Catching up with Calibre

Last week's Edition contained an interview with Kovid Goyal, the maintainer of the Calibre electronic book manager, but it did not look deeply at the application itself. Coincidentally, your editor has been playing with Calibre with renewed interest recently. This application has made considerable progress since your editor's last look at it, so a look at where it has gone is called for. Calibre is not perfect, but it is a useful tool for a somewhat unwilling newcomer to electronic books.

Your editor is not one to resist progress; the transition from vinyl to compact disks was handled with no reservations, despite the fact that there is still something special about those old analog platters. How can one resist a medium that is bulky and heavy, limited to 30 minutes of play time, and which degrades with every playing? When CDs, in turn, started to go away barely a tear was shed. There has been no pining for 8" floppies, eight-track tapes - or for tape in general. Technology moves forward, and things get better.

But books are special. They represent an old technology well optimized for its intended task and are a thing of beauty. Your editor's love of books has swallowed up vast amounts of time and crowded the house with dead trees; Cicero's classic proverb ("a room without books is like a body without a soul") is well respected here. That occasionally leads to certain amounts of marital stress, but we digress. The point is that the movement of the written word to an increasingly digital-only form is something that has been resisted in these parts for some time.

But the writing is on the wall cloud-based persistent storage device: books as physical objects are on their way out. Once your editor got past the denial phase, it became clear that there were even some advantages to ebooks. They are often cheaper, which is nice. Certain science fiction authors would appear to be paid by the kilogram; reading them in electronic form yields the same entertainment value without the kilograms. Electronic books are especially advantageous when traveling; the weight involved in carrying sufficient reading material for a family vacation was, once again, a source of a certain amount of familial disagreement. Searchability can be a useful feature at times. There is still nothing like a real book, but the electronic version is not entirely without its charms.

One does not need to accumulate many ebooks before it becomes clear that some sort of management scheme is required. Simply keeping books on a reader device is not really an option; that device may well not be entirely under the owner's control, its capacity is limited, it can be lost or damaged, and it eventually will need to be replaced. Just dumping them on a disk somewhere has problems of its own; some sort of management tool is needed. For now, in the free software world, Calibre seems to be that tool.

Calibre

As of this writing, the current version of Calibre is 0.8.16. Releases are frequent - about one week apart - and each release adds bug fixes and new features. The web site recommends installing binary releases directly from there because distributors tend to fall behind that schedule; Rawhide did not let your editor down, though. Interestingly, those looking for the source on the Calibre web site can search for a long time; there are no easily-found pointers to the SourceForge directory where the source can be found. The program is written in Python.

One thing first-time users won't necessarily notice is that Calibre phones home when it starts. The ostensible purpose is to check for new releases, but, in the process, it reports the current running version, the operating system it is running under (Linux is reported as "oth") and a unique ID generated when the program is installed - along with the IP address, naturally. It is not a huge amount of information to report - users of proprietary reader devices have much larger information disclosure issues to be concerned about - but it's still a bit of a privacy violation. Programs that communicate with the mother ship in this way should really inform their users of the fact and give them the opportunity to opt out.

The main Calibre window provides a list of books in the library, an animated "cover browser," a list of metadata types, and a pane for information about the selected book. By default, somebody just wanting to look through the books in the library will find less than 1/4 of the available space dedicated to that task. However, one cannot fault Calibre for lacking configurability; there are few aspects of the interface that cannot be tweaked at will. Unwanted stuff is easily gotten rid of.

There is a toolbar across the top with a large number of entries; they do not all fit unless the window is made quite wide. Some of them can be a bit confusing; should one import a book with "Add books" or "Get books"? The icon labeled "N books" (for some value of N) is actually the way to switch between libraries. "Save to disk" is a bit strange for books in the library, which are already on disk; it seems to be a way to save a book in a different format, though how that relates to the "convert books" operation is not entirely clear. With a bit of time and experimentation, though, it's not too hard to figure out how things work.

