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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

#71

Post by Snow_Falls »

reddalo wrote: post #31
inhumantsar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "why write a new app" I'd imagine spearheading a ground up rewrite of their UI would be a lot more work too. thanks for taking this on! calibre is a pita for me to use, and I know what I'm doing. makes it impossible to recommend to anyone, whether they're my grandparents or asavvy tech person.

Trust me, I'm tech savvy but I tried Calibre once and I couldn't figure it out, so I just gave up.

What part couldn't you figure out? Where you editing ebooks or just managing a library? Not a contributor here, just curious.

Edit: I've read a few more comments and some a free with you, while others think it works fine. I'm wondering if there's something about the UI that clicks with some but not others.

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

#72

Post by flkiwi »

Snow_Falls wrote: post #71
reddalo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust me, I'm tech savvy but I tried Calibre once and I couldn't figure it out, so I just gave up.

What part couldn't you figure out? Where you editing ebooks or just managing a library? Not a contributor here, just curious. Edit: I've read a few more comments and some a free with you, while others think it works fine. I'm wondering if there's something about the UI that clicks with some but not others.

Without taking away from the overall project and work that’s gone into it, the UI reminds me unpleasantly of the darkest days of Lotus Notes: things aren’t quite where they should be and they don’t look entirely baked when I find them.

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

#73

Post by jwells89 »

Uvix wrote: post #67
jwells89 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually one of the reasons why I bought a Kobo instead of a Kindle or whatever else was available a few years ago. When you plug them in they mount like any other USB mass storage and you copy your stuff to them… no need for special formats or anything either, standards like ePub work great. It kinda made me wonder how Kindles remain so popular. First mover’s advantage? I dunno, but an eReader that can’t rea…

Most readers only buy books from their device’s store, so they don’t need to worry about sideloading. And then once they’ve done so, they are hesitant to switch because it’s hard or impossible to extract yourself from Amazon or B&N or Apple’s ecosystem without losing content. Ideally everybody would only buy DRM-free ePubs and audiobooks but realistically people don’t care. And I don’t see a repeat of Apple forcing D…

At least the Books app on Apple iOS/macOS will manage and read plain old epubs and PDFs without issue, even if you’ve already bought DRM’d books from Apple’s store.

It’s really only big name e-ink readers other than Kobo that have this issue.

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

#74

Post by flkiwi »

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.

That kitty and Calibre come from the same brain is a marvel of the open source world.

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

#76

Post by f137 »

jwells89 wrote: post #62
oakhaven wrote: post #60

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 di…

This is actually one of the reasons why I bought a Kobo instead of a Kindle or whatever else was available a few years ago. When you plug them in they mount like any other USB mass storage and you copy your stuff to them… no need for special formats or anything either, standards like ePub work great. It kinda made me wonder how Kindles remain so popular. First mover’s advantage? I dunno, but an eReader that can’t rea…

All Kindles I had (the latest is paperwhite from 2020 or so) mounted on USB as mass storage and supported pdf. They also supported epub since 2014 at least.

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

#77

Post by anchitrao »

oakhaven wrote: post #60

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 di…

Even easier, I’ve been using send.djazz.se and sending my books through that portal.

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

#78

Post by vinnymac »

j3d wrote: post #58

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

This is cool, I have toyed with Tauri in the past for some projects.

Curious what brought you to pick Svelte and Tauri for this project? Were you already familiar with them?

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

#79

Post by phildenhoff »

deafpolygon wrote: post #63

> Performant: Citadel should feel just as fast as Calibre. Pretty low bar to clear, honestly. Either way this is cool to see. Maybe we'll see more energy behind Calibre as a result.

Yes, that’s ehh not what I intended, really.

Citadel has a lower bar of “no slower than Calibre” but I expect it to be MUCH faster. For example — Calibre takes 8s to start up on my laptop. Citadel is nearly instant. I’d like to keep it that way!

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

#80

Post by LinguaBrowse »

Uvix wrote: post #69
pooralaska wrote: post #46

does it mangle japanese titles/authors by transcribing to pinyin chinese like calibre does? do the drm plugins work? might check it out and switch.

By mangling, you’re just referring to the folder/file names in the Calibre Library folder, right? The actual metadata in the app/book are fine?

Likely referring to that, yeah. And yes, the metadata is fine - but it’s a joke that I can’t find any Japanese books I own on my file system because Calibre’s author has renamed them to something that makes sense neither in Japanese, nor English, nor even Chinese.

It’s particularly dumb as it will have taken even more work on his part to map the characters to pīnyīn than it would’ve to just preserve the actual titles.

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