Calibre's UI is an artifact from a superior and more civilized time, IMHO

Extremely functional and just a little bit incomprehensible. Compared to modern UI/UX which just slaps me with how stupid it thinks I am

> The interface, however, is like some incredible piece of outsider art, gloriously free of best practice, convention or accepted wisdom.

That was a wonderful way to put it. Excellent writing.

The UI is not the only weird part of it, probably the least weird one.

What I miss are first-class attachments (i.e. code archives and CD/floppy images) support, raw file naming (without automatic romanization of non-ASCII alphabets), flat storage (without creating a separate folder for every book). Using a Calibre-managed library from outside of Calibre (i.e. on a PocketBook reader) feels quite unnatural.

Another thing I always wanted is a simple viewer app without library management features. Like Adobe Acrobat Reader but for ePub and other book formats. The Linux app closest to this concept also comes with Calibre (Sumatra does the job on Windows). All the other book viewers I've seen insist on maintaining your library.

I agree the UI is confusing. However, I'm glad Calibre exists, solves my needs, and is so versatile. And in the end, I decided the confusing UI didn't matter all that much. I'd rather they* spent their efforts in improving stability and features rather than making a fancy intuitive UI -- assuming of course you can't have both. If you can have both, all the better!

*I'm never sure if Calibre is a one-person effort. If it is, more kudos to the author.

This is the best attitude I’ve ever seen in a rebuke of a poor interface. I wish I treated every criticism this way.

I’d really love a post that just analyzed this take.

This is how I feel about the Libby app for iPhone. What is it with book apps? https://twitter.com/bendansby/status/1334717731925417986?s=2...

Seems to me that he might do better if he put in a few tiers of "You get absolutely nothing extra for this except the thanks of Kovid and the Calibre community for supporting ongoing development." Right now all support is custom donations.

I don't want to dig up old grievances but I think most people who have had the misfortune to interact with Kovid on a personal level would agree he is not the sort of person who deserves a penny of your money.

Great reminder. Done. I wonder how much extra income he will get just because you thought to mention it.

I've recently switched to his terminal emulator Kitty and I'm similarly impressed by that! I had no idea he was also behind calibre. I definitely owe him a subscription.

Also, kitty, which is a very fast Linux terminal I use all the time.

(not to be confused with the terminal software of the same name that runs in Windows.)

Is he the sole creator? That is a sadly small sum for this work.

What an unfortunate name these days

Added support for Kobo's "series" organization feature as well. Apparently requires some janky 2-stage process because it's not done with the book's built-in metadata; you have to sync the books to the Kobo, then sync again for it to poke the special series sauce after the files are on the device.

Seems like a needlessly complicated way to do it when the books have series metadata, so props to Calibre for the extra work to support that!

Check out koreader for Kobo devices. I've been using it for a quite some time and it adds some nice Calibre features such as wireless sync. Besides that the PDF support is leaps ahead of stock Kobo

https://github.com/koreader/koreader

Agreed, I'm very happy with their Kobo support.

A great discovery for me was that Calibre can convert to KEPUB (subset of EPUB tailored for Kobo readers).

"ft" is a common ligature. When characters are often used together, fonts are often designed with those characters grouped together as their own character so they can be given certain design flair such as having the "branches" of the "f" and "t" as one continuous horizontal line. Aside from "ft," "ll" (ell ell) also often gets this treatment and others I can't recall off the top of my head. Text rendering engines will then substitute the composite character with the ligature if the ligature exists in the font being used for display. So what might have been happening is that the text engine thought that an "ft" ligature existed for the font it was using to show your book and was trying to show it, but in fact it didn't exist. But who knows at the end of the day.

More information about ligatures can be found on the Internet.

It's likely that "ft" was a ligature in the original which didn't survive the conversion (for example, if the destination font doesn't have the character ſt). Sounds like a bug, though.

Your comment is interesting and relevant.

I always used Calibre to convert normal epub files to kepub format, to be able to zoom images and other things that the Kobo doesn't do with epubs.

I didn't know I could also get kepub files from somewhere else.

Ditto. I did the same for my partner for his Lego instruction booklet collection. He have over 150 sets and managing all of his Lego booklet (through Lego official app) and the official Lego website don't have every single booklet. And those PDFs are rather large file (averaging 40+MB, some are 100MB, a few is 200MB). It wasn't feasible to keep it all in his iPad due to the storage space. So I used my desktop to handles that for him. The best thing about calibre-web, it allows him to upload the PDF and edit the metadata directly in his iPad's Safari than depending on me to put it up for him (I don't mind doing for him, just that I have terrible time management.) For him, he don't have to do manual management and it is in one place.

