This comment is from the perspective of a Calibre power-user, and someone who has been involved with the software for years now.
I must admit, I'm slightly shocked at some of the comments here. Kovid puts in an extraordinary amount of work (nearly 80 hours a week) into Calibre - of which most is for free, in the name of open source software. Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the mobileread forums will also know him as a remarkably intelligent, dedicated, and all-round fantastic guy. He's very patient and kind with beginners, responsive to feedback, and rarely loses his cool with anyone. His only 'crime' was being blunt with a bug report around eleven years ago, and I'm struggling to see why people are so myopic as to turn that into their entire perception of him. Add to the fact that he eventually fixed every bug in that thread as well as second-language difficulties that he likely experiences, and the vitriol that people have for him is undeserved.
The proof of the pudding is Calibre itself, which is a joy to use. It is hands down one of the most useful programs on my computer. It's rarely buggy, fast, logical to use, very feature-rich, and rather customisable. I'm perplexed as to whether some of the people in this thread and I are using the same software. It's very easy to set up, as all you do is either point to a pre-existing library of files or create a new one. Adding books is trivial, as is editing metadata, and the reader itself is splendid. That's really what most people need out of e-book software, but Calibre really does go above and beyond any e-book software on the market right now. The only close competitor is Foliate, which is not cross-platform like Calibre, and even then it simply lacks many useful features that I rely on with Calibre, despite having a much cleaner UI.
I'm not aware of what he said 11 years ago. I'm more familiar with the collective dog-pile he suffered in 2017 when he said he would personally maintain Python 2 after its EOL date to avoid having to update Calibre to Python 3.[0] The internet has never forgiven him for that moment of hubris, it seems. Calibre eventually migrated to Python 3 anyway with the help of other developers.
But yes, I frequent the MobileRead forums and by and large he's responsive and helpful.
I have no idea of who Kovid is and has done but Calibre is a great piece of software. It does exactly what I need: import files into a directory and occasionally let me edit them (text and metadata.) I sync with Synchthing. I'm really happy it got full text search over all the library. I'll use that too.
BTW, if we don't have to use software written by people we don't (or won't) like when we know everything they did or said, I bet we'd have to shutdown our phones and computers and never turn them on again.
I've used Calibre for a very long time now and when my kids finally got Kindles they started using it as well.
I couldn't care less what pointless debates others may have with Kovid. He is very helpful, very active in the forms, and constantly updates this software.
many opensource projects become abandonware, but Kovid continues to pour hours and hours into this.
Cross platform usage alone is impressive. it works the same on my Mac/Linux machines as it does on the kids Windows machines.
Maybe he has been "rude" at times, but who hasn't? let's not let a few instances of him losing his patience cast a shadow over the incredible work he has done for many people.
Came here to say that I 100% agree, but Foliate doesn't compete with Calibre.
Foliate is a much better reader IMO, but Foliate cannot do everything Calibre can. Calibre, on the other hand, can do everything Foliate does.
Calibre is much more than just an eBook Reader. Foliate is a very good (the best for computers, maybe? I don't know how it pales agains Apple Books) eBook reader.
In my usage at least, Calibre is an eBook library-manager, editor, and conversion tool... which has a so-so eBook reader attached that I mostly forget about. :D
It's pretty essential for getting things onto the devices that I actually use to read, though.
Extraordinary amount of work does not guarantee extraordinary quality or results, not even ordinary quality.
> Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the mobileread forums will also know him as a remarkably intelligent, dedicated, and all-round fantastic guy.
Reads like a working para social addiction. Anyway, whatever qualities one has, doesn't matter. One can be nice, and still fail at important things. Those things actually happen all the time and somehow people are always surprised and defending.
> The proof of the pudding is Calibre itself, which is a joy to use.
Opinions are very divided on this part. And as someone who had several hard problems over the decade, including multiple data loses, I'm very far from calling it a joy. It's useful, and if you know your way around the flaws it will also not a harsh experience, but a joy it was never for me.
