This comment is from the perspective of a Calibre power-user, and someone who has been involved with the software for years now.
I must admit, I'm slightly shocked at some of the comments here. Kovid puts in an extraordinary amount of work (nearly 80 hours a week) into Calibre - of which most is for free, in the name of open source software. Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the mobileread forums will also know him as a remarkably intelligent, dedicated, and all-round fantastic guy. He's very patient and kind with beginners, responsive to feedback, and rarely loses his cool with anyone. His only 'crime' was being blunt with a bug report around eleven years ago, and I'm struggling to see why people are so myopic as to turn that into their entire perception of him. Add to the fact that he eventually fixed every bug in that thread as well as second-language difficulties that he likely experiences, and the vitriol that people have for him is undeserved.
The proof of the pudding is Calibre itself, which is a joy to use. It is hands down one of the most useful programs on my computer. It's rarely buggy, fast, logical to use, very feature-rich, and rather customisable. I'm perplexed as to whether some of the people in this thread and I are using the same software. It's very easy to set up, as all you do is either point to a pre-existing library of files or create a new one. Adding books is trivial, as is editing metadata, and the reader itself is splendid. That's really what most people need out of e-book software, but Calibre really does go above and beyond any e-book software on the market right now. The only close competitor is Foliate, which is not cross-platform like Calibre, and even then it simply lacks many useful features that I rely on with Calibre, despite having a much cleaner UI.
I'm not aware of what he said 11 years ago. I'm more familiar with the collective dog-pile he suffered in 2017 when he said he would personally maintain Python 2 after its EOL date to avoid having to update Calibre to Python 3.[0] The internet has never forgiven him for that moment of hubris, it seems. Calibre eventually migrated to Python 3 anyway with the help of other developers.
But yes, I frequent the MobileRead forums and by and large he's responsive and helpful.
I have no idea of who Kovid is and has done but Calibre is a great piece of software. It does exactly what I need: import files into a directory and occasionally let me edit them (text and metadata.) I sync with Synchthing. I'm really happy it got full text search over all the library. I'll use that too.
BTW, if we don't have to use software written by people we don't (or won't) like when we know everything they did or said, I bet we'd have to shutdown our phones and computers and never turn them on again.
I've used Calibre for a very long time now and when my kids finally got Kindles they started using it as well.
I couldn't care less what pointless debates others may have with Kovid. He is very helpful, very active in the forms, and constantly updates this software.
many opensource projects become abandonware, but Kovid continues to pour hours and hours into this.
Cross platform usage alone is impressive. it works the same on my Mac/Linux machines as it does on the kids Windows machines.
Maybe he has been "rude" at times, but who hasn't? let's not let a few instances of him losing his patience cast a shadow over the incredible work he has done for many people.
Came here to say that I 100% agree, but Foliate doesn't compete with Calibre.
Foliate is a much better reader IMO, but Foliate cannot do everything Calibre can. Calibre, on the other hand, can do everything Foliate does.
Calibre is much more than just an eBook Reader. Foliate is a very good (the best for computers, maybe? I don't know how it pales agains Apple Books) eBook reader.
In my usage at least, Calibre is an eBook library-manager, editor, and conversion tool... which has a so-so eBook reader attached that I mostly forget about. :D
It's pretty essential for getting things onto the devices that I actually use to read, though.
What has reddit got to do with the issue? He also made it clear that the right move was to rename, but that he's now refusing to do so out of spite - i.e. an escalation to the drama.
> is simply projection
oh, cool, now you are insulting me. So why am I childish?
He isn't refusing to respond to a bad-faith individual (no idea if all the people in the issue are from a reddit thread, or if that thread is even in bad faith) - he's refusing to ever change the name out of spite.
I'm sensitive to the tactic of insulting people for pointing out inconvenient facts, namely that this action was taken - which got my accused of "projection" i.e. I am projecting my own childishness, based on zero evidence. Saying I'm "extremely sensitive" is another way of distracting from the point.
The decision was not negligible as far as I believe, but if you'd like to have a constructive discussion of that, rather than personal putdown, please go ahead.
Stating that you are sorry, while continuing with the "easily offended" spiel doesn't project sincerity.
Let me be clear - I don't agree with your perspective, either on how offended you think I am or should be, (or how relevant it is to this thread outside purposeful trolling, with personal attacks) or how negligible the naming issue is. The onus is on you to substantiate these judgements.
A more level-headed version of what I was trying to communicate is that I agree that you're probably not as offended as I judged you to be by your replies in this thread. But if you're not as offended as I think you are, then why is this an issue at all - either regarding the replies you're getting in this thread or Kovid's communication that you linked earlier?
I just don't see why that mattered in the first place. It wasn't perfect communication, but it seemed like you were using this to make the point that Kovid's communication should indeed be at the forefront of the discussion of Calibre's development.
b/c I dislike unsubstantiated accusations of "projection", it feels like lazy point making of "no u".
wrt Kovid's communication - it wasn't imperfect communication on Kovid's part, his intent was clear I think. And I responded to the claim that Kovid's only "crime" was some other matter, but he was involved in this flame also.
Extraordinary amount of work does not guarantee extraordinary quality or results, not even ordinary quality.
> Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the mobileread forums will also know him as a remarkably intelligent, dedicated, and all-round fantastic guy.
