Calibre replacement considerations (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Calibre replacement considerations (2019)

anarc.at

169 pointsedward91 comments

Open articleView on HN

I really only have 3 use cases for Calibre : "sync my device with my library", "convert format", and "strip DRM".

I can never figure out how to do those things without massive research each time I need to do them.

Maybe it's just me, but I do find the UI horribly confusing.

Number 3 makes it worth it alone. If I buy something I want to be able to back it up and own it.

Number 2 is awesome because when people publish without DRM, effectively I don't need to worry about the format.

The first has never been that big a deal to me but I'll always have it on a machine I use for the other two.

  $ ebook-convert source.fb2 .epub

I don't know about the other two, never needed them.

I think you can do most/all of that from the command line using tools like ebook-convert

ebook-convert is Calibre. But you're right that you can use it from command line (which is what I do as well).

Yes, but you avoid the interface.

You figure out which command line flags you want to use (mainly for converting to PDF), save them somewhere, and then just use that command forever.

For the last several years I've had terrible luck with number 3, though I supect that's entirely amazon's fault rather than calibre. It's a real shame too because I used to buy a lot of books, but once I couldn't read them on the device I wanted (like Remarkable tablet) there's no point in buying anymore so I stopped. I still buy from DRM-free sellers, but most of the books I want to read are only available through the popular e-reader store.

Similar boat, I have not been able to open some books for the last few times I have tried.

Amazon books published after some date in 2023 have new formatting/encryption.

Now I think for those new books, you need to do some hoop jumping about "send to device" with an old kindle or PC.

This is correct. My answer is simply to not buy any Kindle books. In the future, I may buy some again if I can strip DRM.

Not all Kindle books have DRM. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to figure out which books have it and which do not.

Is there a place that sells ebooks that with easily strippable DRM?

Not that I know of. I had a book I was trying a buy a couple weeks ago, everywhere I found it had DRM. So I gave up. They lost a sale.

We need a gog equivalent with a no drm in books policy

So far we’ve had some individual publishers do that, but no retailer yet.

At this point I think Apple’s really the only candidate for it. Everyone else is either helped by DRM (Amazon, B&N, Kobo), too small, or just don’t seem like a good fit (Google). I was hoping they’d do it after doing so with music, but at this point I’ve given up.

Ten years ago, the largest bookstores in Germany formed an alliance together with Deutsche Telekom and created exactly that. The name is Tolino, there are e-ink ebook readers, designed principally to be the anti-kindle, there is a web reader, there are iOS and Android apps and everything is synced by a cloud account you can upload your own books to or download any books you purchase from any of the bookstores. You can link your bookstore accounts to your tolino account and you get to read anything you buy from them however you want. Apart from the German ones, Belgian, Italian and Dutch bookstores joined in a few years later.

So what happened afterwards?

Deutsche Telekom sold the infrastructure to Rakuten, the Japanese owners of Kobo , in 2017. Interestingly, 6 years later, Tolino still exists with the same DRM-free architecture and new devices are actually developed by Rakuten.

Kobo, Google Play. Kobo uses there own or Adobe DRM depending if you download it through the app or website. Both are supported by DeDRM tools with the former by the "Obok" tool. Google uses Adobe DRM.

Google Play will significantly downgrade the quality of any images, and doesn’t allow some books to be downloaded at all (mostly comics that I’ve noticed but I’m not sure if that’s all). Kobo is a much better first choice.

Are you saying Google books in general have bad image quality, or that stripping the DRM somehow alters the images?

The former. (At least, in the downloads on desktop through ADE. Not sure if the mobile app and website use the same low-resolution images.)

I think everything released in 2023 has the new DRM system which is not really removable. There might be a way using a specific kindle device but I was never able to get it to work. It stinks

We should really be supporting places that sell without drm, there are some. Vote with your wallet and all that.

Good idea but does that exist? Is there a place I can buy a Michael Creighton book DRM-free?

I buy from ebooks.com mostly, and recently there have been a few drm free books there. Didn't investigate the selection like.

> you need to do some hoop jumping

Unfortunately, converting to the older file format means you lose all the typography improvements from the newer version. Also, I believe that loophole is slowly being closed by Amazon. It’s probably not a viable long term solution.

the strip DRM part was always a plugin for calibre, not a native function.

Personally Calibre did amazing work for me always, even if the UI was clunky. When I used a kindle i had it set up to immediately convert everything to a non DRM format and use amazon whispernet (or whatever they're calling it now) to send them automatically and wirelessly to the device.

Hard to argue with that kind of flawless performance.

