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.
Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
11–20 of 163 posts
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#12Sometimes 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.
Agreed. Unfortunately rewriting the Calibre UI is probably more work than maintaining Python 2.
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#13Does this support custom metadata? For example I have a custom field I call "Folders" to hierarchically label/organize my eBooks. Would be nice to be able to browse through that or search under a specific label/folder.
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#14Love the project. Calibre is absolutely an amazing tool, but it never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era. I really like the focus on maintaining compatibility with the Calibre library. Personally the features I use the most are the folder watching and automatic book conversion. Now if there was support for multiple Calibre libraries...
Do you mean viewing multiple libraries at once? What would be the benefit of that over having one library with saved filter views?
I did once have segregated Calibre libraries. One for cookbooks, one for technical books in PDF and one for 'regular' books like novels and nonfiction in EPUB.
The only reason I had it like that was so I could sync just the cookbook files to another device via Syncthing, or only the technical books. It didn't last, it was a pita to manager (three different auto-add folders) and I reunified them after 9 months or so.
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#15Sometimes 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 making it pluggable.
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#16Does this support custom metadata? For example I have a custom field I call "Folders" to hierarchically label/organize my eBooks. Would be nice to be able to browse through that or search under a specific label/folder.
Not yet :) Custom Columns (if thats what you mean!) are on the todo list though — I have a couple in my library, one for tracking Read state and another for tracking word count.
Filtering is only on author & title for now. I’m looking to rewrite filtering once I have support in libcalibre for more data, so that you can easily filter by custom columns.
How do you search / organize your data in Calibre now? What would be ideal?
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#17Kudos on shipping your hobby project! Looks slick. And a calibre cli would definitely be appreciated -- I hate having to click five levels deep in a dozen menus :P If the "reader" and "editor" aspects are explicit non-goals (fair enough), then what actually does Citadel do for users? Is it mainly to be a portal to view/sort books and click on them? Is there a roadmap where you envision more features?
Good question! My main use for Calibre has been to collect my epubs (mostly) in one place, and occasionally sync them to my ereader. When I add books, I need to grab metadata for the book like title, ISBN, etc.
Citadel will (and does) support editing metadata for books — titles, authors, (in future) tags, custom columns. That’s certain. Syncing to devices will come too, in time, as will downloading metadata from online sources.
But what I don’t plan on adding is a way to edit book content or an embedded ereader. There are lots of great ereader apps & devices already, and I don’t think epub editing is commonly used (compared to keeping a collection).
While I don’t have a road map, I’m always open to feedback and ideas!
(Edit: other features like format conversion and stripping DRM are likely to happen too. Ideally with crates or plugins, to make it a bit easier to extend)
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#18Kudos on shipping your hobby project! Looks slick. And a calibre cli would definitely be appreciated -- I hate having to click five levels deep in a dozen menus :P If the "reader" and "editor" aspects are explicit non-goals (fair enough), then what actually does Citadel do for users? Is it mainly to be a portal to view/sort books and click on them? Is there a roadmap where you envision more features?
Hey I'm guessing by Calibre CLI you mean to do something like manage your book collection, but if all you want to do is convert books, Calibre does come with a CLI called `ebook-convert`. It works with many file formats like epub, pdf, azw3, mobi and more.
Example: `ebook-convert file.epub file.azw3`
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#19Sometimes 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…
What happens after 20K books? I am at about 13K books, and I haven't run into any issues yet. I make extensive use of virtual libraries in Calibre, and tags for organization.
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#20Sometimes 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…
What makes you think SQLite is the bottleneck?