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?
I was so excited to see this headline specifically because I hoped they would be doing a UI overhaul. Unfortunately, that just seems to not be the case or even on the horizon. I'd definitely consider dedicating time with it, but I've heard nothing but bad things about trying to work with the maintainers of the code.
Calibre makes it dead simple to manage a library of ebooks and allows you to do just about anything that can be done with them. That's the definition of a good UI. Whether it follows modern design trends is irrelevant. A UI overhaul would be a terrible idea.
Those are very undefined and user-specific complaints you have. And I've seen nothing in your post that justifies a full UI rewrite. Perhaps some changes, to cater for new/novice/confused users, but a UI rewrite is just a ridiculous thing to request.
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.
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.
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.
I don't disagree with your position -- I disagree with the implicit contention that calibre's non-standard UI improves its functionality. It is, at its heart, a file management and viewing application. What advantage does it get by spurning the notion of File and View menus? How is it made better by having a toolbar full of non-standard icons that literally duplicate the menu bar? Is it merely UX idealism that would lead one to argue that menus that have items twenty words long is needlessly suboptimal?
There are GUI conventions which at this point have been with us for three decades, and no matter what operating system you're using the vast majority of programs you use follow them. I would never argue that it's impossible for a program to be improved by deliberately flouting those conventions -- but I'd argue that you need a defensible rationale for doing so. A sound system for a large space has different tradeoffs and design considerations than a home theatre system does, but it's actually following a different set of well-considered conventions, right? I don't think calibre's UX design is well-considered at all; I think it was put together by someone who doesn't know much about UX design, isn't willing to learn, and whose reaction to even gentle criticism is to dig in his heels.
>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.
> 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.
For file conversions, I find myself relying almost entirely on pandoc. Commandline tools rock.
Calibre has done a few conversions, but given the typical use-case I've found is for trying to get PDFs into anything else vaguely usable, it's almost always a complete wash.
Going to Markdown or LaTeX and from that to the format(s) I want is almost always the preferable route.
I use calibre for converting web pages I want to read offline into epub, but then I use the file manager to transfer the epub onto my device - it seems to be the easiest way.
Also, on every single conversion I have to tell it again that I don't want a huge margin. Why would I want to make my e-reader's screen ever smaller?
Maybe it's best to build a whole new app out of the low-level libraries and tools that make calibre. A simple app with a simple UI.
I've seen this complaint with lots of Open Source programs and, while your opinion is valid, I also can't help but feel that you are being a bit ungrateful.
I disagree. This is one of the most important pieces of feedback any opensource project can get. Technical merit means nothing if users find the cost of using the interface more trouble than the benefit of the program.
I think the lack of emphasis on creating polished user interfaces is a real ideological stumbling point for the open source movement.
Given that the thread you're responding to leads in with the suggestion to contribute code to improve the application, your point is both factual and totally tangental to the conversation.
If the project is hostile to merging patches (which Calibre's developer had demonstrated), that is relevant when discussing the possibility of a user providing contributions for improving the UI.
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.
I completely agree. I talked with the Calibre leader some years ago offering my help with the UX, and he didn't seem to have any interest in simplifying the UI. It's his app, and he wants it to have as much features as possible. It's great for many people but not for the majority I believe.
I stopped using it because I can't stand the UI :(
What do you use instead? Calibre has a rather large amount of features, but they are hard to find :)
Edit: if someone were to publish independent mockups for a new Calibre UX, it could motivate community feedback and/or dev contributions. The ebook market is larger now than a few years ago, given the rise of mobile.
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?
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?
Wow, you were not exaggerating. From comment #11 of that bug report [1]:
(...) You are not doing us a favor by reporting a bug. On the contrary, you are asking us to do you a favor and spend our valuable time helping overcome a problem _you_ are having. (...)
Now that you mention it, my one bug report was met with a frosty reception.
Edit: thanks for posting that bug report. I was quite excited about contributing to Calibre at the time of filing my bug report, but got such a negative reaction that the thought vanished. How many other missed opportunities have there been, maybe a fork would bring them back?