Right now, I am trying to set up a scrapping the metadata from few sites in calibre (Import List plugin). Because LibraryThing, WorldCatalog and Amazon are usually scrapping for books. The thing is I don't know how to do XPath expression even I tried to read the guide. I couldn't understand how the hell it work. I can understand LaTeX, Homebrew, Chocolatey, Bash, CSS documentation just fine, but XPath I am just dumbfounded.

It does also allow for conversion of EPUB -> MOBI without using the calibre standalone application. calibre-web is now my primary interface to my existing calibre database file. I keep calibre ready/installed but haven't needed it in over a year

I'm using this for my 80k+ documentation library and couldn't be happier - so easy to share your library with other users.

Kudos for your project.

Similarly, I primarily use calibre-debug CLI to extract resources from ebook.

Just a nit/aside: I'm sure the OS you are using has much older software built in. Iif on Windows, imagine the legacy that's stuck there for backwards compatibility. If on Linux, most of that is really old, updated recently perhaps, but created a long time ago. macOS is similar to Linux, though arguably worse as they dont update software that changed from gpl2 to gpl3, iirc.

There's a lot of really old software you probably use anytime you are on a computer. can't forget all of that!

as an avid calibre user myself, yay there are dozens of us! :)

I prefer calibre-web[1] and it is under active development.

[1]:https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

> Ubooquity server requires Java 8 (Oracle version).

That is rather limiting in 2021.

What made you use KOReader? I've always synced between my Calibre library and my Kindle directly and that works great.

Wait, I didn't know they where the same person. Neat.

They like real buttons, lacking flat nonsense, and densely-presented functionality. I do too, so I get the impulse to resist calls for change, but agree with you that a light-touch reorganization of some of the buttons & menus, and some filing-off of wholly-unhelpful behavioral rough edges would go a long way. It’s one of those pieces of software I’m constantly nervous using, because I’ve seen it do weird, destructive things for no other reason than some piece of the UI is “quirky”.

This makes me think of Dwarf Fortress. Weird menu system, that becomes endearing very quickly. Emacs too, now that I think of it. I love all three though.

Customizing it doesn't help? Right-click on the book text, select Preferences, select Scrolling Behavior

nah it's worse, prompts for a manual download and update.

I’ve purchased a book from Kobo before. It used the epub DRM compatible with adobe digital editions. At the time (afaik) they didn’t have a way to load it on a kindle without breaking the drm, converting it to mobi and doing a manual transfer. These days I stick with my public library (which uses overdrive and in my opinion is fantastic) or amazon in the event they don’t own ebook licenses.

Uh, LibGen?

It's because it doesn't fit into the modern zeitgeist of extreme testability and pandering to computer illiterates

Every time this kind of UI comes up in discussion, I feel like there is always someone groaning about how much extra effort and cost is involved with giving the user too many options. In fact, you could say that modern software seeks to eliminate all noncritical optionality. Combine this with gobs of pointless whitespace, an inexplicable need to humanize pretty much everything, and smother the user in unnecessary feelgood emotions...

And then people wonder why modern apps suck so much...

I think it's because integrated tools parts are often worse than the non-integrated versions and when people are forced to use them, it means removing choice.

A half-dozen well integrated mediocre tools is better than the sum of its parts, but that doesn't mean it's better than a half-dozen not-at-all integrated excellent tools.

A half-dozen pretty good tools that are well integrated is going to be excellent, but you'll still have some greybeards saying "I have to click through 12 menus to frobnicate the widget in this thing, while my old tool I could do it with a single command"

99% of "Integrated tools" fall more into the first category than the second, which makes sense; N non-integrated tools can have N parallel teams working on them, while an integrated tool cannot. This means each tool will get only a fraction of the effort in the integrated tool; it's a special case of Conway's Law.

I appreciate the thought but I think there's a sort of survivorship bias in this. You remember the apps that worked for you which did this and not the ones that overwhelmed you too, even as a savvy user. The vast majority of users are not Hacker News users (even if we adjust that bar for average).

Even as a developer (not a UX designer), whenever a client suggested, up-front, there should be a "power user mode" I would ask, "Is there such a thing as a power user or just someone with Stockholm Syndrome who hasn't found a better app yet?"