Kovid Goyal, the developer of Calibre, is a very responsive, very gentle person. Whenever I needed help, I have gotten help from him. [1] - Calibre is an indispensable tool for me to manage my digital library with close to 800 books.
I support him regularly. Consinder doing it as well if you appreciate the app. Go to https://calibre-ebook.com/ , there’s a support link on the top right.
Yeah kitty is amazing. I've been meaning to donate as a thank you. It's made so many things possible. In fact, because of it's flexibility, today I wrote a vscode extension that can use some of kitty's remote control features so I can execute things in my terminal of choice straight from my editor of choice.
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.
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.
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. I've mostly moved to using [Calibre Web](https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web) which is a software intended as a companion, but I use it almost exclusively.
It has a web interface, and you can deploy it using a container. The killer feature for me that Calibre itself lacks is that has over the internet syncing with the native Kobo firmware. You essentially trick the Kobo into thinking it's calling home to get ebooks from their servers, but you're accessing your own instance of Calibre-web.
This makes my workflow of adding a new ebook as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.
> 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, hosting the library on another computer or network share is not supported, and you can't use an external DB provider e.g. MySQL.
>as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.
Wow, sounds really nice, you got my attention! My stack to achieve the same result is a bit more complicated: I installed KOreader on my device, and it can read calibre's OPDS catalog feed. KOreader has some other niceties that I enjoy, mostly wallabag support.
How do you trick the native kodo firmware? Does it work outside your home network?
Yes it does, I use a reverse proxy with ssl and have CW on its own subdomain.
There's a plain text config file on the Kobo's memory and one of the config options is the store URL. CW generates you a new one tied to your local CW account in your instance and you replace the standard URL. You can do multi user stuff that way. You can also define a "shelf" and only books on that shelf will sync if you wish, handy if you have a large collection or a small memory Kobo.
Looks cool, but the wiki calls out that it can't sync reading progress between devices. Which, I understand--how Kobo does it is probably not well-documented. But without that, the solution doesn't seem any better than the Dropbox support with certain Kobo models. It would only be of interest to me if I could sync e.g. my Sage before putting it down and pick up my Clara somewhere else and be able to find my place in the books I'm currently reading.
Not even the Dropbox integration does this yet with sideloaded books, though. I think KOReader might be the only one that has pulled it off so far.
> Fortunately, plugin developers were given over half a year to port their plugins, so most have already been ported.
I do admire this optimism and good faith. But no... many will not have ported until users start complaining that X plugin no longer works. Expect a few more months.
The full text search feature is surprisingly useful. Just searched my ~800 books for keywords like "tree traversal" or "assoc" to find books that I wouldn't have suspected to deal with these topics (`assoc` being a Lisp keyword searching for entries in association lists [1]).
And I already had ways to search within contents of my books via "HoudahSpot" (an excelent MacOS tool that uses Spotlight search to sift through all my files and present the results in a tabular view), or via command line using `mdfind` [2]
I wonder how well it scales, I have a rather large collection and would love to use this. As long as the index is much smaller than the source files, and it doesn't search by re-reading the files from disk I'll give it a go.
Calibre is awesome to use on desktop. But as someone who wants to sync his Calibre library with other devices (iphone + ipad), it gets really frustrating.
Do you want to sync the whole library with the iphone or just search and download from the iphone? Calibre can be used to just transfer a few books by installing the calibre app on the phone and select books on the computer to transfer. There are also solutions for searching and downloading books from the phone but I haven't tried them much, found it much easier to use the computer to do that.
I can't fit my library on the phone so haven't even thought of syncing the whole thing.
I want to sync the whole thing. Apple Books ineptly forces you to manually copy all of the books themselves to each device, but then syncs collections that you've set up to organize them.
Enable the Calibre web server, then use KyBook to connect to it and download the books you want while on the same network as the Calibre server. You can set up a public URL if you want to access them remotely
I use dropbox for syncing. I point my calibre library to the dropbox folder, and in my ipad I open the dropbox app and "share" the book I want to read to the Books app.
The calibre manual warns against using dropbox on the main library folder, users have lost their complete libraray doing that. Might want to at least pause dropbox while running calibre.
