It is one of the ugliest, most complex to configure, pieces of software I’ve ever used. It’s also the best ebook management tool out there. I love Calibre.
I was planning on setting this up soon, but I heard they’ve been incorporating AI into it. Any reason you’d choose Calibre over Booklore?
Personally, a few reasons.
- I don’t need to run 2 containers and >10GB. I could just install and run in 10 seconds.
- My whole library and metadata is self contained in a single dir. On a fresh OS install I could simply point Calibre to the dir, and off we go.
- A rich plugin ecosystem, including deDRM plugins.
- I can just ignore the AI stuff (for now, at least)
- I’ve used it for close to 2 decades. Familiarity is definitely a factor. And yes, it’s still as ugly as it was 20 years ago. But once you’ve set your workflow up, the UI just kinda melds to the background.
There’s a fork of Calibre to remove the AI stuff : https://codeberg.org/rereading/arcalibre
I use an older version of Calibre that has a fairly robust plug-in to remove DRM. I use it to remove DRM from all my ebook purchases. That plug-in isn’t supported in newer versions of Calibre so I don’t upgrade.
I’ve heard Calibre Web has a better UI and experience. Can anyone weigh in on whether that is true? I’m mostly looking for a better way to manage my book library on KOReader (Kindle) than just putting things into 3 directories (reading, to read, read) and using syncthing to copy them to the equivalent folders on my device.
It has a significantly better UI than Calibre, no question. I only use it to manage my ebook library and send them to my various Kindle email addresses. I can’t compare any more advanced features because I didn’t use them in Calibre and I still don’t in CW.
in case you didn’t know, jellyfin has support for hosting your books, and if you install the OPDS plugin, any compatible reader (librera, moon+, etc.) can pull books directly off the server and open them for reading.
Calibre is much more than just a book management library, that’s why people still suffer it.
