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New in Calibre 6.0

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Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#161

Post by mynameisvlad »

akho wrote: post #155
mynameisvlad wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That would be you making it complicated. What are you all doing with your Kindles that needs multiple levels of organization? A Kindle Keyboard 2 is completely different than a Kindle Oasis 3. The file format they use is different (they've changed formats a few times in the last 13 years,) the software is old enough on the Keyboard 2 that it's fundamentally quite different, etc. This doesn't even preclude other e-r…

Formats are a different point from “ebook groups”. To answer your question — I’ll modify the line that calls the conversion program (which is, at the moment, Calibre’s ebook-convert). As you can imagine, I’ve already had to do that a few times over the last 15 years. It took me less time than the “add to library” dances would have. I still don’t understand “keeping track”. So you have several readers, there are books…

> Formats are a different point from “ebook groups”.

The point is that even in the same line of readers, there are subtle differences. Replace "formats" with "ebook groups" if it somehow makes it easier for you to understand that different readers have different ways to do things.

> I still don’t understand “keeping track”. So you have several readers, there are books on them, you read the books. Calibre does not sync notes or reading position anyway (and certainly not wirelessly), as far as I know.

Uh, yes it does: http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/showthread.php?t=296205

And if you have thousands of books and multiple devices, keeping track of what's on each device and which format is best for the device gets messy. It's not a hard concept to grasp.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#162

Post by Larrikin »

berkes wrote: post #54
blowski wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With iTunes, you were forced to use it to manage an iPod, iPhone, and any media bought from Apple. With Calibre, you can use it or not use it to manage your ebooks as much as you like. That's a very important distinction.

Also, as an avid reader (average five books a month), I also cannot see the need for calibre. Contrary to music, I consume my ebooks on one device: my e-reader. My laptop, phone and tablet are terrible for reading. Why would I need my ebooks on my phone or tablet. The only thing I do want, is to process my annotations on my computer. Which calibre cannot do (but a python and bash hack does provide me).

People have different reading habits than you?

For reference materials, textbooks, comics, and other image heavy and laid out precisely books, I almost exclusively prefer PDFs and only read them on my tablet.

If it's a book with almost zero images, like most fiction, how they're laid out doesn't matter, and I enjoy the ability to read anywhere on any device. I've never found the need for an e reader and regularly switch between my tablet or phone. Reading comics on the phone isn't for me, but there are a lot of people that don't mind it.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#163

Post by JohnTHaller »

jray wrote: post #20

The negative news is that you need at least mac os 10.15.

Given that 10.14 Mojave and prior are end of life and no longer supported by Apple, it's not that unusual. Similarly, Calibre 6.0 only supports 64-bit Windows 10/11.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#165

Post by Chris2048 »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #159
Chris2048 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has reddit got to do with the issue? He also made it clear that the right move was to rename, but that he's now refusing to do so out of spite - i.e. an escalation to the drama. > is simply projection oh, cool, now you are insulting me. So why am I childish?

You’re coming across as extremely sensitive, and yet criticizing the maintainer for a decision so negligible it seems like satire.

I'm sensitive to the tactic of insulting people for pointing out inconvenient facts, namely that this action was taken - which got my accused of "projection" i.e. I am projecting my own childishness, based on zero evidence. Saying I'm "extremely sensitive" is another way of distracting from the point.

The decision was not negligible as far as I believe, but if you'd like to have a constructive discussion of that, rather than personal putdown, please go ahead.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#166

Post by Larrikin »

Whenever I see Calibre mentioned, I always think that I'd like to take the time and organize my hundreds of eBooks with all the metadata but can never seem to justify the effort since I will be reading on a different device that will lose that information.

I have an Android phone and an iPad. The only cross platform solution I've found for syncing reading position between those ecosystems is Google Play Books, but they don't really like large PDF uploads and epubs sometimes fail. It feels kind of gross uploading my own books to Google and having them track that information and would like to remove them from my reading habits. Calibre-Web has been mentioned in this thread and seemed like a good solution, but apparently doesn't support saving reading position.