Awesome is disbutable. The amount of awesome parts is equal to the amount of aweful parts. Calibre is really a prime example of product which shines despite the manifold deep flaws. And this makes it really problematic, as it seems to dominate it's space so strong, that no many even care to work on an alternatives. Very problematic for the health of the ebook-space.
It is easy to criticize, but it takes a toll to fix books in ebook processing.
I had to do some minor ePub work and I was like „WHAT, that’s the standard? This can’t be right“ but yeah the formats are trash and complicated.
To be dedicated over a decade to fix and develop software is hard.
It's incredibly cumbersome to set up for even the most basic, common tasks that everyone wants to do. He's forced to release constant updates because he refuses to separate the news processing code from the main application code (the processing "recipes" should be separately distributed) and worse, there's no auto-updater, so keeping the application up to date is a pain in the ass. The UI is outdated, hostile to users in general, and not low/impaired-vision friendly (six icons in the standard main toolbar all look virtually identical save for very minor differences, and Goval loves different shades of grey, reducing contrast.)
Last but not least: it's almost exclusively developed by one person (a problem by itself for such a large and widely used project) who is infamous for being at best abrasive and at worst an asshole - and not a particularly good programmer. The commit history is an absolute mess to try and navigate because he seems to have "save" and "commit" confused.
Edit: the very link itself is a perfect example of how Goyal seems to have zero awareness or care for others. Why do I have to click to expand text items in release notes? And he says that some plugins are no longer compatible because of the switch to Qt6. Which ones?
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?
I really love Calibre and I've been using it for more than a decade. But one thing I'd really hope to see that hasn't happened yet is support for alternative database backends. Unfortunately if you have enough ebooks, it becomes impossible for the Calibre software to scale to handling them and a big piece of this is internal limits placed on the size of its database file. I have such a large quantity of ebooks on my media server (terabytes of ebooks) and have never been able to successfully add all of them to Calibre to be managed as a single library.
I'm glad to see that development continues, this has been an utterly essential tool as I've switched between different ebook readers over the years.
I have used Calibre for years. It's utilitarian and I can usually get it to do what I need. The weird things I need--editing the metadata of ebooks, converting between formats (including to Amazon's weird KFX using a plugin that piggybacks on Amazon's official kindle tools).
Yeah, it's not some pretty mainstream app. But managing media files of any kind is a power user / nerd activity. Frankly it's a relief to to have to help people out with their completely fucked iTunes anymore. Personally I use Calibre for ebooks, and Swinsian (and tools like MP3Tagger). Ideally I'd have some sort of app that was like classic file-management-only iTunes but instead of iPod syncing, it would be a Plex or similar server for music and video.
Full-text search is huge!! I've been using ripgrep-all, and running up against issues with the maximum cache size. Can't wait to try this out, hope it supports virtual libraries, hope it works with PDFs.
Calibre is great but if you specifically want full text search of ebooks and a multitude of document types then check out Recoll: http://www.recoll.org/
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.
Odd to see a "We value your privacy" popup on the website for an open source project. Both that they do feel the need to annoy their users at all when they could just not collect any data and that they resort to the insincere business speak wording. And of course none of the listed "legitimate interests" are actually legitimate.
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.
I don't like it but it's the best we have. If there would be more lightweight, prettier alternative I'd use that but for now there really isn't an alternative and I'm grateful for the author to keep working on it.
for the same reason I like Emacs. It's just about the only ebook tool that literally does everything. From being a good reader in itself, to conversion, to mailing books to my kindle etc.
I've been using it for years and I begrudge/resent it every time I have to use it; I only use it as little as possible. I'm baffled by all the people who heap praise on it.
afaik it's the only ebook manager + automatic metadata search + conversion tool between multiple formats that exists. Unfortunately for me, the author refuse to implement a functionality to reuse an existing book repository architecture
I mean, you could just install it from your package manager like a normal person. Those instructions are for when your are on some some obscure distro that doesn't package it, but you still want some way of getting it on your system.
Edit: I know on the download page it says "Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below."
