
Announcing Calibre 2.0 - cleverjake
http://blog.calibre-ebook.com/2014/08/announcing-calibre-20.html
======
vj44
I'm sure calibre 2.0 is a great technical feat, and kudos for all the work put
into this product, but judging by the screenshot the user interface is equally
clunky as in 1.0. This software does mostly everything I need it for to
convert ebooks... but can you, the authors, please improve the UI?

~~~
w1ntermute
Considering that it's free and open source, and that I use Calibre for a
fraction of a percent of the time that I do actually reading the books on my
Kindle that I loaded using Calibre, I would rather that the creator of Calibre
focused on the technical details, such as making sure that the file
conversion/transmission is working correctly.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
While that's absolutely desirable in terms of priority, calibre's UI has been
not merely ugly for its entire six-year history, it's been a jet-powered
unicycle ride to Crazytown for its entire six-year history. We're talking
about things like just following generally accepted conventions for how to
structure GUI menus.

I don't think this is a matter of calibre de-prioritizing fixing the UI. I'm
pretty sure it's a conscious choice. _They_ know their UI backward and forward
and it works for them, therefore anyone who complains about the UI Just
Doesn't Get It. That unicycle is BEAUTIFUL, dammit.

~~~
keithpeter
_"...a jet-powered unicycle ride to Crazytown..."_

I'd like to see a few more jet-powered unicycles rides. They sound fun.
Functionality, especially in niche software, is _sometimes_ more important
than some kind of idealised smooth workflow.

The nearest physical analogue I can conjure up is to contrast a 'sound system'
as used in dances in church halls and community centres round here (wardrobe
sized speaker cabinets with 18" paper cone speakers, horn tweeters, all
patched into a rack based preamplifier that only the constructor and a few
close associates know how to navigate) and a domestic hifi by (say) Denon.
Both have their place.

~~~
unfamiliar
>Functionality, especially in niche software, is sometimes more important than
some kind of idealised smooth workflow.

I buy this argument for professional GIS software, database management
software, etc. But come one, Calibre basically has 3 purposes: keep a library
of ebooks, convert them between formats, transfer to devices. It shouldn't be
so complicated. Every time I go open it I have to relearn how it works.

~~~
w1ntermute
> Every time I go open it I have to relearn how it works.

Then you must be doing something wrong. I use Calibre very infrequently, and
yet I've never had any trouble remembering how to convert a book and load it
onto my Kindle.

------
bowlofpetunias
I have a love-hate relationship with Calibre. As a way to manage my ebooks,
and especially overcoming the insanity that is DRM, Calibre is a lifesaver. I
wouldn't even be buying ebooks if it wasn't for Calibre. (I only bought a
Kindle after making sure I could crack the DRM and actually _own_ the books I
paid for.)

However, the user interface of Calibre is one of the worst I've ever
encountered. It looks and feels like a teenagers first attempt at creating a
desktop software prototype back in 1995. (Having to go to the website to
download and install every single new minor release also feels like something
from a bygone era.)

I donate to Calibre because I need it to continue existing, but I have no love
for it.

~~~
walterbell
Calibre is open-source and seems to be a Qt +PyQt front-end to a sqlite
database, fairly mainstream dev tools. But it doesn't seem to have an active
development community with multiple contributors, except for plugins. Anyone
know why?

~~~
DanBC
Toxic maintainer. Kovid Goyal is known to be abrasive. I'm looking for good
examples. But maybe I've just seen the other end of the arguments and he's
okay?

I'm guessing the best bits are hidden here:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/](https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/)

Like eg this one:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934](https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934)

~~~
teraflop
And of course the infamous "calibre-mount-helper" fiasco:
[http://lwn.net/Articles/465311/](http://lwn.net/Articles/465311/)

~~~
donniezazen
Wow he doesn't have to try to be infamous.

