated a few years later, was much
| higher in quality.
|
| I was pleasantly surprised.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The releases are frequent in part because Goyal refuses to
| separate all the content-based stuff (parsers for online news
| sources, for example) from the application.
|
| This is an extra pain in the ass for users because if your
| favorite news site parser breaks, you have no choice but to
| upgrade Calibre itself instead of just updating a config
| file.
|
| At a minimum the news-parsing stuff should have long ago been
| split out into a plugin. It has nothing to do with calibre's
| function as an ebook library tool.
| alsodumb wrote:
| This is something I often tell my friends who complain
| about Calibre: his project his rules. If you think there
| are genuine pain points you can address, fork it and make a
| better one no one is stopping you.
| telmo wrote:
| > This is something I often tell my friends who complain
| about Calibre: his project his rules.
|
| It is hard to imagine that anyone would disagree with
| this. I certainly don't, nor did I say anything to the
| contrary.
|
| > If you think there are genuine pain points you can
| address, fork it and make a better one no one is stopping
| you.
|
| The only thing stopping me is common sense.
| aumerle wrote:
| The updates have nothing to do with news parsers. News
| parsers are loaded dynamically, every time they are used.
| So are metadata downloading plugins. So are get books
| stores. Indeed almost all code that parses data from the
| web in calibre is loaded dynamically independent of calibre
| updates. The calibre developer whom you so blithely
| complain about here actually jumps through a million hoops
| to make sure those bits of calibre remain backward
| compatible with version of calibre and therefore python,
| going back a decade and more.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| I agree with you but I also think that calibre should
| have update patches instead of downloading and installing
| 100mb file every 2 weeks. Calibre comes with its own
| python it is mostly self contained so it would be great
| if we had a choice for downloading just an update patch.
| I don't think this is something Kovid has the time though
| he probably could do it. It's the same problem when he
| was not willing earlier to move to python 3 as the amount
| of man hours required vs maintaining Python2 for calibre
| himself was easier. But someone came along and started
| porting calibre to python 3 and Kovid used their help to
| move to python 3. So if a dev comes along with better way
| to update calibre Kovid will probably accept it but as it
| is not a priority for him he might not ever get around to
| doing it himself.
| sheepshear wrote:
| I don't have this problem because I just don't update mine very
| often.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| I have to admit I've never heard a complaint about too frequent
| optional updates.
|
| Sure, if you are forced to update. But if your Calibre ain't
| broken then just skip the update?
| danpalmer wrote:
| If it was security updates or features that I would like,
| then I'd want to update frequently. By having too many
| releases users will start skipping them, and then users
| aren't getting those important updates.
|
| Realistically, Calibre should just integrate an update
| delivery mechanism such as Sparkle on macOS (not sure about
| other platforms), but sadly I think the developer has Strong
| Opinions and I can't see this happening.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Forcing the option to be presented is also a problem. People
| aren't running the software to manage the software, they are
| running the software to read a book or whatever.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Right on.
|
| That's a huge issue these days. We have to spend far too
| much time updating or upgrading software [1], figuring out
| why or even whether it is needed, (trying to) fix issues
| arising from all that, (trying to) roll back if we cannot
| solve those issues, having downtime on use of the software
| while all this is (mis)happening, and more.
|
| [1] And what the heck is the difference between updating
| and upgrading, anyway? (I'm not interested in googling it.
| More busy work.) And who the heck is interested in the
| difference? Not end users, for sure. I have come across
| these two similar, hence maddening terms, in at least
| Ubuntu Linux distributions. Why can't they use less
| ambiguous terms?
|
| And to top it all, I'm a techie. If I (and many other
| techies) have such issues, what to say about laymen, who
| are sometimes called "normies" by said techies and even by
| biztechies? I've actually heard or read both types using
| that term, disparagingly. The irony is that it only
| reflects on them, i.e. all of us in those fields, because
| the term implies that _we_ are abnormal - with good reason.
|
| End of rant.
|
| I'll see myself out now, your tech honour (overlord).
|
| ;)
| pigeons wrote:
| I call installing new software versions "updating"
| because its newer, while "upgrading" implies things are
| improved, which is far from a given when installing
| software updates.
| super_mario wrote:
| Yet another background daemon. No thanks. Update when you need
| to, it's not like it's mandatory.
| donatj wrote:
| I really agree. Update fatigue is a real thing. MKVToolnix is
| the same way, every single time I start it I am interrupted by
| an update dialog. Even the act of just dismissing it is a minor
| annoyance.
|
| I would be happier if it just did it in the background while it
| was running like Chrome and Firefox. Download the update in the
| background and then silently install it next time the app
| starts. I don't need another daemon running in the background
| at all times.