But that is bad advice. If you want a recent package, then use a distro that frequently updates it's packages. Most people using distros with ancient packages, (Debian, Slackware) _want_ it that way!
I love the idea of Calibre, but I just have no idea how to use it. Whenever I try, I get stuck in some kind of confused loop where I've added things to it, but all attempts to access them just loop back to Calibre. In other words, I can't get it to let me actually read anything.
That must be quite frustrating. FWIW, I have had the opposite experience - Calibre's always just worked. My various ereaders have been detected automatically, and plugins generally have worked without hassle. For me it's a been a great, reliable piece of software.
What are you trying? Do you want to read things with Calibre's built in reader, another desktop reader, sync them to a device (i.e. use the desktop GUI to copy files to a device), download them to a device via the content server or what?
I don't care how I read my stuff, I just want to read it. Calibre says it supports lots of formats, but somehow I can't find or figure out the magic inputs or config options to have it display something to me so I can read it.
This comment is from the perspective of a Calibre power-user, and someone who has been involved with the software for years now.
I must admit, I'm slightly shocked at some of the comments here. Kovid puts in an extraordinary amount of work (nearly 80 hours a week) into Calibre - of which most is for free, in the name of open source software. Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the mobileread forums will also know him as a remarkably intelligent, dedicated, and all-round fantastic guy. He's very patient and kind with beginners, responsive to feedback, and rarely loses his cool with anyone. His only 'crime' was being blunt with a bug report around eleven years ago, and I'm struggling to see why people are so myopic as to turn that into their entire perception of him. Add to the fact that he eventually fixed every bug in that thread as well as second-language difficulties that he likely experiences, and the vitriol that people have for him is undeserved.
The proof of the pudding is Calibre itself, which is a joy to use. It is hands down one of the most useful programs on my computer. It's rarely buggy, fast, logical to use, very feature-rich, and rather customisable. I'm perplexed as to whether some of the people in this thread and I are using the same software. It's very easy to set up, as all you do is either point to a pre-existing library of files or create a new one. Adding books is trivial, as is editing metadata, and the reader itself is splendid. That's really what most people need out of e-book software, but Calibre really does go above and beyond any e-book software on the market right now. The only close competitor is Foliate, which is not cross-platform like Calibre, and even then it simply lacks many useful features that I rely on with Calibre, despite having a much cleaner UI.
I'm not aware of what he said 11 years ago. I'm more familiar with the collective dog-pile he suffered in 2017 when he said he would personally maintain Python 2 after its EOL date to avoid having to update Calibre to Python 3.[0] The internet has never forgiven him for that moment of hubris, it seems. Calibre eventually migrated to Python 3 anyway with the help of other developers.
But yes, I frequent the MobileRead forums and by and large he's responsive and helpful.
[0]https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107
I have no idea of who Kovid is and has done but Calibre is a great piece of software. It does exactly what I need: import files into a directory and occasionally let me edit them (text and metadata.) I sync with Synchthing. I'm really happy it got full text search over all the library. I'll use that too.
BTW, if we don't have to use software written by people we don't (or won't) like when we know everything they did or said, I bet we'd have to shutdown our phones and computers and never turn them on again.
This!
I've used Calibre for a very long time now and when my kids finally got Kindles they started using it as well.
I couldn't care less what pointless debates others may have with Kovid. He is very helpful, very active in the forms, and constantly updates this software.
many opensource projects become abandonware, but Kovid continues to pour hours and hours into this.
Cross platform usage alone is impressive. it works the same on my Mac/Linux machines as it does on the kids Windows machines.
Maybe he has been "rude" at times, but who hasn't? let's not let a few instances of him losing his patience cast a shadow over the incredible work he has done for many people.
Came here to say that I 100% agree, but Foliate doesn't compete with Calibre.
Foliate is a much better reader IMO, but Foliate cannot do everything Calibre can. Calibre, on the other hand, can do everything Foliate does.
Calibre is much more than just an eBook Reader. Foliate is a very good (the best for computers, maybe? I don't know how it pales agains Apple Books) eBook reader.