Reads like a working para social addiction. Anyway, whatever qualities one has, doesn't matter. One can be nice, and still fail at important things. Those things actually happen all the time and somehow people are always surprised and defending.
> The proof of the pudding is Calibre itself, which is a joy to use.
Opinions are very divided on this part. And as someone who had several hard problems over the decade, including multiple data loses, I'm very far from calling it a joy. It's useful, and if you know your way around the flaws it will also not a harsh experience, but a joy it was never for me.
(Fun unrelated fact is that I'm writing a book about this exact question.)
So maybe it is most honest of me not to try and answer that question in this context, and instead say that this is an excellent question to ask of anyone using value implicitely in these sorts of discussions.
There is no widely accepted definition of value in conversation. Even the very concept of "value" is inherently subjective.
Anyone who tries to use such words in an argument is just appealing to their own feelings, pretending they have an "objective argument". For some reason, it feels manipulative to me.
Kovid Goyal, the developer of Calibre, is a very responsive, very gentle person. Whenever I needed help, I have gotten help from him. [1] - Calibre is an indispensable tool for me to manage my digital library with close to 800 books.
I support him regularly. Consinder doing it as well if you appreciate the app. Go to https://calibre-ebook.com/ , there’s a support link on the top right.
Yeah kitty is amazing. I've been meaning to donate as a thank you. It's made so many things possible. In fact, because of it's flexibility, today I wrote a vscode extension that can use some of kitty's remote control features so I can execute things in my terminal of choice straight from my editor of choice.
I just wrote it today and still need to package it. I was tired of alt+tab + up arrow + enter constantly to execute builds etc. in my terminal. It calls out to a kitty wrapper script I wrote[1] that (eg) queries kitty for its running windows so that when I launch from vscode it can find the right kitty window for the vscode workspace and execute there...
Point is, Kovid Goyal is awesome and the extensibility he wrote into kitty makes all that possible. I didn't know he was also the author of Calibre for a long time.
I think he’s really dedicated to making a specific thing and gets frustrated when users ask for “Swiss Army knife” features. I have empathy for that situation.
That said, being unkind to otherwise civil users is never OK.
There are so many good projects out there AND with good people running them. (Not saying kitty's dev is not a good person.) I like to use free software created by people who are pleasent to deal with, because more often than with closed source software, we'll end up having to communicate for one reason or other. :) My favorite terminal chosen in this fashion AND technical merit is wezterm. It really is fantastic all around.
I'm not talking about the security incident. Anyone can have bad days, I am not the one to hold the grudge.
What I've experienced is that Kovid is consistently hostile to anyone who disagrees with him in the slightest. There is no attempt to shine light on the argument or defuse the situation whatsoever - it always ends with comments like "what do you want from me? you get this project for free! if you don't like it nobody is forcing you to use it! get off my lawn!!!".
Of course, the guy has the right to talk to anyone any way he wants.
But I also have the right to publicly call him out on that.
That's great for those developers but you can't expect everyone to act the same way. The fact is that you have not right for ANY support - there is even a disclaimer for that in pretty much every open source license.
I'm not talking about rights, I'm talking about manners.
Everyone has the right to communicate any way they want,
but I also have the right to call them out on that.
If you have a public, open-source project on GitHub, and you regularly accept and respond to issues/pull-requests/suggestions, you are obviously presenting yourself to the world. It is basic courtesy to not be hostile in such communication.
It is very difficult to communicate with Kovid when you're not a user and you've not previously praised his genius. Any kind of criticism or suggestion that isn't wrapped up in the "but your project is awesome and you're awesome!!!" wrapping-paper is met with hostility, insults and banning.
It is a problem for anyone trying to communicate with him.
Criticism or suggestion seems fine. Insulting is not. The one example I saw were someone was effectively making your claim was someone insulting him and him responding without any hostility, insults, or banning.
You are attacking the character of someone but can't even be bothered to provide anything to back up your claims? Then why post this in the first place?
Because that's my experience and I'm sharing it with others.
Are you saying I shouldn't voice my opinions, unless they consist of only praise? Nobody asked the original commenter to provide proof of Kovid being "gentle". If you're going down the "only facts" road, then each praise should be followed by "sources" too.
Calibre does its job so well it's downright essential for anyone thinking about dealing with ebooks. Glad to hear that full text search is added in this version, using it with a bunch of reference books saved will be so useful. It might be worth splitting out the fiction books I have to clean up the results. Maybe it works with tag filtering, I'll have to check.
> Calibre does its job so well it's downright essential for anyone thinking about dealing with ebooks.
Its “job” is not well-defined. I read electronic books almost exclusively (for prose fiction; art and equations are a different bag) since 2008 or so, and never saw any point in it beyond format conversion.
It does format conversion very well. The command-line converter requires a running graphical session for some reason, though.
Most (all commercially available?$ebook readers are not as simple as that.
And a file manager doesn’t track which books of mine are synced and which are not. Calibre does.
A file manager does not make it easy for me to correct the ebook’s metadata so it appears properly on the ebook reader. Calibre does. Calibre will also automatically download metadata for you from a variety of sources (with many options for the level of automation, including individual review with diffs from the existing metadata).
Calibre also makes it trivial for me to create a web server so I can access my books from any device from anywhere.
Calibre will also track which books I’ve read and which ones I haven’t. Which a file manager won’t.
Calibre also makes it possible for me to read the books on my computer itself before I sync them to my device.