| eviks wrote:
| > Download the update in the background and then silently
| install it next time the app starts
|
| and silently break something the next time you start an app?
| Better use some scoop package manager and update at your own
| schedule
| sigzero wrote:
| >I just wish it didn't have updates so often. Since you have to
| do it manually...
|
| Super easy on the Mac. No issues at all.
| srik wrote:
| I myself love the frequent updates but understand where you're
| coming from. Perhaps you can install/upgrade via your package
| manager, on macos at least homebrew has Calibre (and his other
| project kitty) available as casks.
| runjake wrote:
| I have Calibre installed via Homebrew and it still constantly
| pesters me.
|
| I haven't looked into it but I suspect the app is updated far
| more often than the cask.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| Using Homebrew Cask for Calibre actually makes the problem
| worse because the download is consistently very slow for some
| people. For me, it took around an hour the last time I had it
| installed on my Mac.
|
| https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/issues/104814
| LegibleCrimson wrote:
| Don't package managers solve this? Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I
| was under the impression that good package managers existed for
| all major desktop OSes. Surely Windows and MacOS aren't still
| in a situation where apps are expected to regularly check for
| updates and upgrade themselves, right?
| waynesonfire wrote:
| always a join to update calibre. thank you.
| politelemon wrote:
| I remember that Calibre 6 required plugin authors to update, so
| it was a 'breaking change' at the time. Anything similar with
| Calibre 7, or should plugins continue to work?
| mundanevoice wrote:
| This is the same guy who wrote Kitty Terminal. Such a nice guy
| who keeps writing excellent software and giving it away for free.
| dizhn wrote:
| A lot of people would disagree with this. I don't want to talk
| ill of anybody here but maybe you should keep an eye on both
| projects' GitHub issues for a while.
|
| As for a great terminal from (IMO) a genuine nice guy, try
| wezterm.
|
| (I do infact pick open source software based on how they
| respond to issues since I am likely to spend time interacting
| with them.)
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| I'm a bit divided on Calibre. On one side it's very versatile and
| useful. On the other side had it so many data loses over the
| years for me, that it's disturbing, and I stopped using it
| regularly. I wish there would be a good robust alternative. But
| at this point Calibre is such a Moloch..
| Handprint4469 wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I've been using Calibre for 10+ years with
| hundreds of books and multiple libraries, syncing them across
| Windows and Linux machines (using Nextcloud), and I've never
| even once seen any data losses.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Of course is it not a common problem. Calibre wouldn't be so
| popular otherwise.
|
| And some hundreds book's is not much, unless you change all
| of them at once. The probability of loses depends on the
| number of changes. One reason seems poorly implemented
| writing of data, and lousy communication of pending changes.
| At least it was the case 2-3 years ago when I last looked at
| this. But I guess, this is part of the questionable UI..
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Why doesn't Calibre have a "real" app for iOS like Kybooks that
| can both render almost all formats relevant
| (epub+mobi+azw3+pdf+txt+rtf+(audibooks possibly and additionally
| but its also orthogonal in some sense structurally) and serve as
| the root folder/Library for all of them?
|
| They have an app but it always tiptoes around doing exactly this!
| No servers or local server stuff or at least don't force people
| to have that preexisting structure in order to do a facile and
| intuitive things. Was the implicit act of competing with Apple's
| Books apps compelled against?
|
| If they would do just that, they could have all the
| donations/money they would ever need
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Several reasons.
|
| It is a cross platform application in python using QT so is not
| really for mobile it even possible.
|
| What you state as things it does not need are the things that
| it was designed to do - reading ebooks came along quite late (v
| 4 or 5).
|
| Its original function is to convert ebooks between formats and
| store them in a common database.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| I really appreciate your response altho I'm not sure the
| tenor speaks entirely to the fundamental points I raised.
| Like it or not, most people who use Calibre to convert books
| come to view it as a universal ebook library and I'm sure
| everyone would prefer it at least nodded to that reasonable
| association if not pivoted whilst retaining the commitment to
| its converter origins/current mandate. I kinda wish we could
| "have it all" and I'd have zero issue putting my money
| towards that end
|
| It seems ridiculous to leave that continuity, user-
| friendliness, and money on the table out of some insistance
| on never departing from what they essentially are
| inextricably tied-to and associated with as a manner of
| household awareness if I might be so bold as to suggest they
| have reached a degree of ubiquity when it comes to the
| digital ebook experience
| m00dy wrote:
| Kindle now accepts epub files directly. Why would you need this
| app anymore ?
| Cyberfit wrote:
| Does it accept ADEPT encrypted EPUB?
