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Comment by ssivark | Hacker News Reader

Kudos on shipping your hobby project! Looks slick. And a calibre cli would definitely be appreciated -- I hate having to click five levels deep in a dozen menus :P

If the "reader" and "editor" aspects are explicit non-goals (fair enough), then what actually does Citadel do for users? Is it mainly to be a portal to view/sort books and click on them? Is there a roadmap where you envision more features?

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Good question! My main use for Calibre has been to collect my epubs (mostly) in one place, and occasionally sync them to my ereader. When I add books, I need to grab metadata for the book like title, ISBN, etc.

Citadel will (and does) support editing metadata for books — titles, authors, (in future) tags, custom columns. That’s certain. Syncing to devices will come too, in time, as will downloading metadata from online sources.

But what I don’t plan on adding is a way to edit book content or an embedded ereader. There are lots of great ereader apps & devices already, and I don’t think epub editing is commonly used (compared to keeping a collection).

While I don’t have a road map, I’m always open to feedback and ideas!

(Edit: other features like format conversion and stripping DRM are likely to happen too. Ideally with crates or plugins, to make it a bit easier to extend)

One feature that would be great is being able to sync/upload the metadata to something like a Bookwyrm[1] instance (there's apparently a `/create-book` endpoint for this) - trying to find and retype all the information from, e.g., Amazon is a pain.

[1] https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm

A BookWyrm plugin is a great idea!

Do you think you’d make a plugin interface to get books? For example from Standard Ebooks, via some sort of API? My guess is that they’d be ok with that usage if you ask and you can solve some cold start problems that way. And, of course, get some more eyeballs on their fantastic project.

I'm not sure yet. Standard Ebooks does great work, but as far as I know there is no API, so that makes pulling books harder. Once Citadel supports plugins, I'd be happy to see some content sources as plugins!

Hey I'm guessing by Calibre CLI you mean to do something like manage your book collection, but if all you want to do is convert books, Calibre does come with a CLI called `ebook-convert`. It works with many file formats like epub, pdf, azw3, mobi and more.

Example: `ebook-convert file.epub file.azw3`

Calibre comes with a lot of CLI - see https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/cli-index.html

Indeed it does. I know that I am not entitled to dictate Calibre's direction, but it would be nice if these tools were cleanly broken out with minimal dependencies. If I recall correctly, the Calibre developers are not interested in this and have stated it explicitly and the only real alternative I have heard of is ebook-converter [1] which simply lifted the relevant portions of code out of Calibre.

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

>the Calibre developers are not interested

I know it was not a criticism but I would like to point out that Calibre seems to be developed also entirely by one person [0]. I understand why they would be hesitant to make big changes that would generate more work for them that would not be seen by most (GUI) users.

[0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/graphs/contributors

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