In my usage at least, Calibre is an eBook library-manager, editor, and conversion tool... which has a so-so eBook reader attached that I mostly forget about. :D
It's pretty essential for getting things onto the devices that I actually use to read, though.
Not to mention Kovid is also the developer of the excellent kitty terminal.
> The only close competitor is Foliate
Only as a reader. For everything else? Not at all.
> His only 'crime' was being blunt with a bug report around eleven years ago
Here's something from 2018: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9#issuecomment-41...
Is that supposed to be some kind of an offense?
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> Kovid puts in an extraordinary amount of work
Extraordinary amount of work does not guarantee extraordinary quality or results, not even ordinary quality.
> Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the mobileread forums will also know him as a remarkably intelligent, dedicated, and all-round fantastic guy.
Reads like a working para social addiction. Anyway, whatever qualities one has, doesn't matter. One can be nice, and still fail at important things. Those things actually happen all the time and somehow people are always surprised and defending.
> The proof of the pudding is Calibre itself, which is a joy to use.
Opinions are very divided on this part. And as someone who had several hard problems over the decade, including multiple data loses, I'm very far from calling it a joy. It's useful, and if you know your way around the flaws it will also not a harsh experience, but a joy it was never for me.
I don’t mean this in a snarky way, but how does this comment add value?
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Kovid Goyal, the developer of Calibre, is a very responsive, very gentle person. Whenever I needed help, I have gotten help from him. [1] - Calibre is an indispensable tool for me to manage my digital library with close to 800 books.
I support him regularly. Consinder doing it as well if you appreciate the app. Go to https://calibre-ebook.com/ , there’s a support link on the top right.
[1] This is the forum dedicated to Calibre https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166
OT, but he also happens to be the developer of kitty, my favorite terminal emulator on Linux: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty
Yeah kitty is amazing. I've been meaning to donate as a thank you. It's made so many things possible. In fact, because of it's flexibility, today I wrote a vscode extension that can use some of kitty's remote control features so I can execute things in my terminal of choice straight from my editor of choice.
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Their github issue handling did not give me the same impression that parent has of him.
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I had no idea! Awesome.
I interviewed him once. Such a kind and responsive developer. He told me he put 80 hours per week, on average, in Calibre’s development.
Edit: the interview (in Spanish) https://calibre.softonic.com/articulos/entrevista-a-kovid-go...
Oh come on, that was one incident and he did fix the main issue. For a dude who does this in his spare time, he deserves a lot of credit.
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Try giving out years of your labor for free, and then try not being sensitive about it...
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How on earth is overly sensitive a problem for anyone? Assuming for the sake of argument he is.
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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.
I use it extensively for managing the books on my devices (Kobo Libre, and my wife has an old Kindle).
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Yeah, I wanted to separate the conversion code into another package, but it's all so tangled
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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.
[0] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
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!
What do you use it for besides just an application that indexes books and has a reader built into it:?
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.
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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. I've mostly moved to using [Calibre Web](https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web) which is a software intended as a companion, but I use it almost exclusively.
It has a web interface, and you can deploy it using a container. The killer feature for me that Calibre itself lacks is that has over the internet syncing with the native Kobo firmware. You essentially trick the Kobo into thinking it's calling home to get ebooks from their servers, but you're accessing your own instance of Calibre-web.
This makes my workflow of adding a new ebook as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.
> 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, hosting the library on another computer or network share is not supported, and you can't use an external DB provider e.g. MySQL.
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>as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.
Wow, sounds really nice, you got my attention! My stack to achieve the same result is a bit more complicated: I installed KOreader on my device, and it can read calibre's OPDS catalog feed. KOreader has some other niceties that I enjoy, mostly wallabag support.
How do you trick the native kodo firmware? Does it work outside your home network?
Yes it does, I use a reverse proxy with ssl and have CW on its own subdomain.
There's a plain text config file on the Kobo's memory and one of the config options is the store URL. CW generates you a new one tied to your local CW account in your instance and you replace the standard URL. You can do multi user stuff that way. You can also define a "shelf" and only books on that shelf will sync if you wish, handy if you have a large collection or a small memory Kobo.
