Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Calibre Version 1.0 Released After 7 Years of Development

Posted by timothy on from the that-is-some-conservative-numbering dept.

Calibre is a feature-laden, open source e-book manager; many readers mentioned in light of the recently posted news about Barnes & Noble's Nook that they use Calibre to deal with their reading material. Reader Trashcan Romeo writes with some news on its new 1.0 release, summing it up thus: "The new version of the premier e-book management application boasts a completely re-written database backend and PDF output engine as well a new book-cover grid view."

8 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Thanks Kovid! by demonlapin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't forget to give the man some money. He updates Calibre frequently - sometimes more than once a week - and doesn't charge a nickel.

    1. Re:Thanks Kovid! by Colonel+Korn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So what? Nobody held a gun to his head and forced him to work on it.

      Sorry to feed the troll, but this one's amusing. I enjoy the implication that only work performed at the barrel of a firearm should be rewarded.

      --
      "I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
    2. Re:Thanks Kovid! by PhiRo,oRihP · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Must live in America.

    3. Re:Thanks Kovid! by demonlapin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No, the fact that you're a cheap douchebag puts you off from giving money. Kovid puts his product up for free. The download page asks for donations. He's doing important work - there is no other ebook management program I know of that has anything like the feature set of Calibre. I'd like him to give up his free time to work on it, so I give him money.

    4. Re:Thanks Kovid! by c0d3g33k · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I used to think that when I first ran Calibre. It was kind of ugly (no, scratch that - it WAS ugly) to my eyes. It still isn't pretty, but I got over that. Then I stopped looking at it and started using it for its intended purpose: managing ebook libraries and manipulating ebooks. I discovered that the user interface made pretty good sense - I spend a little time learning it, discovered it was quite efficient at what it did, and developed a workflow that fit with what Calibre could do. Now when I sit down and use Calibre, the UI fades away and work gets done. To me that is the hallmark of a good tool - it gets out of your way and lets you get things done.

      Calibre may not conform to the "it must look like every other application" model of user interface design, but it is an effective tool nonetheless. It is certainly nowhere near Blender (http://www.blender.org/) in the CUICM (Custom User Interface Confusion Matrix). Give it a chance. It's the best FLOSS tool out there at what it does.

  2. terrible UI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    7 years and the UI is still shit.

  3. Re:Does it do custom folders? by icebike · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He realized tags made way more sense than odd-ball sorting into directories.
    Any directory structure is a lock in, as soon as you realize it doesn't work.

    So he added tagging with your tags or standard tags.

    But For people who insist on organizing in some antiquated way he created Save to Disk settings where you can change the
    order used when exporting. You can customize to create any sort of directory structure for your exported files.
    So lock-in go Poof, vanished before your very eyes.

    Further you can also create the custome structure when sending books to a device (e-reader), and guess what... It can be
    different than you use for exporting. So when you find that your eReader doesn't support sorting by Genre, you
    can change that back to something sensible.

    Tagging is way better than structured directories. You can sort by any tag within Calibre, and output in any order you want.
    There is no lock in.

    (Its 2013. Tagging is where its at. Obscure Structured directories are so 1999.

    --
    Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  4. Re: Does it do custom folders? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You have no idea what lock in means, do you?