Comment by matthberg
3 years ago
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).
What’s there to manage? They are files. Read a book, copy a new book over, delete old book. A file manager does all that, and is simpler and easier.
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Yeah, I wanted to separate the conversion code into another package, but it's all so tangled
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.
[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.
The deDRM seems interesting. Is that standard? I will look into it. I have many books locked away on kindle.