Calibre will also automatically convert my book to a different format depending on the device I’m syncing to, something a file manager won’t do either.
It's a webserver, file manager, sync client, transcoder/converter, RSS reader, metadata manager all in one.
With all possible regards and respect to the author, I find calibre a terrible mess. It does a lot of things, none of which very well. And the one thing that I want it to do, it doesn't. Not reliable or not at all. I want it to give me access to the ebooks I buy online.
This isn't calibres' fault, but the industries'. DRM, incompatible formats pushed by tech giants. But in the end, all I want is a way to see, reference and sync the books that are on my Kobo with my (Linux) desktop.
A python script, A proprietary Kobo app over wine, some bash scripts and a well kept directory achieves this. But calibre doesn't. Though it can read RSS feeds.
I am an open source developer. I am familiar with the criticism. It's fine. Because a lot of software really is crap. Open Source is not a trait that suddenly makes software better.
My point was this: calibre does a lot. Many things only tangentially related to "managing ebooks". Yet it doesn't do some obvious things that are clearly part of managing ebooks. Like, managing ebooks.
That is criticism towards the model, not the software. It criticizes the lack of polish and lack of focus that many FLOSS suffers from. "Do one thing and do that well" is what I prefer. As opposed to a kitchen sink of plugins, an ever wider spread of use-case half-covered With, again, emphasis on the I.
I actually think Calibre's kitchen-sink approach is great. By-and-large I don't really need the fifty things it does to be best-in-class. If it's good enough, then it's fewer UNIX-style utilities I need to download on top of my existing installation.
For example, for end-to-end ebook creation or editing, I would probably download Sigil. But for the majority of e-book edits that I do (generating or fixing a broken Table of Contents, correcting the odd typo here and there, looking at the CSS rules that are causing the book to display weirdly on my Kobo, etc), Calibre's e-book editor is fine.
> I am an open source developer. I am familiar with the criticism. It's fine.
Dude. If you're a woman and you make jokes about how women should be at home cleaning not being engineers, it's not "fine", it just makes you a dickhead. Even if you're a woman. The same goes here.
If you work an open source, that doesn't give you a free moral entitlement to tell other people their work is crap, should have more features, should have the one feature you personally want for whatever reason.
You don't like it?
Too bad. It's not for you then. Don't use it.
Be respectful of others; the contribution they make, the effort they go to.
It costs you literally nothing.
I think the issue here is that your critique is way out of proportion to reality; Calibre is... fine. It's not great; but it does the job perfectly well for lots of people. It does lots of things. It does most of them fine. It does some well, some badly. I could say the same thing about the gimp. You come off as just having an axe to grind here for no good reason; and negative comments like this do cause people to stop contributing.
> And the one thing that I want it to do, it doesn't. Not reliable or not at all.
> I want it to give me access to the ebooks I buy online.
There are perfectly good Calibre extensions that do this. Given the legalities, it is not at all surprising that those extensions are not written or maintained by the main Calibre developer, and not included with Calibre. But they are easy to find and install.
> It does a lot of things, none of which very well. And the one thing that I want it to do, it doesn't. Not reliable or not at all. (...) A python script, A proprietary Kobo app over wine, some bash scripts and a well kept directory achieves this. But calibre doesn't.
I prefer to have an all-in-one application that does all this for me. My ebook workflow is not particularly demanding, so I let Calibre manage everything and don't maintain my own scripts.
Such a definition of "job not well defined" is just "IDE, but for ebooks" when seen from a different angles. People swear by IDEs for all kinds of reasons, convienience and integration first and foremost. You may not need an IDE, but I'll take it over rolling my own tools any day.
I do need it. But what I prefer is something simpler that does one job and does it well.
That exists, proprietary. In floss it exists for CLI only.
I'm upset that it keeps accumulating features. I understand why. I understand others need those features. But what upsets me is that this "eats" a lot of energy, which now isn't spent on simpler, easier, cleaner or friendlier FLOSS alternatives. I spend that time. On tools for ebooks that I opensourced.
But alas, the most common response to my efforts is people telling me that I should instead spend that time and effort building additions for calibre rather than trying to gain traction on some alternatives. The same most common response people working on e.g. Krita face: wasted time, improve Gimp instead.
Just because you were civil in your expression of it doesn't mean that your opinion itself isn't in poor taste to communicate, especially for someone involved in open source. You may be indifferent to criticism which exists only as a means of self-expression, but when silence costs nothing it's difficult to see exactly how your thought couching your criticism of the e-book ecosystem as a distaste for this long running, free and fairly popular piece of software was going to advance the conversation.
There's a term in Portuguese for a crying baby that's held to a breast but who continues to cry, without even trying to suckle; it's what came to mind when I read your original comment. It's not used for flattery, I'm afraid...
The alternative reality where all of those functions are handled by independent pieces of software, or even worse by software not specialized in ebooks at all, is not necessarily better.
In fact I'd bet money it it would be less useful and less productive and much more forbidding to users.
You've got a bunch of people here saying "I love Calibre", that should be enough proof that it's doing a good job, however well you understand that job to be defined.
Calibre does a lot of course, but for your first point, Kobo exposes a folder when connected via USB, and you can drag plain epubs over which it will then load into its library with no additional software.
> Most (all commercially available?$ebook readers are not as simple as that.
