
Calibre version 1.0 released - kseistrup
http://calibre-ebook.com/new-in/ten
======
bowlofpetunias
Calibre (and the plugins to remove DRM) is the only thing that makes e-books
worthwhile, despite still being overpriced. I wouldn't be wasting money on
e-books if I couldn't use them as freely as physical books.

iPad, Kindle, Nook etcetera, it's all the same incompatible DRM-crippled crap.
Without the existence of Calibre it's pretty much impossible to have your own
virtual library.

This software should get way more credit and support. Especially from
publishers that support DRM-free books, like O'Reilly.

~~~
anonymouz
I find e-books very convenient to read, but am annoyed that it is harder to
lend them to friends (if they themselves don't have a reader), and that I have
nothing to put on my shelf.

What I really wish for would be someone to offer physical books at price X and
the combo physical book + DRM-free ebook at price X+0.50€ or X+1€ or something
small like that. (I can understand that e-books by themselves are not dirt
cheap, since most of the cost goes does not come from the printing and
physical distribution process. But in a bundle with a physical book that is
already paid for through the price of the physical book, so one just needs to
tack on a little bit to make a nice profit). I'd take that option everytime,
turning the small extra into almost 100% profit.

~~~
mikevm
> and that I have nothing to put on my shelf.

Why do you need anything to put on a shelf?

I, for one, am glad that books don't need to take up physical space anymore.

~~~
dagw
_Why do you need anything to put on a shelf?_

Because it adds to the room. I realize this is very much a question of
personal taste, but I find that a room with a wall covered in books can be a
beautiful design detail that adds warmth and character to a room. Plus
physical books are pretty awesome in their own right.

~~~
zanny
I get it is asthetic taste, but I _love_ whenever I move somewhere and I
literally have _nothing_ but white walls, bare floors, a desk, a bed, and a
few drawers of clothes and necesssary accessories.

It feels very clean to me. I don't like cluttering up space for no reason than
to occupy it.

~~~
dagw
As I said, it's all a matter of taste, but I love 'clutter'. As long as it's
my clutter placed by me to my exact specifications (other peoples clutter is
different matter all together). I find it really hard to concentrate or relax
in a too sterile environment.

~~~
mindcrime
Same here. I especially like being surrounded by books. This is probably why I
have WAY too many books in my apartment (it looks like the apartment of the
book guy in that movie _Unfaithful_ but more cluttered) and why I often go sit
at the Barnes & Noble cafe to work, as opposed to going to, say, Starbucks or
Panera Bread.

I'm a fan of e-books and definitely think they have their place (I've
purchased a total of 3 Nook devices over the years), but I am not ready to
wholesale walk away from dead-tree books either.

------
erez
I've been using Calibre for several years now. It's managing my ebook library
on every machine and I have yet to encounter a bug in any of its features. I
use it to sync to my Nook, handle book metadata, convert from format to
format, all without a hitch. In any ebook community Calibre has long since
become the standard application. Many of the question are simply answered
"install Calibre, it has what you need".

Kovid Goyal, the creator of Calibre has been, for me, as much of a poster-
child of FOSS as Firefox or Linux. He has a point release every week, and you
could just update the software without worry - nothing would break. He's open
and frank about the development process - nothing hidden, or "thrown over the
wall" no open-core features to abuse the power user, no excuses for stuff that
isn't ready to release.

I have no idea why only now he reached 1.0 - it's been feature complete for my
needs for a couple of years now. But as it stands, I wish to congratulate him
for reaching the milestone and to thank him and everyone who supports the
project - by submitting code, patches, bug reports, helping in the forums,
donating money, and using the software.

~~~
stevekemp
I have to admit I was soured on the development when I read the how security
issues were handled:

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027](https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027)

~~~
rogerbinns
LWN did an analysis of the bug and response [1]. This issue aside, what I
don't like about Calibre is it trying to be a library and device management
solution, with a small amount of conversion on the side, while all I am
interested in is the conversion. (I use a dropbox folder for library
management.) The device management is what led to the suid security holes in
the first place.