Anyway, I still rely on Calibre to manage my ebooks, and have donated a couple of times. Despite the messy and confusing UI, it's the only ebook manager I found that does what I need (Kindle sync, multiple layers of tags and categorization, download metadata).
I remember reporting a bug, a few years ago, though I can't find it now. It was about the weird glitches in the green icons next to the search bar in the toolbar.
I included screenshots at the time. I got brushed off with a "this doesn't happen for me, it's probably your system being messed up" and my bug closed as invalid.
Yeah, happens for me too but I never noticed until now. I guess I just always thought that this was the way it was designed to look. The UI is more than a little bit jumbled/ugly.
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
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.
I found I had the exact opposite experience. There were just so many options everywhere that when I tried to change a few settings or edit book tags, I quickly got lost. I'd like it to be cleaned up a bit and streamlined, not necessarily conform to Apple/Microsoft/Google design guidelines.
Would you mind if car companies switched the gas and break pedals whenever they felt like it. After all, gas pedal on the right is no harder than gas pedal on the left.
Except...the custom is already set.
Most users would rather ignore a program than relearn yet another arbitrary interface when the standard one is good enough.
I could care less what framework is used, and am fairly positively inclined toward Qt in general.
Some frameworks (GNOME in particular) lead to a shit-ton of user-hostile design decisions.
How you use the framework matters a lot. This is where Calibre needs a lot of love. The interface isn't intuitive (I've got v1.25 open now, and ... it's a mess).
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.
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.
I think it would make much more sense to instead have the journals publish articles in more formats, rather than just HTML and PDF. For example, they should offer them in EPUB[0].
Since EPUB is much more accessible to blind/visually impaired people than PDF, perhaps the federal government could step in and mandate that all articles with content produced using federal grants must be available in a format that the blind/visually impaired can consume as well.
> "K2pdfopt works by converting each page of the PDF/DJVU file to a bitmap and then scanning the bitmap for viewable areas (rectangular regions) and cutting and cropping these regions and assembling them into multiple smaller pages without excess margins so that the viewing region is maximized. Making use of this method, k2pdfopt can re-flow text lines, even on scanned documents"
Looks promising. Hopefully this would also remove javascript and executable code from the source PDF, although any exploits may run within the context of the converter. To be safe, conversion could be run from a livecd.
PDF malware can be used for economic espionage targeting commercial research. What would help is a single open registry which has: bibliographic metadata + hash of known-good PDF for each paper.
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.
I found that the easiest/best way to read PDFs on an e-reader is by extracting the text with PDFminer. It throws away the images, and the formatting often sucks, but at least you can read the text pretty well. I didn't try 2-column journal articles, so maybe it doesn't work for those, though.
I tried all sorts of other things, but this was the least painful.
I'm definitely not a fan of every launch of Calibre showing me a prompt to update, but I'm also not sold on apps that upgrade without my express consent.
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]
Too frequent updates have been an irritant for me, largely on account of my slow internet connection. I always felt that many of the updates could have been bundled, unless it was a major fix. But no, they kept flowing in![0]
More recently my reading habits have changed and I much prefer to go directly for my books on my desktop. I've uninstalled calibre now. All I really need is a cli or a basic client (much like ncmpc for mpd) for my books. I'm looking for something along those lines, and am also planning to do a hobby project for that if the urge grows.
In the FAQ, it's clearly stated that this behavior will not change (http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#why-doesn-t-app-let...). And this is also the reason why I'm not using Calibre as a library manager (I occasionally use the command line tools). I would regularly donate to a FOSS ebook library manager that does library management (I would rather use other tools to make my morning coffee).
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.
I suspect that the parent was asking whether Calibre will index books where you put them on your hard drive, rather than insisting on moving them into a directory that it manages. (For example, iTunes will index your music, but iBooks insists on managing your books.)
It means: If you have an existing ebook library, with whichever folder structure. And you ask Calibre in import it, it will go ahead and copy every single file from your folder structure in to its own inside "My Documents" (or one of the other user folders, can't remember.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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).
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...
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.
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.
