Calibre does its job so well it's downright essential for anyone thinking about dealing with ebooks. Glad to hear that full text search is added in this version, using it with a bunch of reference books saved will be so useful. It might be worth splitting out the fiction books I have to clean up the results. Maybe it works with tag filtering, I'll have to check.
> Calibre does its job so well it's downright essential for anyone thinking about dealing with ebooks.
Its “job” is not well-defined. I read electronic books almost exclusively (for prose fiction; art and equations are a different bag) since 2008 or so, and never saw any point in it beyond format conversion.
It does format conversion very well. The command-line converter requires a running graphical session for some reason, though.
Most (all commercially available?$ebook readers are not as simple as that.
And a file manager doesn’t track which books of mine are synced and which are not. Calibre does.
A file manager does not make it easy for me to correct the ebook’s metadata so it appears properly on the ebook reader. Calibre does. Calibre will also automatically download metadata for you from a variety of sources (with many options for the level of automation, including individual review with diffs from the existing metadata).
Calibre also makes it trivial for me to create a web server so I can access my books from any device from anywhere.
Calibre will also track which books I’ve read and which ones I haven’t. Which a file manager won’t.
Calibre also makes it possible for me to read the books on my computer itself before I sync them to my device.
Calibre will also automatically convert my book to a different format depending on the device I’m syncing to, something a file manager won’t do either.
It's a webserver, file manager, sync client, transcoder/converter, RSS reader, metadata manager all in one.
With all possible regards and respect to the author, I find calibre a terrible mess. It does a lot of things, none of which very well. And the one thing that I want it to do, it doesn't. Not reliable or not at all. I want it to give me access to the ebooks I buy online.
This isn't calibres' fault, but the industries'. DRM, incompatible formats pushed by tech giants. But in the end, all I want is a way to see, reference and sync the books that are on my Kobo with my (Linux) desktop.
A python script, A proprietary Kobo app over wine, some bash scripts and a well kept directory achieves this. But calibre doesn't. Though it can read RSS feeds.
I am an open source developer. I am familiar with the criticism. It's fine. Because a lot of software really is crap. Open Source is not a trait that suddenly makes software better.
My point was this: calibre does a lot. Many things only tangentially related to "managing ebooks". Yet it doesn't do some obvious things that are clearly part of managing ebooks. Like, managing ebooks.
That is criticism towards the model, not the software. It criticizes the lack of polish and lack of focus that many FLOSS suffers from. "Do one thing and do that well" is what I prefer. As opposed to a kitchen sink of plugins, an ever wider spread of use-case half-covered With, again, emphasis on the I.
I actually think Calibre's kitchen-sink approach is great. By-and-large I don't really need the fifty things it does to be best-in-class. If it's good enough, then it's fewer UNIX-style utilities I need to download on top of my existing installation.
For example, for end-to-end ebook creation or editing, I would probably download Sigil. But for the majority of e-book edits that I do (generating or fixing a broken Table of Contents, correcting the odd typo here and there, looking at the CSS rules that are causing the book to display weirdly on my Kobo, etc), Calibre's e-book editor is fine.
> I am an open source developer. I am familiar with the criticism. It's fine.
Dude. If you're a woman and you make jokes about how women should be at home cleaning not being engineers, it's not "fine", it just makes you a dickhead. Even if you're a woman. The same goes here.
If you work an open source, that doesn't give you a free moral entitlement to tell other people their work is crap, should have more features, should have the one feature you personally want for whatever reason.
You don't like it?
Too bad. It's not for you then. Don't use it.
Be respectful of others; the contribution they make, the effort they go to.
It costs you literally nothing.
I think the issue here is that your critique is way out of proportion to reality; Calibre is... fine. It's not great; but it does the job perfectly well for lots of people. It does lots of things. It does most of them fine. It does some well, some badly. I could say the same thing about the gimp. You come off as just having an axe to grind here for no good reason; and negative comments like this do cause people to stop contributing.
> And the one thing that I want it to do, it doesn't. Not reliable or not at all.
> I want it to give me access to the ebooks I buy online.
There are perfectly good Calibre extensions that do this. Given the legalities, it is not at all surprising that those extensions are not written or maintained by the main Calibre developer, and not included with Calibre. But they are easy to find and install.
> It does a lot of things, none of which very well. And the one thing that I want it to do, it doesn't. Not reliable or not at all. (...) A python script, A proprietary Kobo app over wine, some bash scripts and a well kept directory achieves this. But calibre doesn't.
I prefer to have an all-in-one application that does all this for me. My ebook workflow is not particularly demanding, so I let Calibre manage everything and don't maintain my own scripts.
Such a definition of "job not well defined" is just "IDE, but for ebooks" when seen from a different angles. People swear by IDEs for all kinds of reasons, convienience and integration first and foremost. You may not need an IDE, but I'll take it over rolling my own tools any day.