Only if you make them. Have been pretty simple for me. I don’t do most of the things you mention, and do not see myself wanting to.
I do use Calibre for conversion (through the command-line ebook-convert tool, wrapped in a script that converts and mails to Kindle in one operation). I don’t use different devices, to “automatically” does not mean much.
> Only if you make them. Have been pretty simple for me. I don’t do most of the things you mention, and do not see myself wanting to.
That's not how it works. Each device and firmware has its own way of doing things. For example, I would have no idea how to build "ebook groups" on my reader, but I don't have to worry about that because Calibre knows how to do it for me. Creating those by hand would likely involve a third party tool or XML/other structured text format editing, which would be annoying.
> I don’t use different devices
That's your setup. Another person may have three readers, for whatever reason. How would you keep track of it then, and would it not be easier to just hand over things to Calibre for automatic synchronisation?
> > Only if you make them. Have been pretty simple for me. I don’t do most of the things you mention, and do not see myself wanting to.
> That's not how it works. Each device and firmware has its own way of doing things. For example, I would have no idea how to build "ebook groups" on my reader
That would be you making it complicated. What are you all doing with your Kindles that needs multiple levels of organization?
> That would be you making it complicated. What are you all doing with your Kindles that needs multiple levels of organization?
A Kindle Keyboard 2 is completely different than a Kindle Oasis 3. The file format they use is different (they've changed formats a few times in the last 13 years,) the software is old enough on the Keyboard 2 that it's fundamentally quite different, etc.
This doesn't even preclude other e-reader companies existing which further complicates the setup. What if your old Kindle dies and suddenly none of your scripts work anymore because the new Kindle is just subtly different in how it works? What if you suddenly hate the Kindle ecosystem and want to switch to Kobo?
>Keep track of what?
Having more than one e-reader? This is not an uncommon case, honestly.
Formats are a different point from “ebook groups”. To answer your question — I’ll modify the line that calls the conversion program (which is, at the moment, Calibre’s ebook-convert). As you can imagine, I’ve already had to do that a few times over the last 15 years. It took me less time than the “add to library” dances would have.
I still don’t understand “keeping track”. So you have several readers, there are books on them, you read the books. Calibre does not sync notes or reading position anyway (and certainly not wirelessly), as far as I know.
> Formats are a different point from “ebook groups”.
The point is that even in the same line of readers, there are subtle differences. Replace "formats" with "ebook groups" if it somehow makes it easier for you to understand that different readers have different ways to do things.
> I still don’t understand “keeping track”. So you have several readers, there are books on them, you read the books. Calibre does not sync notes or reading position anyway (and certainly not wirelessly), as far as I know.
And if you have thousands of books and multiple devices, keeping track of what's on each device and which format is best for the device gets messy. It's not a hard concept to grasp.
I opened that link and skimmed it. There is a whole thread of people there who can’t get their reading position synced using Calibre.
> And if you have thousands of books and multiple devices, keeping track of what's on each device and which format is best for the device gets messy.
I don’t see a reason to track that, and think you are inventing a use case where there isn’t any. People are obsessive, though, and will spend countless hours tracking things for no benefit when given a tool to do so.
Calibre comes from a period in the '00s where people did a lot of this sort of metadata tracking and cataloguing. There used to be a whole class of applications to track your physical library (with barcode scanning &c; I remember Delicious Library), physical CDs, … All are now dead. Music collection managers are barely alive.
There is very little point in maintaining a “collection” of digital stuff you did not create and do not plan to use. Your beach reading is not it.
There are very useful parts of Calibre — formats, device profiles, the plugin ecosystem. Sadly, it is not particularly modular in terms of workflows (which is the underlying cause of this whole discussion), yet has become a standard platform for all community efforts into deDRM &c.
While you can do that with a Kobo you can't drop the file and expect it to appear in some collections. To associate a book with a collection you have to either use Calibre or the vendor's app. I have epubs and PDFs that weren't bought through the Kobo/Rakuten store and they don't get filed in my collections. With Calibre (and a plugin) I can do that.
I do agree I could live without it but files tend to accumulate and putting books in collections help.
All of this would be much easier if the kobo was dumber and just created shelves/collections based on folders.
I have an old Kindle and it's always had trouble trying to just load files over a USB connection - books show up in the wrong section, no metadata, etc.
Calibre makes it simple and the books appear properly on the device. And it can fix metadata on books downloaded from the internet. That's the main reason I use it. Add in the fact that it's a nice management tool for seeing all my books at once and I'm very pleased with it.
There's a lot of nutty stuff under the hood like ensuring that covers are sized optimally for each device, which often have their own aspect ratios, DPIs and what not.
It also does a lot of database management ie; for Kobo, inserting things into the Kobo database, where schemas have varied over time etc etc.
You can of course just copy paste files as a baseline and it'll work.
I don’t understand. All Kindles I had — from Kindle 2 to Voyage — mounted as external drives when connected via USB, and copying mobi files just works (but their email delivery works fine, so I usually use that). From a brief Google search, Libra is the same (with epub).
I feel like I’m missing something every time Calibre comes up. People seem to love it, but I just found it confusing and unnecessary when I dealt with it.
When I connect the Kindle via USB to a MacBook Pro running macOS Monterey, I do not see a mounted drive with files in it, just the device itself. To email the files to Kindle, I first need to convert them anyway to mobi files.
