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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Great app. I know everyone likes to extol the UNIX "A program should do one thing and do it well" philosophy, but Calibre is one of the few "monolithic" apps I can think of that justifies the bulk. It does everything you could want it to do regarding eBooks: viewing, editing, management, delivery, etc.

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Somewhat interestingly, under the hood calibre seems to be a bunch of little tools, strung together by the UI:

Here's what's under calibre/bin

  calibre
  calibre-complete
  calibre-customize
  calibredb
  calibre-debug
  calibre-parallel
  calibre_postinstall
  calibre-server
  calibre-smtp
  cjpeg
  ebook-convert
  ebook-device
  ebook-edit
  ebook-meta
  ebook-polish
  ebook-viewer
  fetch-ebook-metadata
  jpegtran
  JxrDecApp
  lrf2lrs
  lrfviewer
  lrs2lrf
  markdown-calibre
  optipng
  pdfinfo
  pdftohtml
  pdftoppm
  web2disk

You can use many (possibly all) of these independently of the UI.

Thanks for mentioning this. I didn't know that Calibre packages its own optipng, a program for which there have been some security advisories in recent years. I hope Calibre keeps pace with upstream releases of these tools.

If it helps to think of Calibre as a "toolkit," then, instead of a single monolithic app, I'm all for it.

It's funny, if they released a version of Calibre that had only the bins you mentioned and omitted the GUI entirely, it would probably be held in much higher esteem among the HN community.

I’d argue this is true in general: I once gave a presentation about a (IMO) pretty decent tool but made the mistake of demonstrating it with a UI that was usable but needed work. It got a lot worse of a reaction than an earlier and worse version of the same tool where I ran it from the command line.

Showing tools that work, CLI or not, is better than showing something that barely works. It is a very natural and logical explanation.

Poettering should learn from the design of this software.

Better he learn from Kovid than the other way around!

If you had spent 2 seconds looking at the source code to Calibre, you would not be praising it's codebase.

Also, systemd is not one binary. It's like 50 different binaries.

I installed it on one server that I only ssh to JUST to use that ebook-convert so I can read anything (epub, mobi, pdf, etc) on the command line. It's so easy to use, detects to- and from-formats from filenames and works on anything.

That's good design, right?

Don't forget DRM stripping.

I had mentally lumped that under "management," but maybe I should've added "conversion" as a category. Certainly DeDRM Tools has been worth the price of admission alone.

Do you know if the various 'add-ons' that were required to strip Kindle of DRM are still available and updated.

Years ago, I enjoyed stripping my own purchased Kindle books to ePub with Calibre, so I could read them on my non-Kindle device, but it wasn't so easy as the patches became harder to find, and Amazon would constantly change their DRM.

That's the primary reason I use it. Strip DRM from my purchased books and then upload to Google Books for viewing on all my devices.

Have you considered that maybe you shouldn't be buying DRM content in the first place? If you are going to spend money buy a physical book and consider passing it on after you have read it if you don't want to reread or refer to later.

Sometimes I don’t want a physical copy because it is:

1. unavailable in my country at a reasonable price

2. Something I’d rather read while travelling.

And often, Kindle e-books are the only ones that are priced by region. I try to buy from DRM free stores wherever possible, but it isn’t always doable.

Maybe piracy would be more acceptable? You could always mail the author the cost of the ebook if he doesn't have an online method to accept donations.

I've done that in the past, but a lot of authors have rightful objections to this, since these direct payments to authors don't reach publishers, editors, and many other people who make the book happen.

Unfortunately, many books are ONLY available from stores that still use DRM.

Physical books are much less convenient in that I can't carry 50 of them around in my pocket like I can with books on my phone.

Buy the book from author, donate to someone, download from the internet.

Search for "DeDRM", follow the first result you see to Apprentice Alf's blog. That should lead you to the GH repo with instructions.

It's still a bit of a pain, you may need to intentionally downgrade your version of the Amazon for Kindle app to an older version where the tools can break the encryption. But it can be done.

Or you can download the older file format from the Amazon web page under "Manage Your Content and Devices", "Download and transfer via USB".

The pain kinda disappears if you have a physical Kindle. You enter the serial number once during setup of the plugin, then download the books from amazon.com/myk ("Download & transfer via USB" option), and just drag-and-drop downloaded files into Calibre's interface.

Works on Ubuntu too, which is really a PITA otherwise.

I never managed to get this working weirdly. Still running Kindle for PC 1.17 on Wine.

Technically plugins do this, right?

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