The guide on setting up the Kobo sync feature is here: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio...
> How do you trick the native kodo firmware?
You just change the API endpoint in some file in .kobo on the device.
> Does it work outside your home network?
If you expose calibre-web publicly, sure. In my experience it takes a bit of effort to do that right, but it's doable.
Its wiki is fairly good and usually answers all the questions I have: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio...
Looks cool, but the wiki calls out that it can't sync reading progress between devices. Which, I understand--how Kobo does it is probably not well-documented. But without that, the solution doesn't seem any better than the Dropbox support with certain Kobo models. It would only be of interest to me if I could sync e.g. my Sage before putting it down and pick up my Clara somewhere else and be able to find my place in the books I'm currently reading.
Not even the Dropbox integration does this yet with sideloaded books, though. I think KOReader might be the only one that has pulled it off so far.
According to some posts (https://www.reddit.com/r/kobo/comments/qhdmt2/how_does_the_k...), the Kobo will sync reading process with other Kobos for kepubs only.
Thanks for the heads up on this project. I use Calibre but I find it highly idiosyncratic. This fits my needs better.
awesome suggestion, just installed and it worked well, going to use it from a vps.
question is that, how safe this is? I need add https and a strong password, is there a docker for that?
(edit: found the link to set up reverse proxy with docker): https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/calibre-web
> there are some serious flaws with ... its maintainer.
Such as?
> Fortunately, plugin developers were given over half a year to port their plugins, so most have already been ported.
I do admire this optimism and good faith. But no... many will not have ported until users start complaining that X plugin no longer works. Expect a few more months.
Specifically the amazon decryption ones are quite fussy - which to me seems quite critical
The full text search feature is surprisingly useful. Just searched my ~800 books for keywords like "tree traversal" or "assoc" to find books that I wouldn't have suspected to deal with these topics (`assoc` being a Lisp keyword searching for entries in association lists [1]).
And I already had ways to search within contents of my books via "HoudahSpot" (an excelent MacOS tool that uses Spotlight search to sift through all my files and present the results in a tabular view), or via command line using `mdfind` [2]
[1] https://jtra.cz/stuff/lisp/sclr/assoc.html
[2] For example searching all PDF files for a certain keyword:
I wonder how well it scales, I have a rather large collection and would love to use this. As long as the index is much smaller than the source files, and it doesn't search by re-reading the files from disk I'll give it a go.
Magical piece of software. I don't know how Android has couple of good e-readers but desktop only has Calibre.
Foliate on desktop is one of the best readers I've used. You can get Calibre to open books in Foliate instead of the internal viewer
there is koreader for android. That even got a sync with calibre server feature or access web library feature if I remember right.
I prefer it on my android phone, because it is one of the few that does true black as standard.
koreader works on desktop too https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases
koreader is great and also works on (some?) kobo devices.
Calibre is a great piece of software. Nothing substantial to add, just want to give a shout out as a long time user (about a decade now).
Agreed. Been using it over a decade. It is one of the first things that I install on my PCs.
Calibre is awesome to use on desktop. But as someone who wants to sync his Calibre library with other devices (iphone + ipad), it gets really frustrating.
Do you want to sync the whole library with the iphone or just search and download from the iphone? Calibre can be used to just transfer a few books by installing the calibre app on the phone and select books on the computer to transfer. There are also solutions for searching and downloading books from the phone but I haven't tried them much, found it much easier to use the computer to do that.
I can't fit my library on the phone so haven't even thought of syncing the whole thing.
I want to sync the whole thing. Apple Books ineptly forces you to manually copy all of the books themselves to each device, but then syncs collections that you've set up to organize them.
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I've been using KyBook 3 http://kybook-reader.com
Enable the Calibre web server, then use KyBook to connect to it and download the books you want while on the same network as the Calibre server. You can set up a public URL if you want to access them remotely
I do something similar by running Calibre Web on a raspberry pi and then using KyBooks on my devices. It works really well.
