What's new in calibre 2.0?

When it comes to ebook-management systems, one project continues to stand out: calibre, an open-source, cross-platform solution. The project recently hit its 2.0 milestone. As is usual, weekly updates, in the form of versions 2.1 and 2.2, have also been released. The 2.x series has some interesting new features; in particular, a comprehensive built-in ebook editor. While 2.x brings some new things to the table, the outward changes are not huge since our calibre 1.0 review a year ago.

Longtime users hoping that the major changes implied by the move to a 2.x series included a user-interface overhaul will be disappointed; the program looks much the same as it has since its 0.x days. A plethora of options is listed in a horizontal bar at the top, some of which may be confusing. For example, "Add books" will open a prompt to select a local directory to import ebooks into the calibre library. "Get books", however, opens up a search window to find and download ebooks from a variety of free and commercial online services. "Convert books" allows changing the file format of one or more books, while "Edit book" opens up the new built-in ebook editor.

Somewhat irritatingly, the "Preferences" option, which allows configuration of calibre itself, is not easily found; a small button in the top right corner of the interface expands the options bar to reveal "Preferences". One gets the sense that a simplifying overhaul is overdue for the nearly eight-year-old project.

The biggest user-facing change in the 2.x series is calibre's new ebook editor. A video demo [WebM] by lead developer Kovid Goyal outlines many of its features. The editor splits up EPUBs and AZW3s (Amazon's proprietary ebook file format) into separate files, including HTML for the text itself, CSS, images, and fonts. The ebook editor presents a view with three panels: one on the left which lists the ebook's files, one in the center where source code edits can be made, and one on the right which shows a preview of how the ebook appears.

Readers, writers, and editors can make use of various built-in tools to enhance their reading/writing experience using the ebook editor, either by manipulating either individual files or the collection of files as a whole. For example, a typographically-inclined reader can replace the fonts in an ebook with others that are preferred. A writer and/or editor could add images or play around with the CSS to, for instance, improve the aesthetics of chapter headings.

Bulk actions are available to modify the ebook as a whole. A "Check Book" tool checks the entire ebook for typos and others errors; it can fix these mistakes automatically. A font manager tool can quickly replace and embed fonts throughout the ebook. The tool shows promise for picky ebook power users, but it can be difficult to see writers using the tool over comprehensive alternatives like LyX that abstract away the need for writers to fiddle with the underlying formatting.

Other major changes include automatic recognition of Android devices on OS X; gesture support on the ebook reader for Windows 8 tablets; and "emblems": icons that can be used to distinguish books in calibre's alternative cover view, which organizes books by cover images. These can be added by selecting "Look and Feel" from the "Preferences" menu, clicking on the "Emblems" tab on the side, and clicking "Show emblems next to covers". One can add emblems (locally stored images) by defining an "if this, then that" rule set, where emblems are automatically added next to books according to rules made by the user. It would be nice if calibre could add the ability to manually add emblems in the future, and came with a built-in set of icons to choose from, instead of expecting users to fish around in their filesystem for them. As it stands, the feature feels half-baked.

The project also decided to switch from Qt 4 to Qt 5, which has some interesting implications. The benefits include allowing "calibre command line tools to be run on Linux without needing a running X server. This has led to significant memory usage and performance improvements when running some command line tools, such as the standalone content server and ebook-convert."

The built-in ebook viewer also shows improvement as a result of the move to Qt 5: "Fallback fonts now work, embedded fonts whose names inside the font file do not match the names in the @font-face rule work, hyphenation is greatly improved and so on." There remain some nuisances for users: some plugins currently do not work with calibre, although most have been ported; the team and the community are continuing to port the rest.

Somewhat strangely, the project states on its Windows download page that the reliance on Qt 5 prevents calibre 2.x from running on Windows XP: Although it can be somewhat cumbersome, there are guides online to get Qt 5 working on Windows XP. A discussion on the calibre forums suggests that some users had been able to install 2.0 on Windows XP machines, but one user pointed out that from calibre 2.1 on, the program "will refuse to install or run on any computer running Windows XP."

Downloading and installing calibre for Linux remains less than pleasant. On the download page, Linux users are instructed not to use the version in their distribution, but to copy and paste a command to run as root (a wget of a Python script, then executing it). While there are instructions on how to "do an 'isolated' install that only touches files inside the installation directory and does not need to be run as root", those instructions are further down the page and may be overlooked.

The project continues its practice of phoning home to gather installation statistics:

It should be noted that calibre also reports the operating system type and version number of the program at startup time.

Development remains active, with nearly weekly updates on Fridays. The project has a Launchpad page for bug reports and triage, and an IRC channel on Freenode. A bug report I filed regarding my inability to download books from Project Gutenberg, a repository of public domain ebooks, was promptly replied to and fixed by Goyal.

After eight years, calibre remains a compelling tool for ebook readers. With its new ebook editor, the project has further appeal for picky, technical ebook readers. It will be interesting to see what calibre has in store for the future.