------
skant
The author of Calibre claims: _In my opinion, calibre’s graphic interface is
damn good_ [1]

I don't think the author is going to make any strides towards
improving/changing the UI

[1][http://features.en.softonic.com/interview-kovid-goyal-
creato...](http://features.en.softonic.com/interview-kovid-goyal-creator-of-
calibre)

~~~
droopyEyelids
I agree with him. It's usable, and easy to understand.

It doesn't follow the fads of our time, and thats fine. I struggle to
understand why such a superficial demand is at the top of hacker news.

Asking every useful software project to hire designers so it fits the Apple
Guidelines (yes I'm exaggerating) seems both unproductive and more likely to
drive the programming endeavor further out of the apartments of inventive
people and into VCistan

~~~
ahknight
There's a place between hot as hell and cold as a witch's tit that we call
Earth. Let's not forget that.

The interface is an unmitigated disaster from tip to toe. There's too much
going on. It doesn't need to get hit with the iBooks stick to make it better;
it just needs someone with half a clue to delete half the buttons, tabs,
modals, windows, panes, lists, checkboxes, and other crap.

Put another way: Eclipse is not the program you want to base your design on.

------
llasram
In 2008-2009 I was probably the second biggest commiter to Calibre (still #4
according to github), focusing entirely on the conversion pipeline and format
support. I'm still proud of the OEB modeling as some of the finest OO code
I've written, or probably will write now that I've moved on to functional.

For everyone complaining about the UI and management functionality, realize
that you are not the target audience. Head over to www.mobileread.com, look at
the Calibre forum and the praise Kovid gets, and you'll see that he's largely
catering directly to what his core users want.

It is interesting that Calibre and mobileread are still around, and relatively
little changed. I lost interest and moved on once pretty much every
commercially-available e-book became available in EPUB format. What's left is
a very, very specialized core of enthusiasts.

~~~
izacus
I don't understand, how can a sane UI have a target audience?

------
marianminds
One thing that really sucks still is the conversion of PDFs (for e.g. journal
articles) into formats suitable for e-ink readers. I've tinkered with its
heuristic processing and regex formatting, but I'd never considered manually
touching up the final .epub as it comes. If their ebook editor is any good I
might start reading journal articles again.

~~~
Maakuth
This converter is reasonable:
[http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/](http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/) I wonder if
someone has done a Calibre plugin for it.

~~~
ibrahima
Hey, that's pretty neat, I was just thinking it shouldn't be that hard to do
something like that. I would love to be able to read academic papers on my
Kindle Paperwhite, this might help with that. Reading on a regular tablet is a
bit annoying at times.

~~~
mikebike
I've used k2pdfopt for reading two-column formatted academic papers on Kindle
Paperwhite, it works great.

------
nebulous1
I don't suppose he's backtracked on his awful position on auto-updates?

~~~
fineIllregister
Someone has packaged it for Windows using the Chocolatey NuGet package
manager:

[http://chocolatey.org/packages/calibre](http://chocolatey.org/packages/calibre)

I'm sure OS X has something similar, but I wouldn't know where to find it.

~~~
cooper12
OSX has homebrew-cask [0, 1], which is built on homebrew to distribute
binaries. I checked and a formula for calibre is present. [2]

[0]: [http://caskroom.io/](http://caskroom.io/) [1]:
[https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-
cask](https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask) [2]:
[https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-
cask/blob/master/Casks/...](https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-
cask/blob/master/Casks/calibre.rb)

~~~
dewey
Unfortunately there's still no proper "upgrade" command for cask, there's a
lengthy discussion on how to deal with that on their issue tracker [0] though.
For now you'll still have to rely on a workaround.

Currently I'm using an alias to clear the old binary and download the new one.
[1]

[0] [https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-
cask/issues/309](https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/issues/309)

[1] [https://blog.notmyhostna.me/make-calibre-updates-less-
annoyi...](https://blog.notmyhostna.me/make-calibre-updates-less-annoying/)

------
maxerickson
Does it still refuse to index without managing?

A quick glance at the documentation says yes.

