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
Calibre – E-Book Management
91–100 of 175 posts
Re: Calibre – E-Book Management
#92I use Calibre to manage my ebook library. I share it across devices (and with a couple friends) using Syncthing[1], and read the books using KOReader[2] on a Kindle. I get my books either from Z-Library or by ripping the DRM off of books purchased from Amazon.
Genuinely the best reading setup.
Re: Calibre – E-Book Management
#93I'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."
I don't understand all the ins-and-outs of e-book conversion, but I figure it might have something to do with the font processing. Aside from these occasional glitches, I am a very happy Calibre user.
Re: Calibre – E-Book Management
#94Earlier 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…
If you're on linux, check out Foliate. It's everything you're asking for :D
Not really. As soon as I've launched Foliate the second time it shown me the list with the previous book I've read. I don't want a viewer to maintain any state (besides the settings) between uses.
Re: Calibre – E-Book Management
#95Earlier 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…
What's the benefit over just converting to html and using a browser? As far as I know epub is just html anyway.
Mostly; the structural information is in a mix of XHTML and various XML schemas. Conceptually it's more like that weird "HTML archive" format that IE used to do back when, but considerably more complex, and much less terrible thanks to being a W3C standard and not MIME-encoded.
The .epub file itself is just a zip archive. You can open it that way and pull the HTML content out, if you want, although it may be a pain to work with absent some kind of conversion - I think Calibre can linearize an epub into a single HTML file, but I haven't actually needed to do that so can't say for sure.
Re: Calibre – E-Book Management
#96I use Calibre to manage my ebook library. I share it across devices (and with a couple friends) using Syncthing[1], and read the books using KOReader[2] on a Kindle. I get my books either from Z-Library or by ripping the DRM off of books purchased from Amazon. Genuinely the best reading setup. [1]: https://syncthing.net/ [2]: https://koreader.rocks/
What made you use KOReader? I've always synced between my Calibre library and my Kindle directly and that works great.
Re: Calibre – E-Book Management
#97I'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…
It's likely that "ft" was a ligature in the original which didn't survive the conversion (for example, if the destination font doesn't have the character ſt). Sounds like a bug, though.
Re: Calibre – E-Book Management
#98Does anyone know of any good ebook platforms that compete with Amazon? Getting really sick of the Goodreads/Amazon interfaces and lack of quality recommendations.
I’ve purchased a book from Kobo before. It used the epub DRM compatible with adobe digital editions. At the time (afaik) they didn’t have a way to load it on a kindle without breaking the drm, converting it to mobi and doing a manual transfer. These days I stick with my public library (which uses overdrive and in my opinion is fantastic) or amazon in the event they don’t own ebook licenses.
That's my flow actually. I look up books on Goodreads or Amazon but buy them from Kobo. There are the additional steps of downloading, removing the DRM and uploading it to my Kindle but I think it's worth it.
Re: Calibre – E-Book Management
#99I just wish it wasn’t so ugly and felt like 1990s software.
It is, isn't it. Many people find the UI charming, the top post actually put that into words nicely.
Re: Calibre – E-Book Management
#100Calibre 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…
> Calibre is one of those rare examples of software where the kitchen-sink approach is absolutely warranted.
I disagree, and that's why I generally do not use Calibre, despite being an ebook aficionado. ...I already have my own ebook organization management. I'd like a good ebook reader, and I'd appreciate some of the surrounding tools, but Calibre's monolithic design isn't useful in my case.
It seems like even running the plain ebook reader takes a while because it's doing some callbacks to the larger program? Okular is a better fit for "a program that reads ebooks", but unfortunately has some really buggy handling with a number of books I've seen.