111–120 of 175 posts
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.
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…
The UI is not the only weird part of it, probably the least weird one. What I miss are first-class attachments (i.e. code archives and CD/floppy images) support, raw file naming (without automatic romanization of non-ASCII alphabets), flat storage (without creating a separate folder for every book). Using a Calibre-managed library from outside of Calibre (i.e. on a PocketBook reader) feels quite unnatural. Another th…
Calibre is great once you get the hang of the interface. The one thing I haven't yet figured out is how to stop it from butchering Kobo (kepub) ebooks downloaded from Standard Ebooks: "Important: Don’t use Calibre to transfer the kepub file! Calibre will apply its own conversion on top of our own conversion, making for strange results" from https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks
I always used Calibre to convert normal epub files to kepub format, to be able to zoom images and other things that the Kobo doesn't do with epubs.
I didn't know I could also get kepub files from somewhere else.
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
Calibre is one of those rare examples of software where the kitchen-sink approach is absolutely warranted. It's a one-stop shop for pretty much everything related to e-book management, conversion, or creation. I spend most of my time in Calibre just managing my library or converting ebooks between formats (particularly if I'm pulling ebooks off my Kindle or Kobo to strip their DRM). When I want to test whether the co…
>one of those rare examples of software where the kitchen-sink approach is absolutely warranted I actually like this approach in general and I often wonder why there's so much animosity towards it. There's something about platform-like software like Calibre, or Emacs or WeChat where it becomes more than the sum of its parts that you just don't get with just a collection of disjointed, individual tools.
Even as a developer (not a UX designer), whenever a client suggested, up-front, there should be a "power user mode" I would ask, "Is there such a thing as a power user or just someone with Stockholm Syndrome who hasn't found a better app yet?"
My favourite eReader for android is and always will be AlReader. Some dudes pet project but it is glorious and wonderful.
So I will install AlReader for sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The UI is not the only weird part of it, probably the least weird one. What I miss are first-class attachments (i.e. code archives and CD/floppy images) support, raw file naming (without automatic romanization of non-ASCII alphabets), flat storage (without creating a separate folder for every book). Using a Calibre-managed library from outside of Calibre (i.e. on a PocketBook reader) feels quite unnatural. Another th…
Okular can open ebooks. Maybe it does what you want.
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.
Yeah it's wild how the use case for 90% of users is "convert epub/mobi/whatever to azw3 and upload to kindle" and doing that is buried in several right click context menus... I'm comfortable doing it now but it seems as easy as having a left pane for books in my "library" and right pane for books on my device