I use dropbox for syncing. I point my calibre library to the dropbox folder, and in my ipad I open the dropbox app and "share" the book I want to read to the Books app.
The calibre manual warns against using dropbox on the main library folder, users have lost their complete libraray doing that. Might want to at least pause dropbox while running calibre.
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The Calibre Sync app for iOS is pretty good.
Awesome is disbutable. The amount of awesome parts is equal to the amount of aweful parts. Calibre is really a prime example of product which shines despite the manifold deep flaws. And this makes it really problematic, as it seems to dominate it's space so strong, that no many even care to work on an alternatives. Very problematic for the health of the ebook-space.
Let's say it differently. It is the best ebook manager by far, because for 90% of features it's basically the only one...
I think you should start an alternative.
It is easy to criticize, but it takes a toll to fix books in ebook processing. I had to do some minor ePub work and I was like „WHAT, that’s the standard? This can’t be right“ but yeah the formats are trash and complicated. To be dedicated over a decade to fix and develop software is hard.
"Awesome" is a serious stretch.
It's incredibly cumbersome to set up for even the most basic, common tasks that everyone wants to do. He's forced to release constant updates because he refuses to separate the news processing code from the main application code (the processing "recipes" should be separately distributed) and worse, there's no auto-updater, so keeping the application up to date is a pain in the ass. The UI is outdated, hostile to users in general, and not low/impaired-vision friendly (six icons in the standard main toolbar all look virtually identical save for very minor differences, and Goval loves different shades of grey, reducing contrast.)
Last but not least: it's almost exclusively developed by one person (a problem by itself for such a large and widely used project) who is infamous for being at best abrasive and at worst an asshole - and not a particularly good programmer. The commit history is an absolute mess to try and navigate because he seems to have "save" and "commit" confused.
Edit: the very link itself is a perfect example of how Goyal seems to have zero awareness or care for others. Why do I have to click to expand text items in release notes? And he says that some plugins are no longer compatible because of the switch to Qt6. Which ones?
He's hardly an asshole if he's giving us a useful, free, open-source piece of software all by himself. If you don't like it, write your own.
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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?
FBReader is cross-platform and I believe it sync's the way you want.
This looks like it might be really good, there's no PDF support on iOS though sadly.
Warning! By default Calibre modifies files every time you open them. You have to disable reading position saving to stop that.
Where do you like to find ebooks? I found:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ | The classic source for free ebooks
https://standardebooks.org/ | Sources hosted on GitHub
Others?
https://libgen.rs
I really love Calibre and I've been using it for more than a decade. But one thing I'd really hope to see that hasn't happened yet is support for alternative database backends. Unfortunately if you have enough ebooks, it becomes impossible for the Calibre software to scale to handling them and a big piece of this is internal limits placed on the size of its database file. I have such a large quantity of ebooks on my media server (terabytes of ebooks) and have never been able to successfully add all of them to Calibre to be managed as a single library.
I'm glad to see that development continues, this has been an utterly essential tool as I've switched between different ebook readers over the years.
I have used Calibre for years. It's utilitarian and I can usually get it to do what I need. The weird things I need--editing the metadata of ebooks, converting between formats (including to Amazon's weird KFX using a plugin that piggybacks on Amazon's official kindle tools).
Yeah, it's not some pretty mainstream app. But managing media files of any kind is a power user / nerd activity. Frankly it's a relief to to have to help people out with their completely fucked iTunes anymore. Personally I use Calibre for ebooks, and Swinsian (and tools like MP3Tagger). Ideally I'd have some sort of app that was like classic file-management-only iTunes but instead of iPod syncing, it would be a Plex or similar server for music and video.
Full-text search is huge!! I've been using ripgrep-all, and running up against issues with the maximum cache size. Can't wait to try this out, hope it supports virtual libraries, hope it works with PDFs.
Calibre is great but if you specifically want full text search of ebooks and a multitude of document types then check out Recoll: http://www.recoll.org/
Would love to see an Audio book plugin.
plug-in
Hahaha, look at the infants down-modding INFORMATION.
Here's another worldview-shaker: You log into something. You don't "login" to something.