Recently (last few weeks) I used this fantastic tool to automatically download all my books (and personal documents!) from Amazon and (optionally) break the DRM. The README is mostly in Mandarin but the important bits are all there + the --help is in English. It's fire and forget, even grabs the right cookies/tokens out of your browser automatically. Got my whole collection downloaded with DRM removed in just a few minutes of setup and waiting.

https://github.com/yihong0618/Kindle_download_helper

thanks

Interesting, so it can handle Amazons KFX format?

Yes, it did for me

You can buy the book and then download it DRM free from Anna's archive. That's what I do with the Remarkable tablet.

1: Sync 1a: Plug in device via USB, right click, send to device 1b: with your android/ios device connect wirelessly with the calibre companion app, right click, send to device

Tips:

calibre companion avoid the need to fiddle with a usb cord and worry about your device properly talk to your computer something that is harder than it ought to be with phones/tablets

ondevice:false shows you all the books in your library that aren't on the connected device and can be combined with any other query eg tags:scifi and ondevice:false. If its harder than this you may be selected a device that was not only proprietary and shitty but also uncommon so that calibre don't know how to work around its shittiness.

2: right click book book convert individually/bulk convert

Tips:

If you want to know what things are not in your preferred format say you want epub and not mobi you can search for formats:mobi and not formats:epub. This makes it easy to ensure everything is in a format that for instance works well with your device.

Don't expect conversions to and from PDF to work well. If might turn out readable but it wont be optimal. It works MUCH better converting between more standardized ebook formats.

3. You CAN configure calibre to strip DRM on import automatically but this is inherently going to be a continuing struggle because its an arms race. Consider just not buying books that are protected by DRM. You can virtually always get a book without DRM, get a pirated version that doesn't by its nature have DRM, or a physical book. Hell if you like buy a physical book and donate it and enjoy your pirated book without guilt.

If you find the interface confusing in the settings you can literally customize

- the items that show up in the toolbar - the items that show up in the toolbar when a device is connected - the context menu that pops up when you click a book in each type of view if need be

You can further customize short cuts including single key shortcuts

If you do 3 things you can have 3 buttons in the toolbar or if you please 3 single character shortcuts. Want e to edit the books info and s to send it to your connected device then configure it so.

I have a pretty sizable library of e-books (comics, magazines, regular books, PDFs, papers, etc.). The way I manage, organize, and read them is very personal to my workflows and interests. As a result I've pulled together a hodge-podge of different tools to accomplish what I want, and it works very well for me.

Calibre is not one of those tools.

However, to be fair, I have the feeling that Calibre is mostly the result of Kovid Goyal's version of what I do, but he decided to write some software to do it back when there were fewer choices. As a result, it's highly personal to his interests and workflow, and lots of the complaints about it are really just a result of other people wanting to do things their own highly personal way and running into an impedance mismatch with Goyal's way, just like they'd run into one with how I do things.

It's clear that there's huge demand for ebook management software, but there's no comprehensive "Plex" for ebooks, and as a result you end up having to strap together your own stuff to get it working.

Have you found the "strip DRM" step to work for Amazon books released in 2023?

It works for me, but I have an older kindle Paperwhite on my account. Because of that I they have an option to download a version of the ebook specifically for that kindle, which calibre can unlock with the serial number of the Kindle.

In addition to your noted three, I use Calibre for deleting or reducing the size of images (for use on my ereader) and for merging books, like those in a series, cookbooks, and other references.

Calibre has an awful UI yet somehow people keep using it because of the lack of decent alternatives.

Yeah I feel like this is partly why "it's free, therefore you can't complain" is not true. The mere fact that Calibre exists and kind of works means that it is much harder for anyone else to create a competing program with a sane UI.

I'm not saying the authors of free software have any responsibility to listen to complaints, but complaints aren't inherently invalid because they're about something that's free.

The UI is confusing, but I’ve found its searching and multi-dimensional categorizing to be unmatched

Calibre has the worst UI of any software I’ve ever used.

I don’t think it’s that bad. It’s not ideal for sure, but it’s good enough to get things done. I’ve definitely seen worse, the Avaya call center configuration tool comes to mind.

Also this comment feels a bit rude to the author of Calibre - I’ve been using it for many years and it’s very helpful - I don’t think there’s any other book catalog software with similar feature set. If you feel that the ux/ui is bad - consider helping to improve it, it’s an open source software.

> I don’t think it’s that bad

It is.

It doesn’t make Calibre less useful to say it. Calibre is a remarkable piece of software, which solves real issues and without real alternatives. But it’s UI happens to be bad.

I just try to use the CLI whenever I can, at least I don’t have to spend 10 minutes figuring out which button does what I want.

