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New in Calibre 6.0

calibre-ebook.com

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Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#71

Post by slightwinder »

_the_special_ wrote: post #8

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.

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.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#72

Post by johnchristopher »

johnchristopher wrote: post #41
akho wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s there to manage? They are files. Read a book, copy a new book over, delete old book. A file manager does all that, and is simpler and easier.

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…

Curious about the downvotes here.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#73

Post by dizhn »

em500 wrote: post #39
submeta wrote: post #27

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. [1] This is the forum dedicated…

OT, but he also happens to be the developer of kitty, my favorite terminal emulator on Linux: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty

Their github issue handling did not give me the same impression that parent has of him.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#74

Post by submeta »

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]

[1] https://jtra.cz/stuff/lisp/sclr/assoc.html

[2] For example searching all PDF files for a certain keyword:

     mdfind "kMDItemKind='*PDF*' && kMDItemTextContent='*tree-traversal*'" | grep -Ev "Mail|Library" | sort | less

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#75

Post by wokwokwok »

berkes wrote: post #52
addicted wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lev…

So "it's job is not well defined". 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 i…

> I want it to give me access to the ebooks I buy online.

> This isn't calibres' fault

The software doesn’t do everything.

…but you really only want it do something else, that’s not possible.

So it’s bad.

This is a very difficult position to defend:

There is software, free, maintained as a labour of love, that others like. …but it doesn’t do the one thing you want.

So it’s categorically bad and a mess.

That’s the sort of entitlement that makes open source developers quit. :(

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#77

Post by idonotknowwhy »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #23
_the_special_ wrote: post #8

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.

"Awesome" is a serious stretch. 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…

He's hardly an asshole if he's giving us a useful, free, open-source piece of software all by himself. If you don't like it, write your own.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#78

Post by Bayart »

frameset wrote: post #58

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 it…

Thanks for the heads up on this project. I use Calibre but I find it highly idiosyncratic. This fits my needs better.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#79

Post by mattkevan »

NonNefarious wrote: post #30
Moru wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

No it doesn’t. If you use Books with iCloud any book you add on any device will be automatically synced with the others. Works really well.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#80

Post by mattkevan »

alx__ wrote: post #10
_the_special_ wrote: post #8

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.

I've been using KyBook 3 http://kybook-reader.com 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 do something similar by running Calibre Web on a raspberry pi and then using KyBooks on my devices. It works really well.
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