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Can you look at your library on a PC?
|
| Can you use a non Kindle reader?
|
| Kindle is a small part of its use.
| dopa42365 wrote:
| Directly directly, or "send epub to amazon via email for them
| to convert it and send it to your device"? Pretty sure it's
| still only the latter because we can't have nice things.
|
| No idea if they're all Ferengi (DRM is good for business?) or
| there's an actual reason for them to not just support epub
| actually directly.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Because not everyone uses Kindle? Or Amazon?
| synergy20 wrote:
| 7.0 seems buggy,can't double click to open files anymore,6.x
| worked well.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I don't mean to be ungrateful but I'd appreciate some competition
| for Calibre. The UI feels very dated to me and the functionality
| is pretty slow and awkward. But it's got such market and
| mindshare for open source e-reader software that there hasn't
| been much room for other folks to try something different. I
| guess there's a few epub readers (Sumatra displays ePubs, someone
| below mentions Thorium Reader) but I don't know of anything that
| Calibre does with maintaining a library of e-books in various
| formats.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Maybe have a look at Kavita or Ubooquity (possibly Komga, but
| that's more for comics)
|
| https://www.kavitareader.com/
|
| https://vaemendis.net/ubooquity/
|
| https://komga.org/
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Calibre can be a real pain in the ass to set up the first time.
| Everything from special extensions for certain devices to very
| specific configurations (which you definitely won't figure out
| on your own without a guide) make the experience quite
| unpleasant. Once it's up and running it's... fine. I have a
| huge library and also long for a better alternative. Of course,
| this is free, and I try to be grateful for what we have.
| evanreichard wrote:
| It doesn't try to solve the same use cases that Calibre does,
| but I built an open source (EPUB only) manager / reader /
| statistics tracker called AnthoLume [0]. It mostly stemmed from
| me reading in KOReader [1] on my Kindle, and not having the
| ability to sync the progress to my iPhone / iPad.
|
| It's got metadata matching, support for multiple users, and
| statistics tracking which allows me to have a "Leaderboard"
| that shows how fast you read (words per minute). Fun
| competition between my wife and I (that I'm 100% losing). It's
| a Progressive Web App and utilizes a Service Worker to support
| 100% offline reading as well.
|
| There's a demo server [2] (creds are "demo" for both user &
| pass).
|
| [0] https://gitea.va.reichard.io/evan/AnthoLume
|
| [1] http://koreader.rocks/
|
| [2] https://antholume-demo.cloud.reichard.io/
| Xerox9213 wrote:
| This looks really cool!
|
| I started getting into ebooks again after not using them for
| a few years. When I fired up my kindle it auto updated to a
| new version. Now it's unable to run KOReader. If only I had
| changed my WiFi password in the past 5 years!
| kdwikzncba wrote:
| If people find calibre slow, why not open some PRs to make it
| faster? Doesn't seem like a good argument for starting a new
| project.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I was confused on that front because its quite fast on Linux.
| Brief research on the subject suggested a few things.
|
| Some folks have performance issues with VERY large libraries
| of 80,000 to hundreds of thousands of books which aren't
| experienced by people with more normal sized libraries of
| dozens to single digit thousands of books. There may be some
| room to optimize this case but to be fair this is an edge
| case.
|
| On Windows antivirus can cause issues if the library
| directory isn't excluded. This is fairly out of scope and is
| just the general suck of using the Windows platform.
|
| Mac users complained of general slowness. There may well be
| room for improvement in this area.
|
| Sending to device may be slower than expected if sending
| involves either transmitting books over the wifi depending on
| the speed of the underlying connection or especially if
| sending requires conversion. It might be worthwhile in this
| case to enable conversion of books on import so as to obviate
| the need to convert many books at once later.
| idoubtit wrote:
| I haven't used Calibre for years (it was annoyingly slow on a
| low grade laptop), but I've dealt with many epub files, and I
| think Calibre does a bad job when modifying them.
|
| It's easy to identify an epub that went through Calibre:
| there's usually a lot of junk metatada in the file. Not just a
| "contributor" tag or a custom "modified" timestamp, but dozens
| of empty json structures embedded in xml. And a (potentially
| empty) bookmark file. But what surprised me is that Calibre
| accepts to write metadata that is obviously wrong. For
| instance, a simple heuristic could detect when the user has
| confused the full name "Jane Doe" with its file-as form "Doe,
| Jane" and ask for confirmation. And after seeing many dates at
| "0101-01-01 ...", I suspect that was the default value in some
| version of Calibre.
|
| I'm glad Calibre exists and that many people like it, but I
| hope a better software will emerge: safer, saner, faster, maybe
| prettier and easier to install.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| > But it's got such market and mindshare for open source
| e-reader software that there hasn't been much room for other
| folks to try something different.
