Calibrating Calibre 1.0

File management does not seem to be a one-size-fits-all proposition. Thus, while general-purpose file managers exist, it often appears that much of the development effort goes into domain-specific management tools. We have a whole set of photo management applications, for example, and even more music managers. When it comes to electronic books, though, there seems to only be one viable project out there: Calibre. LWN last looked at Calibre almost exactly two years ago. The recent version 1.0 release provides an obvious opportunity to see what has been happening with this fast-moving utility.

While installing the new version, your editor quickly learned that some things have not changed. The download page still recommends against using versions of the program packaged by distributors, "as those are often buggy/outdated". Instead, one is supposed to install the project's binary release, done by instructing a Python interpreter, running as root, to fetch a program from a web site and execute it, sight unseen. After all, what could possibly go wrong? For those who might balk at handing the keys to their systems to a remote site in that way, it is also possible to download a simple tarball and run the program from there. Source is also available, naturally, but the build process has a lot of dependencies and is not for those in a hurry.

One unfortunate antifeature that has not changed is the program's habit of phoning home on startup, providing the user's IP address, system type, Calibre version, and an identifying UUID to a Calibre server. One assumes that most distributors have disabled this reporting, but binaries retrieved directly from the site still do it. On the other hand, it's worth noting that Calibre is good about not breaking things with its (frequent) updates. Plugins installed years ago still work without problems (or even rebuilding), for example, and your editor's book library itself has never had trouble with Calibre updates. Calibre is developing rapidly, but some care has clearly gone into avoiding pain for users when they upgrade.

New in 1.0

In one sense, there is not a whole lot in the 1.0 release itself that calls for the big version number bump. Evidently, it was simply time to declare that Calibre had reached that milestone. That said, there are a couple of new features in this release, the most visible of which is the grid view for books in the library. This view, as one might expect, simply shows book covers in a matrix arrangement; it joins the longstanding list view and the relatively useless animated "cover browser" as the third way of selecting a book from the library. The grid view is nice; it can be thought of as analog to arranging one's books with the cover forward, while the list view is like looking at the spines.

The 1.0 release also advertises a much faster database backend for managing book information. With a library containing several dozen books, it is hard to notice the difference; those with much larger libraries may have a different experience. But large libraries present challenges of their own in Calibre; the interface feels increasingly unwieldy as the number of books grows. A set of bookshelves can be organized as the owner wishes; a Calibre library is somewhat less flexible. There is, for example, no mechanism for imposing any sort of hierarchy on books. Yes, this is the 21st century, and we all use tags for everything now, but, as Herbert Simon pointed out years ago in The Sciences of the Artificial, human brains think in terms of hierarchies.

That said, one helpful feature that has been added (in the 0.9.28 release in April 2013) is "virtual libraries," which are a sort of saved-search mechanism. One can create a virtual library containing only books from a specific author, say, or based on tags. Virtual libraries don't really provide much that Calibre's search mechanism didn't already do, but they make frequent searches easier and faster to get to.

Calibre has long been the definitive tool for the conversion of books between formats. Over time it has been gaining features for the editing of books as well. New in 1.0 is an editor allowing the modification of the table of contents; it can perform simple tasks like adding an entry for an interesting location, or it can be used to create a new table of contents from the beginning. The automatic metadata downloading system can look further afield for book covers, descriptions, and more. The embedding of fonts within books is now fully supported. On the input side, it is now possible to import books in the Microsoft Word (.docx) format; for output, the PDF generation engine has been rewritten with, it is claimed, much better results.

Beyond that, of course, the program continues to gain support for more devices, more ebook formats, and more web sites as sources of content. Calibre's ability to download the contents of an online magazine issue and package them into a book on a reader device remains one of its more useful feature; it makes offline reading easy. In general, the addition of features continues at such a pace that many of them are hidden at the outset and must be manually added to a toolbar (by way of the "preferences" screen) to be accessible. Suffice to say that Calibre developer Kovid Goyal does not seem to agree with the minimalist line of thought — with regard to features or configuration options — that seems to dominate some other projects.

All those features and options are certainly welcome, but there is no doubt that Calibre could benefit from some focused design and usability work. The interface is cluttered and useful functionality can be hard to find. Who can say, off the top of their head, why there are two search bars on the main screen? (One of them is actually a place to enter a name to attach to a "saved search"). Or consider a dialog like the one shown to the right. What line of reasoning would lead to the "cancel" button being placed right in the middle of all the other options? In general, Calibre gives the impression of being a large collection of (mostly useful) tools haphazardly thrown into a big box.

Finally, one significant "new" feature (new since the last review, but it was available in 0.9) is proper support for Android devices. Linux systems still struggle to support the MTP protocol in any sort of general way, but Calibre's internal MTP implementation seems to work just fine. Calibre recognizes Android devices when they are plugged in, and can tell multiple devices apart; it can be configured to manage or ignore each device independently. There is a simple rule system that allows different types of files to be directed to different locations on the device. It all works quite well, though interoperability with the Android Kindle app is minimal. The third-party plugins that deal so nicely with books on an actual Kindle device are unable to read Kindle books on an Android device.

DRM

In general, of course, DRM continues to be one of the biggest disincentives for anybody considering the purchase of an electronic book. It should be possible to buy a book and read it using the device — and the software — of one's choice. One should not have to worry about things like having one's books deleted as a consequence of crossing a national border. Books should not be subject to lock-in to a particular device or the continuing good will of a remote corporation. Someday, hopefully, the book industry will free itself of DRM; until then, people who are unwilling to break the DRM on books they buy will not be able to make full use of a library manager like Calibre.

One should note, of course, that there are quite a few publishers selling DRM-free electronic books now. Patronizing those publishers seems like a good way to ensure that they continue to make DRM-free books available. Calibre, of course, has long had a built-in "get books" feature that can search for electronic books from a large number of sellers.

In summary: Calibre remains the definitive tool for the management of electronic books for Linux — or for any other operating system. The needed functionality is there, and it continues to develop at a fast pace. Indeed, the pace is surprisingly fast given that the lead developer is responsible for the vast majority of the work — nearly 75% of the commits in the Calibre git repository. Perhaps, someday, somebody will set out to create something that is prettier, perhaps based on Calibre's book management and format-conversion engine. But, for now, Calibre seems to be the only show in town; happily, it is a highly functional and useful tool.

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