As others have said, this is an app I have an absolute love/hate relationship with.<p>I really appreciate all the work the dev puts into it, but it’s a slow app that just isn’t very usable. It’s not just that it’s ugly, it’s that it’s poorly designed. And yet, nothing else even comes close to doing what it does.<p>I even wrote out a spec for a similar app that was built using a more modern framework/usable interface, that some friends and I could potentially build, but the task was so monumental and the return on investment (and I’m not even talking about money) seemed so small, we shelved it.<p>That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that DeDRM is the reason a lot of us use the app — I know it’s a key for me — and that does have an excellent CLI tool.<p>There are also some good iOS apps that work with the book server, for accessing lots of ebooks. Even then tho, those apps are labors of love where the core audience is both critical and shockingly cheap (I say shockingly b/c many pay thousands on ebooks and ereaders a year — it’s an enthusiast market). One look at the MobileReads forums (a fantastic resource) for any specific app, and I kind of understand why we don’t have a “good” Calibre that is OSS for paid for that matter.
Calibre is so darn useful. It gets hate for the eclectic ui but it's absolutely essential for any ebook Downloaders imo. Kovid is a real hero for as much work as he does on this. He must spend several hours a day every day of the year on it.
There have been complaints about the UI since forever, and the developer is well-known for bristling at any constructive criticism and telling people to either accept the way he likes things, or simply don't use the application. Consequently, I am surprised that no one has forked Calibre, even if it was just to kept the backend but simply overhaul the UI.<p>Something that I would like to see in a future version of Calibre (or a fork) is news-download recipes changed to a plugin system that can be updated separately of Calibre itself. It is not ideal that if a news recipe becomes obsolete due to changes on the respective news website, one has to upgrade Calibre to a new version. For users whose distros package only a certain version of Calibre, it would be nice to continue running that distro-supported version but simply be able to update the news recipes from within the Calibre settings.
Surveying this thread, I see an amazingly wide range of uses for Calibre. Yes, the UI is really bad, perhaps especially on a Mac, but it is so mind-bogglingly good at so many different things that it is difficult to believe that Kovid Goyal manages all of this by himself.<p>Other people have different use-cases than I do, and Calibre satisfies us all. Excellent, amazing, wonderful work, Mr. Goyal!
Just updated. Alas, the new viewer still does not provide nondestructive viewing. Open file, press PgDn, exit, and the viewed file is silently changed. The viewer writes current position in the viewed file itself (META-INF/calibre_bookmarks.txt).<p>UPDATE: just found out there is now a checkbox in the viewer preferences: "Keep a copy of annotations/bookmarks in the e-book file, for easy sharing". If unchecked, the viewed files are kept intact. Nice!
While Calibre is not what I'd consider to be a "beautiful" program, I do not care. It's functionality is unbeaten.<p>What I really hate about it is the directory structure, it forces upon you. I have my books sorted in topical directories and Calibre sorts them by author. That sucks. If this single issue would be addressed, I couldn't be happier with Calibre, especially, since Kovid is a very helpful person.
Kudos to Calibre and its author. It's one of the first programs I install on any Linux machine I own.<p>Yes, the UI is a bit quirky, but who cares? I spend my time actually reading the books, and for managing my library and converting between formats Calibre is ace.<p>That useful software like this exists makes me very happy.
Great app. I know everyone likes to extol the UNIX "A program should do one thing and do it well" philosophy, but Calibre is one of the few "monolithic" apps I can think of that justifies the bulk. It does <i>everything</i> you could want it to do regarding eBooks: viewing, editing, management, delivery, etc.
If you like it and want to support development, the main developer is on Patreon <a href="https://www.patreon.com/kovidgoyal" rel="nofollow">https://www.patreon.com/kovidgoyal</a>
Does this still insist on making a copy of all my books on my local hard drive? I have about 10,000+ books on a network share. It would be nice to be able to search through them and download just the ones I'm interested in, but past versions of Calibre require the book to be downloaded to your local HDD before it pulls any metadata.
Calibre ui made me stay away, I don't mind different but sometimes you do need to get a bit more mainstream. Blender 2.80 did this move and it helped a lot I believe.
It's interesting, my complaint with Calibre was always performance rather than UI - it can be surprisingly slow for processing & converting mostly-text formats.<p>But the sheer number of features & formats makes it worth the downsides. Indeed it's probably a good reminder to me as a developer, I can get too focused on making things snappy, efficient and pretty where perhaps I could have delivered twice the features if I took a little more of an 80/20 approach.