~~~
isaacdl
What do you mean by that?

~~~
maxerickson
It comes with a library. A media library can read metadata from content and
use that to build up an index, or it can monkey around with the location of
the content by copying or moving it to some special folder and then read the
metadata there.

Ideally, software supports both ways of working (lots of people prefer to have
the software take over, lots of people are worried this will make a mess, or
don't want to live with some constraint the software imposes, or whatever).

Calibre will only index content imported into its library.

------
holychiz
so much hate for the UI! personally, it works and works well for its intended
purpose. To me, it's even intuitive at times. By that virtue, it's already
better than 90% of software out there, free or not. Can it be better? sure,
like everything else in life. Now that I know that the dev is abrasive from
other HN comments, i've got even more respect for him, because of the heavier
load he has to carried. :)

~~~
philbarr
Agreed! Personally I feel that since he writes and maintains it himself he can
be as argumentative as he likes. It's not like he's the first - check out
Linus Torvalds for the canonical abrasive open source guy.

And they're right. It's free, you don't like it, go bloody well right it
yourself.

~~~
unfamiliar
There is a big difference between the kind of rudeness the Calibre developer
is known for versus the zero-tolerance-for-bullshit that Linus is known for.

Nobody is claiming he is obliged to act differently. Everyone is just agreeing
that he is an asshole and that trying to work with him would be a waste of
time. By all means adopt his attitude if you admire it; you'll get the same
sentiment from the community.

------
dredmorbius
Can someone point to a good Calibre tutorial?

My use-case: I download material in various formats from online, mostly in
PDF, ePub, or some markup format (LaTeX, Markdown, HTML, etc.) I've got a
large set of downloads, which I then try to import into Calibre. This is in
support of a large research project.

1\. It's difficult to tell what I've imported and what I haven't.

2\. The import process itself is slow. Enough so that I'll fire it up, get
caught up in other stuff, and ... well, tend not to get back to it.

3\. The corpus is fairly large: around 1000 books and papers, plus another
5,000 others pulled from web archives.

4\. Tracking this by metadata is crucial. Title, author, publication date, and
tags. Managing _that_ is a headache on its own, especially adding metadata to
works / confirming automatically extracted content is accurate.

5\. Once I've got the information organized, reading, referencing, annotating,
and other tasks should be supported.

Again: calibre is about the only tool out there I'm familiar with, but it's a
pain. Zotero and various LaTeX bibliographic tools are also of some use.

------
jrvarela56
Does anyone have a decent webapp to replace this? Interested in building one
since I haven't found a viable option. As of now I use Calibre and set my
folder to Dropbox so I can access books.

~~~
edent
I use COPS as a Web frontend. [http://blog.slucas.fr/en/oss/calibre-opds-php-
server](http://blog.slucas.fr/en/oss/calibre-opds-php-server)

------
necrodome
I am trying to find a solution to ditch calibre(at least for library
management) completely, and with the advent of cheap android eink devices,
this seems more possible now. A simple app that communicates with a web
backend to manage my library on such a device would be enough.

one recently released such device is Boyue T62
([http://www.banggood.com/Boyue-T62-8G-Dual-Core-6-Inch-
WIFI-A...](http://www.banggood.com/Boyue-T62-8G-Dual-Core-6-Inch-WIFI-Android-
Ebook-Reader-p-942029.html)) Here is an overview (the review is for the same
device, just rebranded and with previos generation specs) [http://blog.the-
ebook-reader.com/2014/08/11/icarus-illumina-...](http://blog.the-ebook-
reader.com/2014/08/11/icarus-illumina-hd-with-android-4-2-now-selling-on-
amazon)

You also get much better pdf reading capabilities with these devices.

Until the next generation displays for reading come into play, these look much
better overall than kindle, nook, etc.

------
yuribit
Is there some Calibre plugin to convert scientific articles with math formulas
to epub or mobi?

~~~
x0x0
I'm guessing that's a very hard problem, but I'd love to hear otherwise.

If you go the standard route: write in latex then pdflatex, you have no
information in the pdf as to what those symbols are, right? So this is pretty
close to mathematical ocr, with all of the weird symbols that math alone uses
and the various meanings of different lengths of underbar or overbar in the
article. Am I wrong? Is there more information left in the pdf? Obviously you
can just extract images from the pdf and put that into epub, but it's a crappy
solution at best.

For a long time, I've wished for something that could ocr handwritten math and
make even a shitty pass at ocr-ing to latex. There appears to be no such
software. I doubt there's a big market, but there are a lot of people being
paid $15+/hour to latex up written math...

