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Calibre – E-Book Management

calibre-ebook.com

101–110 of 175 posts

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#101

Nice if you're into downloading ebooks illegally or from the few sites that don't do ERP. I used to use it too. However since graduating college and starting to make money I didn't download anything anymore due to lack of time more than lack of funds so I don't use it anymore.

This implies that the only use for Calibre has to do with illegally downloaded ebooks... and i'm not sure how that has anything to do with it though. Personally the only times i have used Calibre is the opposite of that: i used it with books i bought on Amazon to remove the DRM and convert them to epub so that i can read them on my mobile phone using my favorite ebook reader app (and also keep my own offline copies o…

If you wanted to remove Amazon from the equation, I recommend Kobo. Prices are similar and you can remove the DRM quite easily.

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#102

I recently started self hosting calibre-web[0] which consumes a calibre database and provides a basic web interface for viewing and uploading books to it. The killer feature for me is that it can act as a Kobo sync server. It makes getting my entire library onto my e-reader a breeze. 0: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

[deleted]

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#103

Kovid only makes $1,800/m from/for development.[0] More people should support him; Calibre has been extremely high quality for years. https://www.patreon.com/kovidgoyal

Also, kitty, which is a very fast Linux terminal I use all the time.

(not to be confused with the terminal software of the same name that runs in Windows.)

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#105

I've used Calibre extensively for stripping DRM and converting formats for my various e-readers. Note that it does glitch sometimes in strange and assorted ways. For example, when it converted the book Futu.re, it replaced all instances of "ft" with a blank space. While reading the book my brain has been interpolating over words to "fill in" the "ft" -- for example, when I read "a er" I know the word really is "after…

"ft" is a common ligature. When characters are often used together, fonts are often designed with those characters grouped together as their own character so they can be given certain design flair such as having the "branches" of the "f" and "t" as one continuous horizontal line. Aside from "ft," "ll" (ell ell) also often gets this treatment and others I can't recall off the top of my head. Text rendering engines will then substitute the composite character with the ligature if the ligature exists in the font being used for display. So what might have been happening is that the text engine thought that an "ft" ligature existed for the font it was using to show your book and was trying to show it, but in fact it didn't exist. But who knows at the end of the day.

More information about ligatures can be found on the Internet.

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#107

Calibre is great. There’s a real lack of good quality ebook software and Calibre is an essential do-everything toolkit. The interface, however, is like some incredible piece of outsider art, gloriously free of best practice, convention or accepted wisdom. As a UX designer it gave me some trouble at first, but now I’ve genuinely come to appreciate it. There’s no way the interface could be ‘improved’ by conventional st…

Calibre's UI is an artifact from a superior and more civilized time, IMHO Extremely functional and just a little bit incomprehensible. Compared to modern UI/UX which just slaps me with how stupid it thinks I am

> Extremely functional and just a little bit incomprehensible.

lol, that is what everyone should aim for (I'm not being sarcastic).

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#108

Calibre just works and is great, but the user interface needs some work to modernize how it looks and to be less confusing in general. I'd love a fork that follows the Gnome Human Interface guidelines.

Noooo, no more Gnome ultra-minimalist and featureless interfaces.

If we ask for a better user interface, it pays to be sure it is actually an improvement.

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#109
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calibre's UI is an artifact from a superior and more civilized time, IMHO Extremely functional and just a little bit incomprehensible. Compared to modern UI/UX which just slaps me with how stupid it thinks I am

> Compared to modern UI/UX which just slaps me with how stupid it thinks I am Because most average users of any software absolutely fall in that bucket. My mom can use the Facebook app on her phone just fine, but I wouldn't even dare to suggest that she try to convert an eBook on Calibre and transfer it to her Kindle.

Both things can be true - a person can prefer a more complicated and feature rich UX, while most people prefer a simpler UX that doesn't provide as much control.

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#110

Kovid only makes $1,800/m from/for development.[0] More people should support him; Calibre has been extremely high quality for years. https://www.patreon.com/kovidgoyal

What an unfortunate name these days

Kovid (pronounced with a soft d sound as 'th' in the) means an "expert in his domain".
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