Calibre does the trick.<p>It's a shame there's no good hardware ereader to use it with. Every e-ink device is closed hardware, runs only closed software, and is trying to lock you into some DRM-rich ecosystem.
Surprised to see so much hate for Calibre's UI here. I'm not sure I understand. I can load damn near anything that pretends to be an ebook into it, and then I can double-click on the row for that item, and it pops open a reader window. That's all I need it to do.<p>At least on Windows, I've been pretty underwhelmed with other ebook viewer apps I have tried. The various Kindle apps tend to blow for anything you don't obtain through Amazon, and often don't work great for syncing even Kindle ebooks. I still have a bunch of Microsoft Reader .lit files kicking around, and Calibre is one of the only things that will open them. The Calibre PDF reader is pretty terrible, but setting is up to pop open to Adobe or whatever instead doesn't take much ceremony.
I used this for a bit ages ago. Useful tool. Funnily, I think it's a great example of how building some things is way harder than people think. For instance, everyone has complained about Calibre since the beginning of time. Code, UI, everything. And yet, no one has come up with a replacement. Maybe pandoc captures some use cases.<p>It's like OpenSSL in that respect alone. Everyone wants something like it but it's too hard to build so they'll just use what they think is an inferior solution (when really it's superiority as a solution is that it exists).
Other commenters are pretty ruthless. Calibre's great for managing e-books and putting them onto an e-reader. It works reliably and I've never had an issue.<p>Imagine writing a useful (free!) tool and the best thing people can say is "well, the code is a nightmare and the UI is ugly". Shameful - remember that there's a real, hard-working person on the other side of your comments.
I relly want to like and use Calibre, but none of my several tries to get started were successful.<p>No idea how to browse my Kindle library, how to browse books on my Kindle, or do anything else. It's a totally non-intuitive GUI.
Well, given the subject here, it seems relevant to ask how everyone is organizing their libraries in Calibre. Is there such a thing as "best practices"? Would really love to hear ideas as I've found library mgmt in Calibre to be cumbersome, sluggish, and rather none intuitive compared to something like Plex for movies & TV shows.
I wish it was more unix-way-ish so I could write my own UI with just the features I need, my own back-end (I'd like a less-bloated library storage convention without directories for every book, without title transliteration, with support for multiple files of same format (e.g. .code.zip, audio.zip, .html.zip) for plain HTML files and embedded metadata) and ony use Calibre for tagging and conversion (with conversion customization, and I can also see no reason why conversion tools should not be a separate project).<p>Calibre is by far the best yet still could be made a way better.
Is there a good replacement for Calibre ?<p>one the converts from any format to any format, strips DRM (so I heard), adapts to different readers and if you really have to allows you to read (though the reader looks terrible)
Full disclosure: I'm a sql & emacs geek so that may warp my views on interfaces. I suspect there are a lot of features that are used by no more than 5-10% of users, but we'd scream bloody murder if they were taken away. No two of my heavy Calibre user friends use exactly the same set of features and we're always swapping tricks. Calibre does a decent job for so many use cases that I'm not sure there's any way to have a completely coherent UI that covers them all. That doesn't mean it's not krufty and occasionally frustrating, but I've no exaggeration never seen an alternative that did even 20% of what I wanted.<p>Calibre can seem pretty overgrown and I used for years without missing features like search-based virtual libraries, but now an ebook management app that doesn't let me slice and dice with that kind of power. For me it's a mix of how easy it is switching between tabbed views like new last 30 days, unread (custom tag automatically added on import), various reading lists from the Reading List plugin, author sets I tend to read together, missing metadata, etc. and the composability of virtual libraries.<p>When you combine virtual libraries with the slightly misleadingly named FanFicFare plugin's metadata it's a lot easier to keep track of both original[1] & fan fictions from dozens of sites (out of several hundred supported) and separate it out from regular books. Similarly the Reading List & Import List plugins are great for pulling in info from outside calibre, but they need a lot of the features that people generally ignore to do their jobs.<p>On the flip side most people don't seem to use multiple real libraries and they are great for topic-specific book collections or when I really don't want to see a book again, but don't want to just delete it.<p>Even simple things like being able to arbitrarily color column text based on filters I ignored until I realized lets me set the titles of all books missing a description red. It makes cleaning up my library easier, but nothing else I've tried has a similar features.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFare/wiki/SupportedSites" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFare/wiki/SupportedSites</a>
It's the only thing that makes reading fiction from spacebattles.com not soul-destroyingly annoying.
