81–90 of 163 posts
Do you plan to handle custom folder hierarchy?
That said, the end goal is to have a native Citadel way to manage libraries and that WOULD support custom folder hierarchies.
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…
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.
And I’m not even talking about non intuitive UI. For something that has supposed to be a library it’s nowhere near real library (alphabetical list of authors).
Is there a publicly accessible book catalog where books can be searched by isbn, title or author?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Calibre afaik was created from scratch.
Those are two entirely different circumstances from which to start from and it’s inevitable they would have vastly divergent results even in the same hands.
Have you looked at Zotero? This would fit well within that ecosystem, and it's hard to think that shoring up its support for ebooks (and Calibre compatibility) would be poorly received. I could imagine Citadel being an opinionated Zotero "distribution"—in the vein of OS distros or the various Jetbrains IDEs—with its own landing page and downloads, to better cater towards and more tailored for people primarily interested in reading for pleasure (rather than an emphasis on academic research, which tends to throw people off when recommending it, even though most of the pieces are there for ebook management...)
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.
I am going to try and use it again today and see if I can get used to it. It really is fantastic for a free product especially for a power user.
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?
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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.
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…
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.
But yes, they support USB mass storage.