Is there any solution that lets me read the same book on my phone and my tablet and keep them in sync?

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#167

Post by xdennis »

frameset wrote: post #134
dmos62 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pretty much have to use it for some things, but as sibling commenters have pointed out, there are some serious flaws with both it and its maintainer Your sibling comments have not mentioned or alluded to any such flaws. Do you have criticism to share?

Other commenters have pointed out that the lack of a self replacing auto-updater in a modern desktop app is striking to put it mildly. It has a pretty bad UI, that seems to be getting worse especially with regard to the shades of grey. If you bring up these flaws the maintainer can react quite poorly, even when the subject is broached politely and in good faith. And to add my complaints to those of other commenters,…

Seems like a feature. Packages shouldn't update themselves. That's what package managers are for.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#168

Post by pwinnski »

joeman1000 wrote: post #22

Why do people like calibre?

I have close to 18k ebooks in a library, and every other program I've tried to use in the past falls over dead when facing that.

Calibre doesn't fall over. Instead, it happily and quickly sorts and searches and downloads metadata, and syncs to my Kindle (converting formats if required in the process).

It's the most un-Mac-like program I use on my Mac, certainly, and some days I might even describe it as ugly or unfocused, but there are literally no alternatives that work nearly as well, and there's something to be said for that. And "unfocused" just means it has a lot of features I don't need, but other people may rely on those features and not need the features I use.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#169

Post by akho »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #161
akho wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Formats are a different point from “ebook groups”. To answer your question — I’ll modify the line that calls the conversion program (which is, at the moment, Calibre’s ebook-convert). As you can imagine, I’ve already had to do that a few times over the last 15 years. It took me less time than the “add to library” dances would have. I still don’t understand “keeping track”. So you have several readers, there are books…

> Formats are a different point from “ebook groups”. The point is that even in the same line of readers, there are subtle differences. Replace "formats" with "ebook groups" if it somehow makes it easier for you to understand that different readers have different ways to do things. > I still don’t understand “keeping track”. So you have several readers, there are books on them, you read the books. Calibre does not syn…

> different readers have different ways to do things

Sure. Yet the underlying activity (reading) is not complicated.

> Uh, yes it does: http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/showthread.php?t=296205

I opened that link and skimmed it. There is a whole thread of people there who can’t get their reading position synced using Calibre.

> And if you have thousands of books and multiple devices, keeping track of what's on each device and which format is best for the device gets messy.

I don’t see a reason to track that, and think you are inventing a use case where there isn’t any. People are obsessive, though, and will spend countless hours tracking things for no benefit when given a tool to do so.

Calibre comes from a period in the '00s where people did a lot of this sort of metadata tracking and cataloguing. There used to be a whole class of applications to track your physical library (with barcode scanning &c; I remember Delicious Library), physical CDs, … All are now dead. Music collection managers are barely alive.

There is very little point in maintaining a “collection” of digital stuff you did not create and do not plan to use. Your beach reading is not it.

There are very useful parts of Calibre — formats, device profiles, the plugin ecosystem. Sadly, it is not particularly modular in terms of workflows (which is the underlying cause of this whole discussion), yet has become a standard platform for all community efforts into deDRM &c.

Re: New in Calibre 6.0

#170

Post by DiggyJohnson »

Chris2048 wrote: post #165
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re coming across as extremely sensitive, and yet criticizing the maintainer for a decision so negligible it seems like satire.

I'm sensitive to the tactic of insulting people for pointing out inconvenient facts, namely that this action was taken - which got my accused of "projection" i.e. I am projecting my own childishness, based on zero evidence. Saying I'm "extremely sensitive" is another way of distracting from the point. The decision was not negligible as far as I believe, but if you'd like to have a constructive discussion of that , ra…

The onus is on you to demonstrate why it’s not negligible, besides demonstrating your ability to take offense more readily than most.

Look, I’m not the person that insulted you, but I’m sorry this happened to you if it means you’ll reevaluate your perspective of this discussion.

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