There is a basic reader application built into Calibre; it works well enough, though, likely as not, few users actually read their books in this application. Some of its more obnoxious behaviors (the 1/2 second animated page flip, for example) can be disabled. One thing that cannot be turned off, though, is the obnoxious "tooltips" that show up on everything. Your editor has noticed a trend toward these annoyances in a number of applications; when one can't see the interface through the tips, something is wrong. As can be seen in the associated screenshot, the "next page" tooltip obscures the text of the book itself.

Calibre's management of devices seems to work well; when a recognized device is plugged in, a separate pane showing the contents of that device is created. Books can be copied between the library and the device at will; if needed, Calibre will convert the book to a different format on the way. Your editor's Kindle device Just Works with Calibre; all that was needed was to plug it in. Android devices also work nicely. The Calibre site recommends installing WordPlayer on Android, but interoperation with the open-source FBReader application works well. Aldiko can also be used, though it is necessary to manually import the book files into the application after Calibre has placed them on the device.

Naturally, when working with a Kindle, one quickly runs into DRM issues; Calibre will put up a dialog saying that it cannot work with a locked file and wish you luck. As it happens, there is a plugin out there that can decrypt books from a Kindle and store them in a more accessible format. The Calibre project itself won't go near such plugins, but they are not hard to find. Whether one sees unlocking an ebook as an exercise of fair-use rights on a text that one has purchased or as an act of piracy will depend on one's viewpoint and, perhaps, local law. Your editor can only say that, if he were able to store his purchased ebooks in a format that does not require a functioning Kindle or Amazon's continuing cooperation, he would be much more inclined to buy more such books in the future.

(The Kindle, incidentally, will eventually be replaced with a more open device; selecting that device is likely to be the topic of a future article).

The "Get books" option pops up a dialog that, seemingly, will search every bookstore on the planet for a given string. Results are listed with their price, format, and DRM status. The process tends to be slow - not surprising, given how many sites must be queried; one will want to trim down the number of sites to speed things up and eliminate results in undesired languages. The Calibre developers have clearly been busy setting up affiliate arrangements with as many of those bookstores as possible. The proceeds support ongoing development of the code, which seems like a good cause, certainly.

Another interesting feature is the ability to download articles from various news sources, format them appropriately, and send them to the device. In the case of the Kindle, that sending happens immediately over the Kindle's cellular connection; there is no need to plug the device into the computer first. Over 1,000 different news sources are supported at this point. If Calibre is left running, downloads can be scheduled to run at regular intervals. The value of this feature arguably drops as always-connected devices take over, but it's easy to see how it could be indispensable for those who do a fair amount of offline reading.

Wishlist and conclusion

There is a fairly well developed search feature clearly designed with the idea that there will be thousands of books in the library. Searches can key on almost any metadata, but there does not seem to be any way to search for books based on their contents. If you cannot remember which book introduced the concept of "thalience," Calibre, it seems, will not be able to help you find it. Indexing a large library to the point where it can be efficiently searched is not a small task, of course, but there are times when it would be nice.

Closer integration between Calibre and the reader devices would be useful. For example, all readers have a concept of bookmarks, or, at least, the current position within a given book. Imagine having a copy of one's current book on a phone handset; it would always be at hand when one finds oneself with an unexpected half hour to kill somewhere. Later, when curling up by the fire with the spouse, the dog, a glass of wine, and the real reader, said reader would already know the new position to start from. No such luck with the reader, alas; even the spouse and the dog can't always be counted upon. Calibre can't fix the latter, but it could convey that kind of information between reader devices.

Even nicer, someday, might be to run an application like Calibre directly on the reader devices, backed up by a library found in personally-controlled storage on the net somewhere. Google's Books offering is aiming at that sort of functionality, without the "personally-controlled" part, but books are too important to leave in some company's hands. Until such a time arrives, we'll be left managing our books on a local system and copying them to devices as needed. Calibre seems to be the best option there is for that management; it is a capable tool that does almost everything a reader could want. It definitely helps to make the transition away from real books a bit less painful.

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bzr branch lp:calibre