Author here, fancy seeing this here (again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190657)! I keep updating that article as I find things, the most progress there is is in ebook readers. I mostly use Koreader on a Kobo now, but they also have an Android app which I used when I had a tablet (which has been unfortunately bricked recently). This meshes well with Syncthing as I have read progress propagate everywhere, and I use git-annex for archival / backup / redundancy.

I still use Calibre for importing books. I think I could get rid of it if I had Something that would:

1. take a book and search for missing metadata (e.g. publication date, author, title, series, publisher, cover)

2. record addition date (git-annex or filesystem m/ctime could be used for that)

3. ... well, that really is it

Really, I don't use Calibre for anything else anymore. In the article I talk about the book browser, but I don't really use that anyway. I'm actually considering "flattening" my archive so that all books are in the same directory. That would make Koreader possibly more usable as it would directly show book covers while browsing around. It might also make navigating through a file manager better for exactly the same reason.

More broadly, I wish we had better file managers on the Linux desktop. What I'm looking for, repeatedly, is something that would show me a preview of what's inside a folder, kind of a photo gallery / music browser / ebook browser all rolled into one. The generic idea is that if there's a `cover.jpg` or whatever it's named inside a folder, use that as a icon or at least some sort of overlay when displaying the folder. I'm not sure how that would work, I'm not a designer, but I can't help but think there Must Be A Better Way here.

Hey, Kavita creator here and noticed you don't have any mentions of Kavita for epub readers. Kavita is not a Calibre replacement, but has a built-in epub/pdf reader along with some series-based organization.

https://www.kavitareader.com/

interesting project! added, thanks!

There was a time, when I was so fed up of the Calibre being so bloated, while all I needed was just a convert capabilities, that I started to rip off parts of the Calibre, clean it up, make things simpler, removing unnecessary things and trying to understand what is happening behind the conversion, resulting with ebook-converter[1], which simply do the conversion, without all the management/downloading rss/editing/what have you. It is usable right now, but I'd say it's still somewhere in between alpha and beta stage. You could give it a shot.

[1] https://github.com/gryf/ebook-converter

wow. that is courageous!

looks like an interesting project... but I must admit it's not really something I use or need anymore. I used to do some book conversions when I would only find (say) a `azw` or a `mobi` file and would need to convert to `epub` but these days (a) I just find a `epub` but even if not (b) koreader can read `mobi` files and a lot more i can throw at it and (c) `azw` files are basically unconvertible, if I followed that correctly.

Speaking of which, do you do the DeDRM dance?

thanks!

I own really old ebook reader, but it still works (Sony PRS-505), so mine intention was to be able to easily convert to BBeB/lrf format, which is fastest on this reader. And no, I didn't bother to find out if drm can be removed from the ebooks - perhaps the reason is, that I'm always looking for drm-free ebooks. Although, I don't mind if anyone want to implement that and contribute.

I tried to explain Calibre to someone else and an analogy I came up with was "iTunes for ebooks" which I found to be quite accurate.

If Apple breaking up iTunes into different apps gives any hint about the shift in the way people manage their devices and contents and the general trends in software development, Calibre is probably not the ideal way for managing ebooks in 2023.

(I started using kindle in 2011 and have been a long time user of Calibre, although I have used Calibre much less -- almost never unless I have to)

My main grip with calibre is that I can't use my already defined folder structure, so I'm not using it. Unfortunately there is no alternative for managing metadata including automatic download and batch edition, even as a command line. I sometimes toy with the idea to develop one, but I realise that I don't have the competence or the dedication to do it

Surprised to not have seen one of my pet peeves in this thorough article: Calibre doesn't allow manual folder organization of your books

Any software that re-arranges my files and folders without asking is a non-starter. So is any software that copies my files into its own set of folders and obscures any attempt to understand those folders.

Calibre isn't as bad as iTunes, which will silently delete classical music ripped from a CD and replace the tracks with other orchestras performing the same piece... But Calibre has no concept of, "this user's files are already organized the way the user wants them to be."

It's a manifestation of developer arrogance to not even give the end user the option.

> It's a manifestation of developer arrogance to not even give the end user the option.

Calibre is a free, open source software. If it doesn’t fit your flow - don’t use it. The author doesn’t owe you anything. You should be thanking him for his great job that he does for free, instead you decide that you’re somehow entitled to more of his lifetime dedicated to the features important to you personally.

> instead you decide that you’re somehow entitled to more of his lifetime

Goyal has stated that he would not merge the feature even if other people did the work.

> you’re somehow entitled to more of his lifetime dedicated to the features important to you personally.

They never said this, only that developing a product to be used by a lot of people and completely disregarding a (arguably very common) use case is arrogant.