~~~
josu
I think that the solution is much more simple.

Print formula > Convert formula to image (screencap) > Paste image

~~~
x0x0
the whole point is to have vector math, not raster, particularly to well
support zooming in and out on small devices

~~~
audreyt
Rasterize at 900dpi, then? Even on small devices that would support a ~3x zoom
without compromising visual quality versus vector.

In EPUB3 readers with full <canvas> support one can translate the paint
primitives via pdf.js into JS, too.

------
dredmorbius
I'll take a look at this, as my long rant on what's wrong with browsers[1]
basically ends up with the admission that something along the lines of Calibre
or Zotero is probably more of what I want from a reading app: the ability to
manage a library of works, local, networked, or on the Web, with a highly
uniform presentation (ignore virtually _all_ document formatting in favor of
my own preferences).

From my relatively light explorations of Calibre to date (v. 1.25 on Debian
jessie/sid):

⚫ The UI is clunky. Especially when trying to edit / capture bibliographic
information I've found it beyond frustrating.

⚫ The built-in readers are severely brain-damaged and I've found no way to
change them. The PDF reader is complete and total fail, the eBook reader isn't
much better, and I seem to recall that accessing HTML docs is similarly
frustrating.

By contrast, I've been impressed by the Moon+Reader Android eBook reader,
generally like the Readability online (Web) reader and Android app, and had
found a Debian eBook reader that was fairly decent client -- fbreader. Its
main disadvantage is in not having the ability to set a maximum content width.
I find that 40-45 em is my preferred width in general. Among fbreader's
frustrations: I cannot define a stylesheet, though I can apply a selected set
of styles (defining margin widths, e.g., but not the _text_ width, which is
frustrating). The book I've presently got loaded is either right or center
justified -- the left margin is ragged, again, frustrating. And text doesn't
advance on a <space>, like virtually any other Linux pager.

If calibre readily supported alternative clients, I'd be a lot happier with
it.

⚫ The ability to include / reference / convert Web content would be somewhere
north of awesome. There's still a large amount of information online that I
reference, but would prefer to archive or cache locally, and/or convert to
more useful formats (usually ePub or PDF).

⚫ Optimizing viewing experiences for wide-format, vertically-challenged
screens would be hugely useful. 16:9 display ratios mean vertical space is at
an _absolute premium_. Most PDF viewers are utterly brain-dead in this regard
(evince, for example, requires four manual repositionings to view a typical
2-up document). The Internet Archive's BookReader does an excellent job of
consider _positioning_ content and _paging through it_ as two separate
functions. I strongly recommend taking some UI notes from it.
[https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader](https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader)

Alternatively, the old 'gv' ghostscript Postscript and PDF reader will page
through documents in a highly sensible fashion: top-bottom, left-right. Why
this was achieved in 1992 while PDF readers of the subsequent 22 years have
utterly blundered in this regard escapes me.

That said, I'm looking forward to this showing up in Debian's repos (I've got
v1.25 presently).

________________________________

Notes:

1\.
[http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_b...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/)

~~~
walterbell
Calibre can be configured to use the OS defaults for reading specific file
extensions. The option is buried somewhere in the preferences menu of Calibre.

On Windows, OSS SumatraPDF will read pdf, epub, djvi, fb, chm and more. You
can preset 2up fullscreen & other options, including the carnival yellow
default background. It's minimal and can be locked down more than Acrobat, but
has still had a handful of public security vulns (much less than Acrobat),
[http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-
read...](http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html)

On iOS, Marvin is an epub reading app which integrates well with Calibre and
includes screen temperature adjustment (similar to Fl.ux) for reading at
night.

~~~
dredmorbius
I use Linux (mentioned though not explicitly stated in my comment above). I've
dug for config options and haven't found it. I've also searched for docs and
posted on several forums without finding any resolution for this.

~~~
walterbell
Preferences -> Behavior

On the bottom right quadrant of the panel, "Use internal viewer for:"

Clear the checkboxes for each desired format.

