Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app

#161

Post by retrochameleon » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 11:36 PM UTC

phildenhoff wrote: post #3

As an aside, some folks may ask "why write a new app instead of contributing to Calibre Web or a similar project?" It's a good question! Because I wanted to :) Right now, this is a hobby project — I'm more interested in having fun building (rough!!) software than worried about extending existing projects. Plus, with how Citadel is designed to be backwards compatible with Calibre, you can continue to use Calibre Web.…

Calibre is a champion of ebook management functionalities, but I have never been satisfied with its experience, nor its developer. It was never designed to be a hosted library accessible over the web, and it's a very poor experience in my opinion.

If there was a solid competitor that was more open, more modern, and designed with the hosted library solution in mind, I would no doubt start using it.

Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app

#162

Post by retrochameleon » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 11:37 PM UTC

smivan wrote: post #15

asimpletune wrote: post #11

Sometimes I feel that if Calibre just looked better people would realize how amazing it is. It’s honestly not that bad (I actually love it) but I think people can’t get past the aesthetic.

The challenge that I face is Calibre absolutely craters after 20,000+ ebooks. I understand that most folks probably have 10-300 books, but in my case I have some large libraries I tried to use with Calibre, and it just absolutely DIES. The steadfast decision to exclusively use SQLite doesn't help. I opened a PR back in 2016 or so, but the maintainer was quite enthusiastically opposed to changing the DB layer or makin…

This is one of the frustrations I have heard about Calibre's dev: very resistant to certain ideas or making Calibre more extensible.

Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app

#163

Post by ornornor » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 6:15 AM UTC

para_parolu wrote: post #83

asimpletune wrote: post #11

Sometimes I feel that if Calibre just looked better people would realize how amazing it is. It’s honestly not that bad (I actually love it) but I think people can’t get past the aesthetic.

It is incredibly slow and unstable. I spent literally weeks adding large (100gb library) into it. I had to add chunk by chunk. It was crashing constantly and process was so slow that I moved it to a separate machine. Then I tried to use web interface to search and it was super slow. And I’m not even talking about non intuitive UI. For something that has supposed to be a library it’s nowhere near real library (alphabe…

100gb of ebooks? I’ve used kindles and kobos for a decade at this point and I don’t think I have 8gb of ebooks.

At a few mb per, 100gb is centuries of reading.

Unless it’s comic books?