|
| This contains the misunderstanding that merely by existing
| calibre "uses up" something like oxygen. This is true in a
| commercial product when there are a finite number of buyers
| whose money in turn funds a finite number of merchants efforts
| to bring a product to market.
|
| In open source software users are finite but on average
| worthless except insofar as they constitute a funnel whereby
| some microscopic portion may in some instances become
| contributors but more often than not that funnel is virtually
| non-existent with contributions coming from the same small
| cadre of developers.
|
| > The UI feels very dated to me
|
| Perhaps the worst reason to make a different piece of software.
| Modern usually is synonymous with an oversimplified interface
| which shoves much functionality into a junk drawer and makes it
| easy to do some subset of easy things and hard to do anything
| else.
|
| Although quite usable out of the box the calibre UI is also
| very customizable and trivial to figure out how to customize
|
| - You can add or remove functions to right click menu or tool
| bars
|
| - tool bars by default has both icons AND text and you can
| change the icons if you want something that looks more "modern"
|
| - The default layout has a toolbar, search bar, list of books,
| info about the selected book, and a tag/author/series etc
| browser toolbar.
|
| - If you were wondering how to change the layout there is a
| button on the bottom right that says "layout" alongside a
| colorful icon. If you click it you can choose a pretty cover
| grid view and hide both the book info and tag browser. Congrats
| it now looks "modern"
|
| - not only can you set single character shortcuts because they
| only operate when the cursor isn't in a text field but the
| preferences menu for shortcuts makes it easy to search for a
| function by name in order to bind and the shortcut so chosen is
| shown by the function.
|
| - It has a search that is both powerful and works exactly how
| you would think it works
|
| For having a huge pile of functionality it is probably one of
| the most usable pieces of software I use regularly. It works in
| a fashion that suggests the author uses it and has thought a
| lot about what would make it easier to use.
|
| I'm also a little lost at what slow means here as on Linux it
| like virtually every desktop app that isn't based on electron
| it responds instantly and briskly. Perhaps it works poorly on
| Mac?
| BookFusionHQ wrote:
| [shameless plug]
|
| We provide a seamless way to sync your eBooks from Calibre to
| your other devices with Native, Android, iOS and Webapps.
| https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre
|
| Two-Way Sync for highlights and annotations are also planned.
| Once we wrap up our Obsidian and Notion integration.
|
| Some Calibre users use BookFusion to seamlessly share their
| eBooks with friends and Family.
| https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/branch (early access
| restricted to only paid users)
| m_sahaf wrote:
| Worthy of note the Calibre-Web[0] project, which builds atop
| Calibre library to provide powerful web interface. The project
| and its maintainer deserve some love and support.
|
| [0] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
| mistahchris wrote:
| I use calibre-web and love it.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| I currently use the Amazon Kindle ecosystem extensively and love
| it. I am a little bothered by how closed off it is, however. Is
| there an open ecosystem that is just as good?
|
| Where do you buy books? Are most books available or is the
| selection poor? Does it work with library apps like Libby?
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| I used a Kindle for a decade, but then switched to a Kobo
| device (Libra 2) and I really enjoy it. Kobo is friendly to
| users modding the device, so you can easily install KOReader
| that is a superior interface if you read a lot of PDFs.
|
| In spite of being an avid reader, I have never actually bought
| an ebook. All my reading comes from LibGen, Anna's Archive, or
| their predecessor communities for free downloads. Consequently,
| I never suffered from Amazon's ecosystem: as soon as I took any
| new Kindle out of the box, I put it in airplane mode and only
| sideloaded books over USB.
| ebb_earl_co wrote:
| Perhaps not precisely what you're asking, but there are simple
| ways to download the Kindle books that you paid good money for,
| and decrypt them to plain ePub or PDF using Calibre.
| mistahchris wrote:
| I was a kindle user and recently switched to Pocketbook. I've
| been buying new ebooks from ebooks.com which are often already
| drm free. For me, there haven't been any downsides.
| deanc wrote:
| I use calibre to transfer ebooks and pdfs to my kindle on MacOS.
| I literally use no other features and from what I've seen it
| seems like it's suffering from enshittification.
| beej71 wrote:
| Right sidebar on GH has multiple ways to donate to this project:
| https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre
| gerardpg wrote:
| It doesn't work on macOS 12, which is strange because even Apple
| itself still supports macOS Monterey.
| sigzero wrote:
| If you use it, think about donating to the project. Please.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I just tried to launch Calibre. It nuked my Mac and I had to
| force a manual reboot - which is only necessary maybe twice a
| year or so.
| ntnsndr wrote:
| After I started using Zotero, I found that I stopped using
| Calibre. Especially with Zotero's recent improvements, it serves
| as a decent replacement.
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