[1] [http://lwn.net/Articles/465311/](http://lwn.net/Articles/465311/)

~~~
mmsimanga
I think it is rather unfair to criticise Calibre for being a one stop shop for
all things ebook. For none technical people who I would assume are the
majority of people reading books this is exactly what they need. Trying to get
them to use different applications for different aspects of ebook library
management will be a nightmare for whoever is trying to help them out into the
world of ebooks.

------
driverdan
I use Calibre and it's great to see how far it has come. That said, let's not
pretend it's all kittens and rainbows.

It has all the problems people associate with GUI based FOSS. The UI is pretty
terrible. It looks and feels like FOSS from seven years ago. It has about a
million prefs / settings buried many layers down in a very confusing series of
prefs dialogs. It shouldn't take you 3 hours to configure an ebook reader. It
should just come with sane settings out of the box. As someone else remarked
the UI often feels slow / sluggish.

The app is 253MB (OS X version)! Is it just me or is that crazy?

~~~
sbarre
The beauty of FOSS is you can take your criticism and turn it into action by
contributing to make it better!

~~~
MichaelGG
I'm not sure if this was sarcasm, or simple platitudes about open source, but
this whole "contribute to make it better" is really a hit-and-miss affair.
Best case scenario is that the code is clear, easy to update the UI, and the
only reason it hasn't been done is because no one cares about the UI. That
seems incredibly unlikely (the caring part - someone built it, maintains it,
and will probably be upset if you "fix" it).

On other projects, you first get a huge range of code complexity/quality,
making contributing perhaps simply not feasible. After that, you can run into
all sorts of stuff. My real world experience:

    
    
      "We won't take this because we use linked lists, not hashtables, because <original maintainer> likes linked lists." 
      "We won't fix this broken XML parser because this code is fast." 
      "Why did you fork and create those modules without telling us? That's really rude to all of us that spent so much time on this." (In response to an announcement a company had ported a project to another platform, and wanted feedback and was going to open all their work. They ended up just keeping it internally.)
    

And some of that is on projects that are actually very friendly otherwise and
to which I've contributed large and successful pieces. (To those involved if
you happen to read this: you already know my criticisms ;)).

In short, the whole "hey it's open so go fix it" is a rather trite
simplification. It does not reflect the usual or even possible experience for
the majority of users.

~~~
sbarre
It wasn't really sarcastic, but it was my intention to point out that, unlike
closed source, if your complaint about open source software UI means _that
much_ to you, you do have the option of actually putting your time where your
mouth is, and helping solve the problem that is bothering you.

Your personal anecdotes are less about the software being open source and
perhaps more about a lack of coordination with the existing developers. Every
time I've contributed to an OSS project, I've opened a dialogue with the
existing team ahead of time and had my ideas vetted before I put in a bunch of
work. That or (now in the Github era) they were tiny/trivial patches where I
wouldn't mind if my pull requests get ignored.

With closed source software that has shitty UI (and there's lots of that too),
you have to just live with it...

------
hack_edu
Now, the real question is whether or not Kovid Goyal (the maintainer) releases
his iron grip on development. For years, seemingly any bugs are features,
EVERY TIME. Good luck getting a commit accepted! You'll probably get an
incredibly passive aggressive reply about why he doesn't see a need for it, no
matter how obvious and simple to execute.

Can we get a real UI, autoupdates (and without needing to download the whole
giant binary every time), a database that doesn't choke on realistically large
libraries? How shaving some time off of the 45 seconds the application takes
make an Amazon API call to grab metadata and a tiny cover image? These are
just the obvious, major issues that have been present for years now.

Calibre is already that half-assed community project cliche. One that has so
much potential at first, but falls apart since no one can see the forest among
the trees. Has been for a while now.

~~~
dfc
A great example of this (IMHO) is the networkmanager bug:

[http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=668899](http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=668899)

[http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=125693](http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=125693)

I gave up on calibre largely due to the irratation caused by this bug. Sure
the UI is not great but I could deal with the UI. I keep networkmanager
installed on my laptop to keep some oddball VPN profiles available. 80% of the
time I have NM disabled, pidgin and a host of other apps have no problem with
NM being disabled.

------
kriro
Calibre is pretty awesome, congratulations to the team.

"Unfortunately" most of my books are non-fictional/science/textbooks etc. For
the few fiction books I read, I pretty much use ebooks unless it's a comicbook
or maybe some fine leather collectors item.

My main problem is that I scribble in, marker (multiple colors), take note,
underline and do all kinds of stuff with my non-fiction books. I researched
and the options to do all that were pretty underwhelming last time I checked.
If any of you know about good "texbook tools" I'd be all ears.

I think for textbooks I'll never get used to ebooks. I also like being able to
flip through them quickly, scan the content on a quick flip and so forth. The
one major advantage of ebooks for my typical use cases is full text search
(and theoretically links to other books on quotes and so forth).