This isn't what arrogance is though.

> ...instead you decide that you’re somehow entitled to more of his lifetime dedicated to the features important to you personally.

Please don't put words in my mouth. It's insulting, rude, and also arrogant.

Nowhere have I suggested that I am entitled to anything. Nowhere have I requested multiple features. You're writing as if I'm in this developer's issue tracker making demands. I'm not. We're both in a thread on a forum separate from Calibre's development and maintenance where the topic of discussion is Calibre's strengths and shortcomings.

I did imply that not providing an off-switch for tangential complexity in software is an arrogant design decision. I stand by that opinion.

> Please don't put words in my mouth. It's insulting, rude, and also arrogant.

:) so you’re complaining that the existing feature set doesn’t cover your use case, calling this decision arrogant, but _in fact_ you do not want this feature implemented? Right. Now I follow. Of course you didn’t say that. My apologies.

> You're writing as if I'm in this developer's issue tracker making demands. I'm not. We're both in a thread on a forum separate from…

Calling people arrogant for the choices they made working on a product (useful to thousands) for free is exactly what entitlement is. It would be actually better if you did the same in the issue tracker, at least the author could have blocked you and limit the toxicity.

It’s not up to you to decide for the author of the free tool what features should be implemented in this tool. You didn’t pay a cent to him. You do not have any right to criticize him in this tone.

What you could do is ask politely and leave quietly if the request was denied. Or you could suggest better alternatives as the author of the linked article did. Everything else is nothing but entitlement. And yeah, I stand by that opinion too.

Yeah that's my biggest problem with calibre. I could live with the rest, but I want to be able to have my own directory structure

This is actually what I want Calibre the most for. It sorts things in folders quite nicely.

I am one of those weirdos that really appreciated iTunes setting up my music by Artist/Album/Track.mp3 format back in the days... until I realized how much badly-tagged garbage I had in there at which point, yeah, I was upset. :p

But nowadays I just have books setup by Author/Book/book.epub and that ... works okay. I mean it's one way to sort things around. I am actually considering a fully flat structure now so that koreader can show me previews, and I think Calibre could allow that, as I can customize its naming patterns...

But yeah, it can be kind of annoying for software to rename files for you especially if you're not starting from scratch. But Calibre is the first thing I used to sync books on my ebook reader (a sony PRS-T2 i think!) so i did start from scratch and just kept going, so i didn't get many bad surprises, and it in fact forced me to keep my metadata clean to a certain extent (otherwise books end up in the wrong folder).

One of the more useful things you can do in Calibre I’ve found is full text search. I’m a Warhammer fan and enjoy their fiction and being able to search across hundreds of books for character names is rather handy, particularly when the flagship book series has 70+ books.

It's brilliant for my 200+ cookbook collection as well, I can basically search for recipes by ingredient.

Calibre is essential to me to manage all my ebooks and pdfs, thanks for the great work.

I don't use the Calibre GUI for anything, I have my own library management software, but the `ebook-convert` command-line tool which comes with Calibre is very useful. Much respect to Kovid Goyal for making these tools.

I do use the GUI, but I have to agree in the ebook-covert tool being top notch. I once pulled a massive amount of books and videos from a particular publishers online platform. I can't remember the details but I wanna say the tool I used left me with html files with images stored in various folders or something. Ebook-convert handled thousands of books with very few having some formatting issues or outright failures. Most of the issues were the tables being way oversized and the text inside them not scaling correctly. I suspect I could fix this fairly easy, as I do still have all these books, but I just haven't gotten around to it. My data hoarding tendencies start to come out when scarcity is on the horizon and I will waste much time archiving something I'll never use on occasion.

(2019)

Calibre 6.x is in current Debian https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/calibre

I use Calibre regularly to strip DRM and convert books from one format to another.

For reading, I like epr, but epy is apparently an upgrade.

https://github.com/wustho/epr https://github.com/wustho/epy

My use cases are convert format, edit ebook, create ebook from text. The last two with the editor which used to be a separate application. Maybe it was named Sigil?

I send books to my phone with Syncthing. It would be nice if calibre had a way to receive the position in the file and if the reader on my phone had a way to send it to calibre. It would be easier to pick up a book on another device, maybe my tablet, but it's not really important. I always have my phone with me and for a typical fiction book a phone screen is really OK.

I use syncthing to sync my library around now, as mentioned in the article (I believe). This works great for Koreader, which stores read stats in a plain text file next to the ebook file. That can lead to syncthing conflicts sometimes, unfortunately but I suspect that might be more because of my combined use of git-annex and syncthing to archive my collection than anything specific to syncthing.