I do need it. But what I prefer is something simpler that does one job and does it well.
That exists, proprietary. In floss it exists for CLI only.
I'm upset that it keeps accumulating features. I understand why. I understand others need those features. But what upsets me is that this "eats" a lot of energy, which now isn't spent on simpler, easier, cleaner or friendlier FLOSS alternatives. I spend that time. On tools for ebooks that I opensourced.
But alas, the most common response to my efforts is people telling me that I should instead spend that time and effort building additions for calibre rather than trying to gain traction on some alternatives. The same most common response people working on e.g. Krita face: wasted time, improve Gimp instead.
Just because you were civil in your expression of it doesn't mean that your opinion itself isn't in poor taste to communicate, especially for someone involved in open source. You may be indifferent to criticism which exists only as a means of self-expression, but when silence costs nothing it's difficult to see exactly how your thought couching your criticism of the e-book ecosystem as a distaste for this long running, free and fairly popular piece of software was going to advance the conversation.
There's a term in Portuguese for a crying baby that's held to a breast but who continues to cry, without even trying to suckle; it's what came to mind when I read your original comment. It's not used for flattery, I'm afraid...
The alternative reality where all of those functions are handled by independent pieces of software, or even worse by software not specialized in ebooks at all, is not necessarily better.
In fact I'd bet money it it would be less useful and less productive and much more forbidding to users.
You've got a bunch of people here saying "I love Calibre", that should be enough proof that it's doing a good job, however well you understand that job to be defined.
Calibre does a lot of course, but for your first point, Kobo exposes a folder when connected via USB, and you can drag plain epubs over which it will then load into its library with no additional software.
> Most (all commercially available?$ebook readers are not as simple as that.
Only if you make them. Have been pretty simple for me. I don’t do most of the things you mention, and do not see myself wanting to.
I do use Calibre for conversion (through the command-line ebook-convert tool, wrapped in a script that converts and mails to Kindle in one operation). I don’t use different devices, to “automatically” does not mean much.
> Only if you make them. Have been pretty simple for me. I don’t do most of the things you mention, and do not see myself wanting to.
That's not how it works. Each device and firmware has its own way of doing things. For example, I would have no idea how to build "ebook groups" on my reader, but I don't have to worry about that because Calibre knows how to do it for me. Creating those by hand would likely involve a third party tool or XML/other structured text format editing, which would be annoying.
> I don’t use different devices
That's your setup. Another person may have three readers, for whatever reason. How would you keep track of it then, and would it not be easier to just hand over things to Calibre for automatic synchronisation?
> > Only if you make them. Have been pretty simple for me. I don’t do most of the things you mention, and do not see myself wanting to.
> That's not how it works. Each device and firmware has its own way of doing things. For example, I would have no idea how to build "ebook groups" on my reader
That would be you making it complicated. What are you all doing with your Kindles that needs multiple levels of organization?
> 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-reader companies existing which further complicates the setup. What if your old Kindle dies and suddenly none of your scripts work anymore because the new Kindle is just subtly different in how it works? What if you suddenly hate the Kindle ecosystem and want to switch to Kobo?
>Keep track of what?
Having more than one e-reader? This is not an uncommon case, honestly.
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 on them, you read the books. Calibre does not sync notes or reading position anyway (and certainly not wirelessly), as far as I know.
> 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.
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.
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.
While you can do that with a Kobo you can't drop the file and expect it to appear in some collections. To associate a book with a collection you have to either use Calibre or the vendor's app. I have epubs and PDFs that weren't bought through the Kobo/Rakuten store and they don't get filed in my collections. With Calibre (and a plugin) I can do that.
I do agree I could live without it but files tend to accumulate and putting books in collections help.
All of this would be much easier if the kobo was dumber and just created shelves/collections based on folders.
I have an old Kindle and it's always had trouble trying to just load files over a USB connection - books show up in the wrong section, no metadata, etc.
Calibre makes it simple and the books appear properly on the device. And it can fix metadata on books downloaded from the internet. That's the main reason I use it. Add in the fact that it's a nice management tool for seeing all my books at once and I'm very pleased with it.
There's a lot of nutty stuff under the hood like ensuring that covers are sized optimally for each device, which often have their own aspect ratios, DPIs and what not.
It also does a lot of database management ie; for Kobo, inserting things into the Kobo database, where schemas have varied over time etc etc.
You can of course just copy paste files as a baseline and it'll work.
I don’t understand. All Kindles I had — from Kindle 2 to Voyage — mounted as external drives when connected via USB, and copying mobi files just works (but their email delivery works fine, so I usually use that). From a brief Google search, Libra is the same (with epub).
I feel like I’m missing something every time Calibre comes up. People seem to love it, but I just found it confusing and unnecessary when I dealt with it.