For the Kobo Libre, I can indeed see a mounted volume, but copying a file into it does not consistently make that book available for reading.
Given I don't have these problems when I use Calibre, I'd definitely say it makes my life easier.
Then you need to provide more details. I have used many versions of macOS with Kindles including 12.4 and attaching a Kindle has always shown it as an external drive (called Kindle)
What do you mean by the device itself - how does a device show up on macOS?
It's iTunes for eBooks. If you're someone that has 19 different readers, wants to keep them synced to the same page, make the metadata perfect, rate books, write notes about them etc. it makes a lot of sense.
For me it's basically a way to use two plugins and occasionally fix a book cover. It's a bit bloated IMO.
With iTunes, you were forced to use it to manage an iPod, iPhone, and any media bought from Apple. With Calibre, you can use it or not use it to manage your ebooks as much as you like.
Also, as an avid reader (average five books a month), I also cannot see the need for calibre.
Contrary to music, I consume my ebooks on one device: my e-reader. My laptop, phone and tablet are terrible for reading.
Why would I need my ebooks on my phone or tablet.
The only thing I do want, is to process my annotations on my computer. Which calibre cannot do (but a python and bash hack does provide me).
For reference materials, textbooks, comics, and other image heavy and laid out precisely books, I almost exclusively prefer PDFs and only read them on my tablet.
If it's a book with almost zero images, like most fiction, how they're laid out doesn't matter, and I enjoy the ability to read anywhere on any device. I've never found the need for an e reader and regularly switch between my tablet or phone. Reading comics on the phone isn't for me, but there are a lot of people that don't mind it.
the extensive library of plugins allows you to do things not possible with just command line tools or the file manager. But of course the basics are just awareness of metadata, metadata editing, and grouping different file formats of the same book together in one entry. Using an app that is aware of the metadata conventions of the specific media files you are managing is indispensable to me.
I only read 60-80 books a year, maybe 40-60 on a Kindle. I guess I need to take up some sport to live long enough to reach your numbers (and to stop deleting things).
Even including an occasional article, 'thousands' is very impressive.
My worst habits are largely (TT)RPG manuals. I've got a huge collection from DTRPG especially. Sometimes one RPG purchase will have ten/twenty PDF files inside it (player's guides, GM guides, adventures/modules, etc). (Not to mention the combinatorial explosion if you ever talk yourself into a big sales bundle or two.) There's a bunch of weird reasons to keep them around "read" or not, and make them searchable if I need to look something up or am trying to remember a detail. Syncing some of them to my kindles or to other tablet devices from time to time can be handy for portable retrieval (or on the go skimming). I eventually realized my Books folders were huge and unmanageable even with a detailed folder structure and have been happy with moving that all to Calibre with better tags and metadata management.
I'm a horrible hoarder but I've also had a kindle and have been using Calibre since it started. You can store a ridiculous amount (thousands+) of books on a Kindle but as soon as you do that the interface slows to a crawl, it's really unpleasant to use at that point. Just page turning in your library takes seconds and I think it only lists 10-20 books a page.. oof.
I bounce between books a LOT. I don't read daily or anything and no speed reading skills but I'm usually reading 5-10 at a time and I fall asleep to audiobooks.
I’ve also spent an hour looking at it at one point. I’m sure it all makes sense in the overall Calibre context (formats can be plugins, so the perimeter includes stuff like customization code), but conversion is not easily extractable.
The Calibre conversion CLI tool is easy to run though. A bit unfortunate I can’t do it in an SSH session from my phone.
Honestly it's so good I don't even have a reason to update it to the latest version. I'm probably several years of releases behind and it already does everything I need it to do without any hassle.
I’ve long kept separate libraries (including one for academic papers and one for appliance manuals). This search functionality is going to come in quite handy.
Full text search sounds great. I'm just wondering what kind of overhead it will add to a big library? I think I have about 3000+ books in mine.
Calibre is one of those excellent pieces of software that shows free and open source can sometimes be better than commercial software. My only gripe with it is that it is updated so often [sometimes it seems almost weekly] and every update involves visiting the site and downloading the whole app again. In-place auto-updates would be nice.
I use Calibre along with Calibre-Web [0] to make my library available online, so I can always grab one of my books to read on my phone, whenever I'm stuck somewhere, thumb-twiddling. I have an rsync... command aliased in my terminal. So every time I add new books to Calibre on desktop, I just type that in a terminal and it's immediately synced to my online library.
PS: Top marks also to Calibre Dev for actually spelling the name of the app properly. It gladdens my heart no end to see the occasional piece of proper English flotsam still afloat on the massive tide of online Americanisms.
UPDATE: Dammit! --just downloaded and Calibre 6 is OSX 10,15+ only. Another piece of software leaves me languishing, as I stick with Mojave. On the plus side, I'll no longer have to worry about the huge updates I was complaining about above!
I use it to load books onto a kindle and to process ebooks. I like adding metadata, making basic style tweaks or edits (like fixing OCR typoes or em/en/- mishaps), and tagging and cataloging. There's a setting to load all files plopped in a directory into the calibre system, which is both accessible through the GUI and as an author-grouped directory structure with standardized filetypes, which I find quite helpful. Also useful is the DeDRM plugin to make books bought from Amazon or Google Books accessible with any format (plus all the other benefits of DRM free media, like customizability and portability).