It does mean I need to use koreader everywhere though, I don't have a way to sync read progress back into Calibre, but then I don't really have read progress there anyways. I have a "read/not read" flag there, but it's some custom thing I added somehow, Calibre doesn't support that out of the box anyway.

I googled it and it seems that koreader has a selfhostable server that can be used to sync reading positions across devices

https://github.com/koreader/koreader-sync-server

I used koreader years ago. I'll give it a try again. If I like it I'll download the server and check if I can make it work.

The protocol is simple enough that there are multiple implementations. I like this small one, which does all the necessary things:

https://github.com/b1n4ryj4n/koreader-sync

Thanks.

I installed Koreader but I think I'll stay with CoolReader and do without progress sync.

The two deal breakers are

- I can change the brightness of the screen in CoolReader by sliding a finger on the left of the screen. I must use a menu in Koreader and that makes brightness control almost useless.

- There is no way to change the color of the text. I like red on black in night mode. White text is too bright in a dark room. Reading thought the issues on GitHub it seems that maybe a custom CSS can do the trick but I don't feel like investing time in that. Progress syncing is not so important to me.

> - I can change the brightness of the screen in CoolReader by sliding a finger on the left of the screen. I must use a menu in Koreader and that makes brightness control almost useless.

Strange, because Koreader has this functionality. On my kindle paperwhite I can slide up and down on the left side of screen to change intensity, on my oasis I can additionally slide up and down on the right side to change color temperature.

Which platform isn't it working on?

Android. However I found Expert Mode and activated it. Then Taps and gestures, Gesture Manager, One-Finger Swype and there are the two swyping gestures to set brightness.

One is done. Text color next, maybe.

As a side note: I always thought that CoolReader settings UI was a mess but Koreader's one is much worse: less funky but even less efficient.

but see that's the thing, i don't even need that silly thing. i just run syncthing everywhere I need to (and it pretty much runs everywhere, including the kobo), and that's it. no middleman required (other than the syncthing meet-me infra of course, which is not as much as i expected: https://relays.syncthing.net/).

I think installing Calibre is a good use case for installing Nix (https://www.nixos.org).

Unfortunately, you might also need https://github.com/guibou/nixGL to run graphical apps under Nix. It's a shell script to use the correct OpenGL library.

I've definitely been trying to find a good alternative for a while. Still haven't found one though…

I've mostly moved to Calibre web, and use sshfs to mount the library when I need to do things that can only be done in the "real" version

It's been really nice, and KOreader syncs nicely with it

I love calibre's content server

Foliate is excellent for epubs albeit much less powerful.

Calibre always had some update. It was annoying.

Yes, Calibre updates frequently, but a quick read of the release notes can tell you if you need that update. I usually update every couple of releases, but I can't remember a time (within a major version) that I had to update right away for any reason.

> I know almost exactly zero people that have an ebook reader that do not use Calibre.

Calibre is like curl an important part of the foundation of the worlds knowledge base, except Kovid Goyal doesn't have a wiki page.

While MIT blowhards came up with BS like OLPC, Calibre has helped spread books worldwide.

It was great Kovid Goyal got Calibre to Python 3 as the sole (?) developer , I'm not sure if any of the complainers offered to pay to get it there quicker?

I have no idea why the blog post is getting upvoted, but I'm sure helping Calibre along with bug fixes or $ is better than the most/all of the musings in the blog.

Experiences in FOSS | Kovid Goyal (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-nFFtQt-Gg

I switched to Kitty terminal across all platforms about a year ago, a fantastic decision for me (initially I just wanted tmux-style windowing with no tmux) and Kovid built Kitty as well

Except that people didn't complain that Goyal didn't port calibre to python 3 but that he refused for it to be ported and preferred backport librairies to python 3, which proved a very bad idea (obviously)

This seems to be from 2019. Still no viable fork in sight. Yawn. Can't be so bad.

fire up your IDE

I think toenail meant less "will no one rid me of this turbulent reader?", and more "if it were really so bad, then someone would have written some sort of alternative solution already." (I'm not sure I agree with the assertion, but, if I've read it correctly, then "fire up your IDE" doesn't seem to address it.)

good point! i see what they meant now.

Not the original commenter, but if the code is as messy as the blog post states, a fork might not be the ideal choice. Might be better to start cutting out libraries, then implement bespoke, feature-specific applications on top of them.

Best is someone familiar with the LLM based coding tools to help the calibre team refactor their code.

IMHO, calibre components can be replaced with other tools, but very difficult to assemble and engage an open source team successfully as they have shown. I have the same view on VLC also

Are LLMs useful for large-scale refactoring? Seems like you'd need a specific model for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com