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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

#51

Post by ninjin »

opengears wrote: post #23
timenova wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Indeed it does. I know that I am not entitled to dictate Calibre's direction, but it would be nice if these tools were cleanly broken out with minimal dependencies. If I recall correctly, the Calibre developers are not interested in this and have stated it explicitly and the only real alternative I have heard of is ebook-converter [1] which simply lifted the relevant portions of code out of Calibre.

[1]: https://github.com/gryf/ebook-converter

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

#52

Post by spython »

generic92034 wrote: post #41
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?

Just to offer a different opinion: I never had any issues with the Calibre UI and usually get stuff done quickly and efficiently in it. Honest question: Are there any examples of native smartphone apps which are offering such a functional wealth as Calibre does in a much better/easier way?

Years ago I was very happy with the GoodReader app, haven't used it recently though.

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

#54

Post by dns_snek »

Onavo wrote: post #30
smivan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It wouldn't be a (sub-)thread about Calibre without someone pointing out the last bit. Made me chuckle.

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

#56

Post by 9dev »

Interesting! For a while now, I’ve started working on a similar project with the same general idea, although I settled for SvelteKit and browsers instead of native apps:

https://github.com/project-kiosk/kiosk

I just can’t keep motivation up long enough to finish it…

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

#57

Post by Hendrikto »

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…

> the maintainer was quite enthusiastically opposed to changing the DB layer or making it pluggable

Sounds very reasonable. I am pretty sure that SQLite isn‘t the problem. It is actually faster than traditional client server DBs in many cases.

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

#58

Post by j3d »

This looks really cool and I plan on checking it out. Ironically, I recently built a desktop app using the same stack (Rust + Tauri + Svelte) for managing audiobooks. Shameless plug in case anyone is interested: https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker#audiobook-locker

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

#59

Post by zimpenfish »

phildenhoff wrote: post #17
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?

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 onli…

One feature that would be great is being able to sync/upload the metadata to something like a Bookwyrm[1] instance (there's apparently a `/create-book` endpoint for this) - trying to find and retype all the information from, e.g., Amazon is a pain.

[1] https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm

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

#60

Post by oakhaven »

Yesterday I realized that I can just copy an epub to a directory on my Kobo reader to the `root/` of the mountpoint in /media/oakhaven/koboreader (on Ubunutu 22.04). It will show up in the list of books on the device.

For some reason I thought that uploading books to the Kobo reader was somehow complicated, and I only used Caliber to get books from laptop to Kobo.

I know Calibre has lots of other functions, but I didn't like the interface and I'm happy I don't have to use it, or any other application like that, anymore.

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