One aspect of working with digital books I haven't solved yet is syncing bookmarks and highlights across devices, or making them easily searchable. I'm sure there's a plugin or tool which makes it easy, yet I just haven't found it yet.
I pretty much have to use it for some things, but as sibling commenters have pointed out, there are some serious flaws with both it and its maintainer. I've mostly moved to using [Calibre Web](https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web) which is a software intended as a companion, but I use it almost exclusively.
It has a web interface, and you can deploy it using a container. The killer feature for me that Calibre itself lacks is that has over the internet syncing with the native Kobo firmware. You essentially trick the Kobo into thinking it's calling home to get ebooks from their servers, but you're accessing your own instance of Calibre-web.
This makes my workflow of adding a new ebook as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.
> I pretty much have to use it for some things, but as sibling commenters have pointed out, there are some serious flaws with both it and its maintainer
Your sibling comments have not mentioned or alluded to any such flaws. Do you have criticism to share?
Other commenters have pointed out that the lack of a self replacing auto-updater in a modern desktop app is striking to put it mildly. It has a pretty bad UI, that seems to be getting worse especially with regard to the shades of grey. If you bring up these flaws the maintainer can react quite poorly, even when the subject is broached politely and in good faith.
And to add my complaints to those of other commenters, hosting the library on another computer or network share is not supported, and you can't use an external DB provider e.g. MySQL.
Calibre is cross-platform, and windows is about 40 years behind when it comes to software distribution best practices. Windows users don't realize that their OS is the problem, and expect all software developers to work around their OS's retarded idiosyncrasies.
Windows added a package manager with active auto-updates in Windows 8 called the Windows/Microsoft Store. It has supported non-sandboxed installers since a year into Windows 10 (the "Anniversary Update"). Late in Windows 10/11 they added a useful CLI tool for it ("winget") and a bit more than just the Store. Around the same time the Store also added support for "update feeds" other than ones that the Store directly manages.
(If anyone recalls old .NET "One Click" updaters, where you can just dump new versions into the right folder structure at a URL and the updater does the work of checking for new versions, the Store can now check similar folder structures if you'd prefer that way to manage updates instead of uploading updates directly to the Store.)
I think its more Developers don't realize their distrust of the OS is the problem today. Users are mostly happy with the Store, when they can find things on it. It is Developers that still don't like putting things on it, or have weird distrust issues with the Store, which is the issue now.
I'm aware of it, and it is a step in the right direction I suppose. But what's the point of a package manager, if you need another one (windows updates) to install/update other software, and yet another method (each app auto-updating itself) just to update all of the software on your system?
The whole point of a package manager is having one place to do all the updates/installations.
But this multi-billion $ company can't use it's clout and complete control over their OS to enforce one good way of installing/updating software.
A lot of what used to be in Windows Update is now in the Store updater.
Many of the developer complaints about the Store have been the times Microsoft has even hinted at trying to use their clout to move every install/update to the Store. You can find all sorts of yelling and arguments here on HN and elsewhere about Microsoft's various S Edition and S Mode projects over the years all the way back to Windows 8.
Talk about moving to one package manager to rule them all on Windows pushed Valve to return to work on Steam OS and moving to Linux for their freedoms. Talk about moving to one package manager sparked Epic creating the Epic Game Store to bulwark their sales freedoms.
Developers seem to love the freedom to build a million terrible auto-updaters no matter what their users actually want and go crazy every time Microsoft even mentions the idea of a user-friendly single package manager edition/version/mode of Windows.
To clarify, I would be happy if it either used the Windows Store updater (essentially a windows package manager) or updated itself via a self downloading msi package or similar. Instead it has neither.
>as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.
Wow, sounds really nice, you got my attention! My stack to achieve the same result is a bit more complicated: I installed KOreader on my device, and it can read calibre's OPDS catalog feed. KOreader has some other niceties that I enjoy, mostly wallabag support.
How do you trick the native kodo firmware? Does it work outside your home network?
Yes it does, I use a reverse proxy with ssl and have CW on its own subdomain.
There's a plain text config file on the Kobo's memory and one of the config options is the store URL. CW generates you a new one tied to your local CW account in your instance and you replace the standard URL. You can do multi user stuff that way. You can also define a "shelf" and only books on that shelf will sync if you wish, handy if you have a large collection or a small memory Kobo.
Looks cool, but the wiki calls out that it can't sync reading progress between devices. Which, I understand--how Kobo does it is probably not well-documented. But without that, the solution doesn't seem any better than the Dropbox support with certain Kobo models. It would only be of interest to me if I could sync e.g. my Sage before putting it down and pick up my Clara somewhere else and be able to find my place in the books I'm currently reading.
Not even the Dropbox integration does this yet with sideloaded books, though. I think KOReader might be the only one that has pulled it off so far.
> Fortunately, plugin developers were given over half a year to port their plugins, so most have already been ported.
I do admire this optimism and good faith. But no... many will not have ported until users start complaining that X plugin no longer works. Expect a few more months.
The full text search feature is surprisingly useful. Just searched my ~800 books for keywords like "tree traversal" or "assoc" to find books that I wouldn't have suspected to deal with these topics (`assoc` being a Lisp keyword searching for entries in association lists [1]).