~~~
nekopa
I use goodreader on the iPad the same way you use textbooks. Only on the PDFs,
but you can type, highlight, write, scribble draw all over the PDF. One
feature that I like is I can then export just the typed up notes, so I have my
own kind of cliff notes version of a book. Good if you follow the 'How to read
a book' methodology.

~~~
kriro
This sounds interesting. I'll check it out...have been thinking about an iPad
anyways because it has good support for virtual baordgames :)

Thx

------
ebtalley
I have liked Calibre when I have used it a few times, but the GUI is pretty
slow compared to most software these days. I attributed it to using python,
but maybe thats not the case? has anyone else found some speed hacks that make
it easier to use? (or maybe its time for me to upgrade the machine it resides
on?)

~~~
Blahah
There are plenty of blazing fast GUIs written in python; that's not the
problem.

~~~
slashclee
Such as... ?

~~~
signed0
Sublime Text 2 & 3.

~~~
krelian
Sublime Text 2 is written in C++

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822114)

------
b4d
Any way to automatize updates on Mac, every time I open Calibre there is a new
version and going on the site, download and manually installing is so 199X? :)

~~~
officemonkey
One way to get over that is to simply not bother updating. Make a reminder for
every three months or so.

------
mavhc
I don't use Calibre to manage my library, I just use the News option, every
morning at 7am it downloads rss/websites, parses them into a book, and emails
them to amazon, so my kindle downloads them. Does mean I hardly ever get
around to reading actual books though.

------
hnha
I just wish it would not insist on forcing the user to use its library and
only its library. Just like my music I prefer to organise my ebook files
myself. With calibre that is not possible.

~~~
hannibal5
You can export files into customizable directory structure.

If you want to arrange files to directories, you can export documents into
arbitary directory structure determined by big number of attributes and even
tags.

~~~
maxerickson
Content library tools that refuse to index arbitrary content should be
considered broken. The mindset that you can only index content if the
canonical copy of the data is in your database is just awful.

It's also at least a little bit problematic that there is little support for
treating source books as special, which would be a nice feature given the fact
that the convertors are not yet perfect (and last I looked they didn't work
very hard to make semantically sensible conversions, which makes knowing the
source book that much more valuable...).

~~~
hannibal5
Calibre is not just indexing. It's also modifying data.

Of course, if Calibre would have source book concept, it could treat arbitrary
directory as sources and map converted and massaged documents and metadata to
them.

------
arocks
Calibre is not only great for ebook management but an excellent command-line
tool for converting between several ebook formats. It is like the swiss-army
knife for managing ebooks.

------
VaucGiaps
On a related note, they now accept bitcoin: [http://calibre-
ebook.com/donate](http://calibre-ebook.com/donate)

------
oleganza
Calibre accepts Bitcoin: [http://calibre-ebook.com/donate](http://calibre-
ebook.com/donate)

------
quangquach
I've used Calibre over 5 years. It's being with me from Windows, then Linux,
and now OS X, and always one of the first software installed when I setup a
new computer. Thanks for your very hard work, Kovid Goyal and other
contributors.

Despite its first 1.0 hit, for a long time, the project has been developing
too actively for me to update every minor release (every week less or more).

------
pdfmnbvcxz
This looks worth a look : [https://register.blib.us](https://register.blib.us)

It currently only supports PDF books (search/share/...), and is broader than a
book library (includes photo album support/openid/...), something related to
Calibre.

~~~
laureny
Python again, sadly. I understand the appeal but I'd really like to see such
an app written in a faster language.

~~~
pdfmnbvcxz
Most of this code is actually C/C++.

------
Havoc
Could someone help me understand why there is a x64 version? Naturally thats
great, but I don't quite see why its a priority for an ebook tool.

~~~
enscr
The conversion with heuristics enabled benefits from it.

------
AbhishekBiswal
Seven YEARS! Finally.

