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.
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.
Seeing how many people prioritize fashion over function...in this topic, and life in general, depresses me. Calibre works very well and you have people saying they "can't" use it because it's not pretty enough. It's one guy, does SO much, and it's free. I don't care what it looks like. It's amazing.
I'm not exactly surprised because that was my original response to the UI as well, several years ago, but the surprising thing to me now is why exactly I considered it such a terrible UI back then.
One thing I can remember is that if you start a conversion or a download, often it silently starts in the background with apparently no indication anything is going on, unless you know to look for "Jobs" in the lower right corner. But I think I had a bunch more complaints which have apparently become invisible to me now.
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.