Not meaning to sound ungrateful, but does anyone know of any _good_ dark themes for Calibre's ebook viewer? I found one on the web, but found it's generally easier to just use calibre to manage the files, but Atril or something similar to actually view it. This seems to especially be the case for books with code snippets and the like, like the ones I'm often getting via the Humble Bundle store.
An issue in the past was that books loaded into Kindles through Calibre appeared as 'personal documents' rather than as a 'book' in the Kindle, upsetting causing the reading state sync to not work if you were reading the same book for example through the Kindle app in your smartphone also, very annoying, and goes against the promise of ebooks. I hope they have a fix for this.
Since we're sharing gripes, I wish it would only push updates when there is a significant user-facing change (such as a fix for a major bug). It's not worth the bother to update the app manually merely in order to gain a new formula for the automatic news downloader. Feels like I spend more time installing the program than using it.
I wish ebook-viewer added highlight annotation capability, I can use PDF viewers to highlight texts but not ebook-viewer, so I had to convert all of epub etc to PDF under calibre.<p>for technical books annotation is essential for me, it's my notes so I do not need re-read the book from start to end each time.
What I'd really like is an iOS app that can plug directly into a Calibre library (via iCloud or Dropbox or whatever). It seems like everything that's existed in that space requires an explicit download step rather than being able to sync/cache stuff in the background.
I appreciate letting me know what the license is, but I'm not convinced I should be required to agree to the terms of it before the (Windows) installer progresses. I'm not redistributing anything as a consumer of the software.
This is one of those things that has made my life easier. Especially avoiding multiple copies of same pdf files. It helps me organize my e-Library much better than I have my home library. Thanks for the updated version
My (only!) gripe with Calibre is that it checks for updates, but doesn't have a feature to automatically update after that.<p>Thankfully, I just make do with running:<p><pre><code> brew cask reinstall calibre</code></pre>
I love Calibre. Yes, It's a little clunky, but it solves problems nobody else does.<p>I have a lot of eBooks, because I built a DIY Book Scanner and scanned all my books in a couple of years ago.
I love calibre but I find that a lot of the time I want to open a recently read book or one I know by name. Cold starting calibre, finding the book, opening the book, minimizing or closing calibre is a 4 step process that takes 15-30 seconds. Further it takes up about 250MB in memory to avoid that 4-8 second wait for it to start. By default without specifying a field it finds results in text describing the book which is almost never what I want as well.<p>Calibre has a cli interface calibredb. One could use that but it would be vastly more cumbersome than using the gui. It isn't at all designed to be used interactively unless you like typing switches like --for-machine and mixing in a lot of jq in preparation for opening a book.<p>What I really wanted to do was type a quick command with a search query just like I would type at the calibre search box have it pop open a list that I could narrow by typing hit enter and open a book. One step and 1 - 10 seconds to open a book instead of 15-30 without a process taking up ram all the time for no reason.<p><a href="https://github.com/michaelmrose/rdr" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/michaelmrose/rdr</a><p>Written in clojure and compiled to a portable executable with graal next to no requirements outside of rofi or dmenu and currently being tied to linux. Could presumably be be compiled for mac if I had one. It uses 19MB of ram for the and starts about instantly.<p>-q [query] => pass query with the same syntax as calibredb or calibregui accepts<p>-l => open the last book read<p>-r => filter the most recent 30 distinct books opened via rdr via rofi or dmenu<p>query string => If a string is passed in without -q -h -l -r specified it is treated as a query<p>-o [file] => open with default reader and record in recent reads if part of a calibre library<p>-S [options] => save options passed to disk
Options<p>-p [list] => list of formats in order of preference eg pdf,epub,mobi<p>-k [number] => number of recent reads to keep<p>--port PORT<p>--server URL<p>--user USER<p>--password PASSWORD"<p>The recommended usage is to pass the desired defaults with -S then omit them on future invocations. Example:<p>rdr -S -L /path/to/library -p pdf,epub,mobi -k 10 -p 8090 --user me --password hunter2<p>then<p>rdr -q query string here<p>I currently have a keybinding tied directly to rdr -l and rdr -r and use it all the time. 1 button to go back to the most recently read book is nice.<p>I'd also love any feedback anyone wanted to provide about the code.