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

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

#21

Post by pmontra »

pathartl wrote: post #9

Love 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...

> [Calibre] never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era

Could you explain that in more detail? It seems to me that Calibre is totally self hosted.

I give an example. I use Calibre to import ebooks as epub (if they are not already epub, which they usually are,) maybe change their metadata and add a cover if they don't have one. The books go to Calibre's directory and then I sync to my phone using syncthing, like everything else I exchange between my laptop and my phone. I know that Calibre has a way to send books to devices but I think that it requires either a hardware reader or some interoperable app. I prefer working only with the file system. It always works no matter what I have on my phone.

All of that seems self hosted to me, or do you mean having a server somewhere at home or on the internet with the ebook collection?

I also use the editor to fix typos or to create ebooks from text files.

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

#22

Post by bomewish »

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…

SQLite couldn’t be the problem. Scales well to millions and millions of rows. Clearly something else going on.

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

#23

Post by opengears »

timenova wrote: post #18
ssivark wrote: post #8

Kudos 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`

Calibre comes with a lot of CLI - see https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/cli-index.html

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

#25

Post by mvelbaum »

phildenhoff wrote: post #16
mvelbaum wrote: post #13

Does 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…

> 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.

Yeah, I have a bunch of them, one is "Read Status" (read, reading, to-read), another is "Recommended By" to track books recommended by various people, and the last one is "Folders" which I use to arrange books in a folder-like hierarachy.

For example, you could have a "Finance" folder, and then "Finance.Investing", "Finance.Personal Finance", "Finance.Trading" subfolders.

The calibre content server does support searching and viewing these columns, and in the desktop app you see the tree on the left pane which you can quickly browse.

To search a specific "folder" you'd use something like: #folder:"=Finance.Personal Finance" title:"happy money"

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

#28

Post by freddie_mercury »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #12
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.

Agreed. Unfortunately rewriting the Calibre UI is probably more work than maintaining Python 2.

What does Python 2 have to do with anything?

Calibre hasn't used Python 2 in years.

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

#29

Post by Modified3019 »

spython wrote: post #26

Looks great! Just last week I tried to use Calibre again and fell into the black hole that is its UI.. Thought of donating some UI/UX work but felt like that would be a multi-year project. Perhaps I could support you with UI/UX instead?

My understanding of the calibre project from watching it over the years, is that improvements are typically not welcome. Kovid Goyal already has what he wants, and if you any everyone one else want something else, you’ll need to fork (and then maintain)

He’s done amazing work, but he’s one of those very opinionated people that can quickly and arbitrarily become weirdly hostile to things, even when others offer to do the work.

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

#30

Post by Onavo »

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 strange, Kovid Goyal, for all his apathy towards UI, is an excellent performance engineer. Check out his production terminal emulator kitty. He's more than capable of building extremely scalable systems. I would be surprised that this is a bottleneck caused by Calibre's core code.

He is however an asshole on the level of Linus when it comes to bug reports and community support.

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