I happened to read Kovid justification[0] of this kitchen-sink approach few days ago and I agreed with Kovid. Before I was dead-set against his idea, and now I understand why it is the best for calibre.

It boils down to database and robustness. Filesystem and OS have their particular way of how it manage the files. And sometime when the file are being used and when calibre try to modify/something to the file, it can lead to unpredictable situation such as data corruption. And some OS sandboxed/isolated the app from ever touching outside of it own home directory unless explicitly permitted to do so. Sometime, it can be a permission weirdness. It is less variables for Kovid to worry and putting the software itself in control of the directory.

Also, another variable that Kovid don't have to worry about is between the keyboard and the chair errors. Users does stupid shit with it and those management software are sensitive to sudden changes without the software's awareness. Sure, you can set the path to find it again (it can be a pain for some), it didn't mean everything is jolly good. Some will force itself to rebuild the database to ensure it accounts for every bit of data. Those softwares are THAT particular and I can understand why.

Zotero does the same thing (and they preferred it), but Zotero does allows users to decide where it should be. Shoko Desktop/Server preferred their own but does allows users.

And the biggest advantage of calibre's approach is that its library only exist in single directory. You can move the folder itself without worrying the data corruption.

[0]: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#id33

This is an odd take. You don't use Calibre because it doesn't fit your use-case, not because it's not good for what it's meant.

> I already have my own ebook organization management.

Calibre is an e-book management software with a reader for convenience, it's not geared towards reading.

If you just want to convert books and then copy them to your device I suggest you have a look at the command line tools installed alongside calibre.

`ebook-convert` does exactly that.

https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/de/generated/de/ebook-conve...

Haven't used it in a little bit, but from memory most of my flow for this was drag and drop. Drag the source onto Calibre, then drag that to the Kindle logo up top.

Considering that it is an amazing piece of software but 90% of the comments on this thread (made up of mostly technical users) are about its user interface, it should be obvious that there are some problems.

People shouldn't have to learn how to use its complicated interface. The killer feature is managing eBooks, not rocket science.

There is nothing at all about the Calibre interface that needs to be the way it is. What's so interesting is the way it apes an old version of iTunes, one which nobody would've considered the pinnacle of UX, and still manages to complicate and bury things in unexpected places.

There are some huge UI warts, so I only use it to convert e-books.

1. I can't figure out how to change the styling of the book viewer. 2. Whenever I search, then try to hit backspace to modify my search terms, it tries to delete the first search result.

Not everyone is happy, which is why many of us wish it had a better UI.

I don’t know. I’ve bounced off it multiple times and just given up.

UIs that you have to google are like jokes you have to explain...

I just dislike library software in general. I like files, I like keeping files neatly in folders and subfolders (and adding tags in filenames if necessary), so that I can easily use whatever software I like at the time on whatever platform to view or edit them, without ever being dependent on any. I organize all my movies, music, photos, documents, etc. this way, and I didn't want to hand over my ebooks to some software to keep it organized in its own way.

I don't even like it if a program scans my existing files to form a database without affecting them; but as long as it's not too in-my-face I guess I don't mind it so much; as I can get rid of the software and its database whenever I like, and I wouldn't notice anything was different. But Calibre decidedly takes the opposite approach, so, as the link says, I decided it's not for me. There are many parts of Calibre that I thought I might find useful, but it would be tiring to fight against a software that actively tries to work fundamentally differently than the way I like. (And I did try it, but using it felt almost as frustrating as using much of Apple software; it's an agony unless you use it exactly the way they want.) That's why I don't have Calibre installed on my computer even just for those useful parts; I just found other software to do things I like. Which is sad, because as an ebook user I really tried to like Calibre, and I really thought I would because I tend to love software that people criticize as "ugly/not modern" and "too cluttered/bloated". If only those things came with a package that didn't make it its "mission" to get me "to stop storing metadata in filenames and stop using the filesystem to find things".

From the linked Calibre FAQ:

> Why doesn’t calibre let me store books in my own folder structure?

> ... a search/tagging based interface is superior to folders ...

> ... much more efficient than any possible folder scheme you could come up with ...

Quite opinionated software. That and the quirky UI are reasons why I only use Calibre for a conversion or de-DRM here and there. Jump in, flail around until task done, fast exit.

I've already got them organized. At this point some of these PDFs and CHM and LIT files could get drafted, they're so old.

It is not meant for you, it is done that way by design for calibre's database. If you use the export feature, then you can set how the way you want it.