And I already had ways to search within contents of my books via "HoudahSpot" (an excelent MacOS tool that uses Spotlight search to sift through all my files and present the results in a tabular view), or via command line using `mdfind` [2]
I wonder how well it scales, I have a rather large collection and would love to use this. As long as the index is much smaller than the source files, and it doesn't search by re-reading the files from disk I'll give it a go.
Calibre is awesome to use on desktop. But as someone who wants to sync his Calibre library with other devices (iphone + ipad), it gets really frustrating.
Do you want to sync the whole library with the iphone or just search and download from the iphone? Calibre can be used to just transfer a few books by installing the calibre app on the phone and select books on the computer to transfer. There are also solutions for searching and downloading books from the phone but I haven't tried them much, found it much easier to use the computer to do that.
I can't fit my library on the phone so haven't even thought of syncing the whole thing.
I want to sync the whole thing. Apple Books ineptly forces you to manually copy all of the books themselves to each device, but then syncs collections that you've set up to organize them.
Have you tried Resilio Sync?[0] I'm using it on Android but seems to exist for iOS [1] too. I'm not syncing the library though, might want to make sure you only run the sync when Calibre isn't running to prevent data loss.
It does, but there is an ongoing bug [0] - which I suffer myself - that is always removing the local version of the book. I grew tired of always having to redownload books after a few days.
I wish that were true; but I just checked the computer I'm typing this on, and it's missing books from my other one (which is logged in with the same iCloud account).
Enable the Calibre web server, then use KyBook to connect to it and download the books you want while on the same network as the Calibre server. You can set up a public URL if you want to access them remotely
I use dropbox for syncing. I point my calibre library to the dropbox folder, and in my ipad I open the dropbox app and "share" the book I want to read to the Books app.
The calibre manual warns against using dropbox on the main library folder, users have lost their complete libraray doing that. Might want to at least pause dropbox while running calibre.
I have using calibre with dropbox for 10+ years now. The warning was given out mostly for the internet speeds of the time where the time for your edits to be synced took very long. I had a problem only once in 10 years even then because of dropbox revert file ability was easily able to revert.
The only caveat is I do not use calibre server so I usually start calibre do what I want and exit. If you use the server and keep calibre on all the time then Dropbox might not work as well for you though just restarting calibre after any library edits should be enough.
Awesome is disbutable. The amount of awesome parts is equal to the amount of aweful parts. Calibre is really a prime example of product which shines despite the manifold deep flaws. And this makes it really problematic, as it seems to dominate it's space so strong, that no many even care to work on an alternatives. Very problematic for the health of the ebook-space.
It is easy to criticize, but it takes a toll to fix books in ebook processing.
I had to do some minor ePub work and I was like „WHAT, that’s the standard? This can’t be right“ but yeah the formats are trash and complicated.
To be dedicated over a decade to fix and develop software is hard.
It's incredibly cumbersome to set up for even the most basic, common tasks that everyone wants to do. He's forced to release constant updates because he refuses to separate the news processing code from the main application code (the processing "recipes" should be separately distributed) and worse, there's no auto-updater, so keeping the application up to date is a pain in the ass. The UI is outdated, hostile to users in general, and not low/impaired-vision friendly (six icons in the standard main toolbar all look virtually identical save for very minor differences, and Goval loves different shades of grey, reducing contrast.)
Last but not least: it's almost exclusively developed by one person (a problem by itself for such a large and widely used project) who is infamous for being at best abrasive and at worst an asshole - and not a particularly good programmer. The commit history is an absolute mess to try and navigate because he seems to have "save" and "commit" confused.
Edit: the very link itself is a perfect example of how Goyal seems to have zero awareness or care for others. Why do I have to click to expand text items in release notes? And he says that some plugins are no longer compatible because of the switch to Qt6. Which ones?
Being an asshole doesn't have to be about what you're doing, it can be about how you're doing it. In fact, that's normally how I see it used -- referring to an abrasive person who's difficult to interact with.
(I'm not commenting on the specifics of Goyal at all; I don't know about their situation.)
Whenever I see Calibre mentioned, I always think that I'd like to take the time and organize my hundreds of eBooks with all the metadata but can never seem to justify the effort since I will be reading on a different device that will lose that information.
I have an Android phone and an iPad. The only cross platform solution I've found for syncing reading position between those ecosystems is Google Play Books, but they don't really like large PDF uploads and epubs sometimes fail. It feels kind of gross uploading my own books to Google and having them track that information and would like to remove them from my reading habits. Calibre-Web has been mentioned in this thread and seemed like a good solution, but apparently doesn't support saving reading position.
Is there any solution that lets me read the same book on my phone and my tablet and keep them in sync?
I really love Calibre and I've been using it for more than a decade. But one thing I'd really hope to see that hasn't happened yet is support for alternative database backends. Unfortunately if you have enough ebooks, it becomes impossible for the Calibre software to scale to handling them and a big piece of this is internal limits placed on the size of its database file. I have such a large quantity of ebooks on my media server (terabytes of ebooks) and have never been able to successfully add all of them to Calibre to be managed as a single library.
I'm glad to see that development continues, this has been an utterly essential tool as I've switched between different ebook readers over the years.
I have used Calibre for years. It's utilitarian and I can usually get it to do what I need. The weird things I need--editing the metadata of ebooks, converting between formats (including to Amazon's weird KFX using a plugin that piggybacks on Amazon's official kindle tools).