This is timely, I was looking for builds I could use on my Raspberry Pi yesterday. Thanks!
Note: I'm not seeing the release available on the website, but it's available in the Github repo.
The negative news is that you need at least mac os 10.15.
Maybe https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/ is helpful to some.
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.
Actually I don't need any version of Mac OS at all.
Odd to see a "We value your privacy" popup on the website for an open source project. Both that they do feel the need to annoy their users at all when they could just not collect any data and that they resort to the insincere business speak wording. And of course none of the listed "legitimate interests" are actually legitimate.
Why do people like calibre?
Despite the godawful UI, feature-wise it's a one of a kind software, so some people are forced to use it.
> Despite the godawful UI
Simple is beautiful. It's also not that hard to use.
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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.
I wish most software would be like Calibre. Feature-packed yet discoverable with an almost no bullshit / no wasted space UI
It does what people want/need - - mostly conversions, metadata edition and sync with an e-reader - with a relatively frictionless interface.
I use it to convert ebook formats and remove DRM when needed, it does that efficiently and easily, I am not aware of any serious competitors.
I don't like it but it's the best we have. If there would be more lightweight, prettier alternative I'd use that but for now there really isn't an alternative and I'm grateful for the author to keep working on it.
for the same reason I like Emacs. It's just about the only ebook tool that literally does everything. From being a good reader in itself, to conversion, to mailing books to my kindle etc.
For way too many years, there was no other way to read Apple's own E-books on a Mac. It was baffling. That's how I discovered Calibre.
Now that Books was finally added to Mac OS, I've put all of them in there so I can sync collections across all my (albeit Apple-only) devices.
I've been using it for years and I begrudge/resent it every time I have to use it; I only use it as little as possible. I'm baffled by all the people who heap praise on it.
I suspect the reason you have to use it is because it does things that no other piece of software does. Some people find that praiseworthy.
I really like the ability to email an ebook to my Kindle, even auto-converting it to the correct format.
afaik it's the only ebook manager + automatic metadata search + conversion tool between multiple formats that exists. Unfortunately for me, the author refuse to implement a functionality to reuse an existing book repository architecture
I love Calibre but "sudo && wget | sh" installation on Linux makes me cringe. I wish there is an apk or snap.
I mean, you could just install it from your package manager like a normal person. Those instructions are for when your are on some some obscure distro that doesn't package it, but you still want some way of getting it on your system.
Edit: I know on the download page it says "Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below."
But that is bad advice. If you want a recent package, then use a distro that frequently updates it's packages. Most people using distros with ancient packages, (Debian, Slackware) _want_ it that way!
https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.calibre_ebook.calibre
I love the idea of Calibre, but I just have no idea how to use it. Whenever I try, I get stuck in some kind of confused loop where I've added things to it, but all attempts to access them just loop back to Calibre. In other words, I can't get it to let me actually read anything.
That must be quite frustrating. FWIW, I have had the opposite experience - Calibre's always just worked. My various ereaders have been detected automatically, and plugins generally have worked without hassle. For me it's a been a great, reliable piece of software.
What are you trying? Do you want to read things with Calibre's built in reader, another desktop reader, sync them to a device (i.e. use the desktop GUI to copy files to a device), download them to a device via the content server or what?
I don't care how I read my stuff, I just want to read it. Calibre says it supports lots of formats, but somehow I can't find or figure out the magic inputs or config options to have it display something to me so I can read it.
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I haven't used Calibre GUI but have many times used its tool ebook-convert.
Really very useful.
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert....
Heads up for Windows users that Calibre 6 now requires Windows 11 or Windows 10 64-bit.
Does it scale correctly on windows yet? Is that part of QT6?
We made an app in Qt 5 (all QML) that scales well on Windows, so I don't know what the problem would be.
We did have to add special cases for font sizes on Windows, because auto-sized fonts looked like shit there, whereas on Mac they looked fine.
6.0 scales correctly for me on win 11.
Solid update, thanks Kovid & contributors!
Apple silicon support is ace, startup times on my M1 Pro have improved immensely from >6s down to 1s.