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New in Calibre 6.0

calibre-ebook.com

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Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#91

Post by tristor »

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.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#92

Post by doliveira »

akho wrote: post #24
matthberg wrote: post #4

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…

Yeah, I wanted to separate the conversion code into another package, but it's all so tangled

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#93

Post by berkes »

wokwokwok wrote: post #75
berkes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

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.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#94

Post by berkes »

Torifyme12 wrote: post #67
berkes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You go write your scripts, maintain them, etc since you feel that's a superior option We'll keep using Calibre

Why the snarky tone? I expect better from a debate on HN.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#95

Post by hoppyhoppy2 »

johnchristopher wrote: post #72
johnchristopher wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#96

Post by coldtea »

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…

>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.

Yeah, and no free pony coming with each download either...

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#97

Post by leokennis »

slightwinder wrote: post #71
_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.

Let's say it differently. It is the best ebook manager by far, because for 90% of features it's basically the only one...

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#98

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

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…

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.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#99

Post by NoGravitas »

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…

> 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.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#100

Post by jnovek »

dizhn wrote: post #73
em500 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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