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That kitty and Calibre come from the same brain is a marvel of the open source world.
Not really, kitty was forked from putty. 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.
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I assume you mean not just the aesthetics, but the entire UI/UX, and I agree. Calibre is a very powerful and capable app, hindered by its unintuitive and clunky UI.
The UI is actually fine to me. I say that as someone who uses it a lot though. What specifically do you not like about it?
It took me the better part of the year to figure out how and why QGIS wouldn't just let me draw geometry like I can in a vector drawing tool. I still have to read the docs every time to figure out most selection manipulation actions in GIMP or decode the icons.
With Calibre and GIMP in particular, most people don't need most of its functionality, and easier but weaker tools exist that can do the same things. Almost all of my image editing is in Krita now because it's about as powerful and much more intuitive. If Citadel becomes the Krita of ebook readers, I'd readily use it just on the UI even if it's just as unstable.
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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's a big shame that whenever anything related to Calibre is posted, top comments will often be how arrogant is author is. I used to think the same. But when I read his comments history in GitHub, he doesn't seem a dick to me at all. So I googled his name, and end up in a forum. It completely changed my mind. Contrary to what people believe, Dovid Goyal is the most friendly programmer to his users. He spent lots of time answering questions in the forum https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166. His answers include where is a menu located, how to convert a book from one format to another, helping the user to debug the exact the problem with Calibre. He has been doing this daily and is very responsive. You can expect an answer to your question in the same day. (The forum used to allow you to read user's comments history anonymously, but now you need a account to do so)”
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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.
As for Kindle... for most users Send to Kindle is going to be more convenient than sideloading anyways, and that does take ePubs now, so it's not a huge usability hit.
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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…
Is there a publicly accessible book catalog where books can be searched by isbn, title or author?
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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://gith…
I know it was not a criticism but I would like to point out that Calibre seems to be developed also entirely by one person [0]. I understand why they would be hesitant to make big changes that would generate more work for them that would not be seen by most (GUI) users.
[0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/graphs/contributors
> thread 'main' panicked at libcalibre/src/infrastructure/domain/book/repository.rs:20:62: called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: ()
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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.
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, li…
I''m not the person you replied to, but having it run on a server somewhere is exactly what "self hosted" means to me.