Yeah, it's not some pretty mainstream app. But managing media files of any kind is a power user / nerd activity. Frankly it's a relief to to have to help people out with their completely fucked iTunes anymore. Personally I use Calibre for ebooks, and Swinsian (and tools like MP3Tagger). Ideally I'd have some sort of app that was like classic file-management-only iTunes but instead of iPod syncing, it would be a Plex or similar server for music and video.
Full-text search is huge!! I've been using ripgrep-all, and running up against issues with the maximum cache size. Can't wait to try this out, hope it supports virtual libraries, hope it works with PDFs.
Calibre is great but if you specifically want full text search of ebooks and a multitude of document types then check out Recoll: http://www.recoll.org/
Given that 10.14 Mojave and prior are end of life and no longer supported by Apple, it's not that unusual. Similarly, Calibre 6.0 only supports 64-bit Windows 10/11.
Odd to see a "We value your privacy" popup on the website for an open source project. Both that they do feel the need to annoy their users at all when they could just not collect any data and that they resort to the insincere business speak wording. And of course none of the listed "legitimate interests" are actually legitimate.
I have close to 18k ebooks in a library, and every other program I've tried to use in the past falls over dead when facing that.
Calibre doesn't fall over. Instead, it happily and quickly sorts and searches and downloads metadata, and syncs to my Kindle (converting formats if required in the process).
It's the most un-Mac-like program I use on my Mac, certainly, and some days I might even describe it as ugly or unfocused, but there are literally no alternatives that work nearly as well, and there's something to be said for that. And "unfocused" just means it has a lot of features I don't need, but other people may rely on those features and not need the features I use.
I don't like it but it's the best we have. If there would be more lightweight, prettier alternative I'd use that but for now there really isn't an alternative and I'm grateful for the author to keep working on it.
for the same reason I like Emacs. It's just about the only ebook tool that literally does everything. From being a good reader in itself, to conversion, to mailing books to my kindle etc.
I've been using it for years and I begrudge/resent it every time I have to use it; I only use it as little as possible. I'm baffled by all the people who heap praise on it.
afaik it's the only ebook manager + automatic metadata search + conversion tool between multiple formats that exists. Unfortunately for me, the author refuse to implement a functionality to reuse an existing book repository architecture
I mean, you could just install it from your package manager like a normal person. Those instructions are for when your are on some some obscure distro that doesn't package it, but you still want some way of getting it on your system.
Edit: I know on the download page it says "Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below."
But that is bad advice. If you want a recent package, then use a distro that frequently updates it's packages. Most people using distros with ancient packages, (Debian, Slackware) _want_ it that way!
I love the idea of Calibre, but I just have no idea how to use it. Whenever I try, I get stuck in some kind of confused loop where I've added things to it, but all attempts to access them just loop back to Calibre. In other words, I can't get it to let me actually read anything.
That must be quite frustrating. FWIW, I have had the opposite experience - Calibre's always just worked. My various ereaders have been detected automatically, and plugins generally have worked without hassle. For me it's a been a great, reliable piece of software.
What are you trying? Do you want to read things with Calibre's built in reader, another desktop reader, sync them to a device (i.e. use the desktop GUI to copy files to a device), download them to a device via the content server or what?
I don't care how I read my stuff, I just want to read it. Calibre says it supports lots of formats, but somehow I can't find or figure out the magic inputs or config options to have it display something to me so I can read it.
OK, first make sure the books are really there. Right click on a book entry, and click "open containing folder". Make sure the book file is there and isn't corrupted.
If it's OK, you should be able to read any non-DRM'd file of most formats by right click > View > "View with calibre e-book viewer".
You can also try any other ebook reader by clicking the "Configure Calibre" icon to open the Preferences dialog. Under "Behavior" find "Use internal viewer for" and uncheck the file format. Then when you right-click > View > View, Calibre will use your OS default viewer for that file format.
If you have DRM'd files (such as from Amazon), you will need a plugin to remove the DRM. The best way to find these is to look on https://www.mobileread.com which is a good place for Calibre discussion in general. I used to know how to do the Amazon ones but it's been a while, there might be a new way by now.
I must admit, I'm slightly shocked at some of the comments here. Kovid puts in an extraordinary amount of work (nearly 80 hours a week) into Calibre - of which most is for free, in the name of open source software. Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the mobileread forums will also know him as a remarkably intelligent, dedicated, and all-round fantastic guy. He's very patient and kind with beginners, responsive to feedback, and rarely loses his cool with anyone. His only 'crime' was being blunt with a bug report around eleven years ago, and I'm struggling to see why people are so myopic as to turn that into their entire perception of him. Add to the fact that he eventually fixed every bug in that thread as well as second-language difficulties that he likely experiences, and the vitriol that people have for him is undeserved.
The proof of the pudding is Calibre itself, which is a joy to use. It is hands down one of the most useful programs on my computer. It's rarely buggy, fast, logical to use, very feature-rich, and rather customisable. I'm perplexed as to whether some of the people in this thread and I are using the same software. It's very easy to set up, as all you do is either point to a pre-existing library of files or create a new one. Adding books is trivial, as is editing metadata, and the reader itself is splendid. That's really what most people need out of e-book software, but Calibre really does go above and beyond any e-book software on the market right now. The only close competitor is Foliate, which is not cross-platform like Calibre, and even then it simply lacks many useful features that I rely on with Calibre, despite having a much cleaner UI.