When I connect the Kindle via USB to a MacBook Pro running macOS Monterey, I do not see a mounted drive with files in it, just the device itself. To email the files to Kindle, I first need to convert them anyway to mobi files.
For the Kobo Libre, I can indeed see a mounted volume, but copying a file into it does not consistently make that book available for reading.
Given I don't have these problems when I use Calibre, I'd definitely say it makes my life easier.
Then you need to provide more details. I have used many versions of macOS with Kindles including 12.4 and attaching a Kindle has always shown it as an external drive (called Kindle)
What do you mean by the device itself - how does a device show up on macOS?
It's iTunes for eBooks. If you're someone that has 19 different readers, wants to keep them synced to the same page, make the metadata perfect, rate books, write notes about them etc. it makes a lot of sense.
For me it's basically a way to use two plugins and occasionally fix a book cover. It's a bit bloated IMO.
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.
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).
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.
the extensive library of plugins allows you to do things not possible with just command line tools or the file manager. But of course the basics are just awareness of metadata, metadata editing, and grouping different file formats of the same book together in one entry. Using an app that is aware of the metadata conventions of the specific media files you are managing is indispensable to me.
I only read 60-80 books a year, maybe 40-60 on a Kindle. I guess I need to take up some sport to live long enough to reach your numbers (and to stop deleting things).
Even including an occasional article, 'thousands' is very impressive.
My worst habits are largely (TT)RPG manuals. I've got a huge collection from DTRPG especially. Sometimes one RPG purchase will have ten/twenty PDF files inside it (player's guides, GM guides, adventures/modules, etc). (Not to mention the combinatorial explosion if you ever talk yourself into a big sales bundle or two.) There's a bunch of weird reasons to keep them around "read" or not, and make them searchable if I need to look something up or am trying to remember a detail. Syncing some of them to my kindles or to other tablet devices from time to time can be handy for portable retrieval (or on the go skimming). I eventually realized my Books folders were huge and unmanageable even with a detailed folder structure and have been happy with moving that all to Calibre with better tags and metadata management.
I'm a horrible hoarder but I've also had a kindle and have been using Calibre since it started. You can store a ridiculous amount (thousands+) of books on a Kindle but as soon as you do that the interface slows to a crawl, it's really unpleasant to use at that point. Just page turning in your library takes seconds and I think it only lists 10-20 books a page.. oof.
I bounce between books a LOT. I don't read daily or anything and no speed reading skills but I'm usually reading 5-10 at a time and I fall asleep to audiobooks.
I’ve also spent an hour looking at it at one point. I’m sure it all makes sense in the overall Calibre context (formats can be plugins, so the perimeter includes stuff like customization code), but conversion is not easily extractable.
The Calibre conversion CLI tool is easy to run though. A bit unfortunate I can’t do it in an SSH session from my phone.
Honestly it's so good I don't even have a reason to update it to the latest version. I'm probably several years of releases behind and it already does everything I need it to do without any hassle.
I’ve long kept separate libraries (including one for academic papers and one for appliance manuals). This search functionality is going to come in quite handy.
Full text search sounds great. I'm just wondering what kind of overhead it will add to a big library? I think I have about 3000+ books in mine.
Calibre is one of those excellent pieces of software that shows free and open source can sometimes be better than commercial software. My only gripe with it is that it is updated so often [sometimes it seems almost weekly] and every update involves visiting the site and downloading the whole app again. In-place auto-updates would be nice.
I use Calibre along with Calibre-Web [0] to make my library available online, so I can always grab one of my books to read on my phone, whenever I'm stuck somewhere, thumb-twiddling. I have an rsync... command aliased in my terminal. So every time I add new books to Calibre on desktop, I just type that in a terminal and it's immediately synced to my online library.
PS: Top marks also to Calibre Dev for actually spelling the name of the app properly. It gladdens my heart no end to see the occasional piece of proper English flotsam still afloat on the massive tide of online Americanisms.
UPDATE: Dammit! --just downloaded and Calibre 6 is OSX 10,15+ only. Another piece of software leaves me languishing, as I stick with Mojave. On the plus side, I'll no longer have to worry about the huge updates I was complaining about above!
I use it to load books onto a kindle and to process ebooks. I like adding metadata, making basic style tweaks or edits (like fixing OCR typoes or em/en/- mishaps), and tagging and cataloging. There's a setting to load all files plopped in a directory into the calibre system, which is both accessible through the GUI and as an author-grouped directory structure with standardized filetypes, which I find quite helpful. Also useful is the DeDRM plugin to make books bought from Amazon or Google Books accessible with any format (plus all the other benefits of DRM free media, like customizability and portability).
One aspect of working with digital books I haven't solved yet is syncing bookmarks and highlights across devices, or making them easily searchable. I'm sure there's a plugin or tool which makes it easy, yet I just haven't found it yet.
