Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Calibre – E-Book Management

calibre-ebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 175 posts

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#51

Post by tomc1985 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #45
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #24

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.

It's because it doesn't fit into the modern zeitgeist of extreme testability and pandering to computer illiterates

Every time this kind of UI comes up in discussion, I feel like there is always someone groaning about how much extra effort and cost is involved with giving the user too many options. In fact, you could say that modern software seeks to eliminate all noncritical optionality. Combine this with gobs of pointless whitespace, an inexplicable need to humanize pretty much everything, and smother the user in unnecessary feelgood emotions...

And then people wonder why modern apps suck so much...

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#52

Post by fencepost »

david_allison wrote: post #23

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

Seems to me that he might do better if he put in a few tiers of "You get absolutely nothing extra for this except the thanks of Kovid and the Calibre community for supporting ongoing development." Right now all support is custom donations.

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#54

Post by qwerty456127 »

mattkevan wrote: post #19

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 thing I always wanted is a simple viewer app without library management features. Like Adobe Acrobat Reader but for ePub and other book formats. The Linux app closest to this concept also comes with Calibre (Sumatra does the job on Windows). All the other book viewers I've seen insist on maintaining your library.

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#56

Post by philips »

stinkytaco wrote: post #44
webwielder2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I feel about the Libby app for iPhone. What is it with book apps? https://twitter.com/bendansby/status/1334717731925417986?s=2...

I'm genuinely curious to hear any specific changes you might make. I'm a librarian and I can say that Libby was a huge improvement in usability over the Overdrive app and we spend much less time on basic user support now. There are weird quirks for me as well, but I'm always hard pressed to say exactly what I would change.

It is a huge improvement over the low bar set by Overdrive. I use Libby everyday with my children and I think my three complaints are:

1. Filtering and categorization can be confusing: I have a difficult time finding books that are age appropriate for my daughter and available. I end up memorizing favorite authors as that is easier than the filtering.

2. The four buttons at the bottom are… interesting? The “library card” button the second from the left does… what exactly? I have never really understood the purpose of that button or why it is shaped like a card.

3. Figuring out how to exit a children’s book that is read “within” the libby app is inconsistent. I can never figure out how to reliably call up the UX to exit or change books.

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#57

Post by imwillofficial »

mattkevan wrote: post #19

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…

This is the best attitude I’ve ever seen in a rebuke of a poor interface. I wish I treated every criticism this way.

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#58

Post by asoneth »

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

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#60

Post by m463 »

thrower123 wrote: post #16

The one thing I really don't like about Calibre is how it will copy all of my ebooks into its own file organization. There is probably a way to disable this, but that is the default. Kind of irritating when you have Calibre in a cloud-storage folder and your books are also in the cloud storage, and it uses up your space with duplicates.

...and rewrites/truncates the file titles
Post reply on HN