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New in Calibre 6.0

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Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#101

Post by james-redwood »

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.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#102

Post by akho »

swozey wrote: post #82
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.

They may be "files" but I have thousands of them on my devices. And there is no way in the world I'm managing that through Kindles interface.

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.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#104

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

james-redwood wrote: post #101

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 a…

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.

[0]https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#105

Post by moffkalast »

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.

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.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#106

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

berkes wrote: post #93
wokwokwok wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#107

Post by swozey »

akho wrote: post #102
swozey wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may be "files" but I have thousands of them on my devices. And there is no way in the world I'm managing that through Kindles interface.

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.

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.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#108

Post by Chris2048 »

james-redwood wrote: post #101

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 a…

> His only 'crime' was being blunt with a bug report around eleven years ago

Here's something from 2018: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9#issuecomment-41...

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#109

Post by wokwokwok »

berkes wrote: post #93
wokwokwok wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

If you don't like it, just.. don't. use it.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#110

Post by synergy20 »

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…

awesome suggestion, just installed and it worked well, going to use it from a vps.

question is that, how safe this is? I need add https and a strong password, is there a docker for that?

(edit: found the link to set up reverse proxy with docker): https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/calibre-web

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