Are there any real alternatives to Calibre? Possibly text-based...

Are there any real alternatives to Calibre? Possibly text-based? You'd think there'd be a much greater appeal of book managers among programmers.

Ebook display is inherently graphical, but Calibre does package a bunch of command line tools for conversion, etc.

That's absurd. That's like saying music display is inherently graphical because of album covers, yet the majority of music players on GNU/Linux don't even have the capacity to display images, often times don't even parse music tags like AlbumArtist.

What's wrong with Calibre? If it works don't fix it

It's kind of stupid that I have to wait 10 seconds to load a book manager, image display, and book reader when all I want is to query for one book and read it in Emacs. It makes for very cumbersome workflow. Calibre is incredibly bloated for no good reason.

Calibre has awesome terminal-based ebook conversion tools. If you'er more into using text-based setups you can just fire up your command line, convert all your epubs to txt for reading via
$ $ ebook-convert -h
Usage: ebook-convert input_file output_file [options]

, browse your collection with $ cd and view your exported books through $ less.

I for instance have the full Calibre suite installed but only ever use the command line converter.

I was afraid that was going to be the answer. How do you add ebooks to your library through the terminal command. I briefly skimmed the manual, and I can't see anything like that.

FBReader

Does Calbire offer to remember what page you were on yet? That's a pretty big point for me.

That's an ebook reader, not a library manager, you fucking moron.

>I was afraid that was going to be the answer. How do you add ebooks to your library through the terminal command. I briefly skimmed the manual, and I can't see anything like that.
Obviously, if you prefer the terimanl, then libraries become something rather obsolete. You'd add books to your library via the command line. And by "library" here I mean an ordered folder structure by your own design.

$ mv "~/Downloads/Author - Title.epub" "~/MyBooks/MyLibrary/Genre/Author/"


I don't know of any pure command-line tools that exactly mimic the functionality of Calibre's library functions. You are, of course, free to write your own, but that's not an option for most people, who aren't necessarily programmers.

I wonder if there's a tool like beets or musicbrainz picard for books. It would make things really convenient.

>make small folder hierarchy for your pirated books
>write bash script to organize anything that gets dumped in the root of the hierarchy and automatically convert them to text format
>make script modular and upload to github

Beat me to it. Obvious answer though.

Firstly, this was never an issue of being able to read the file. It's feasible to read epubs and pdf's as-is from the commandline. Calibre is only coincidentally an epub reader. Secondly, that doesn't fix the bigger issue of metadata. Part of the biggest appeal of calibre is that it can search for, download, and apply the appropriate tags automatically. And although it's easy enough to fill in the blanks, you didn't even mention the fact that you should grep search recursively for your books. And even then, that doesn't resolve the issue of genres.

Same, I never had the need to organise my ebooks in a "library", I just keep them in separate directories, organized by category, and ebook-convert them when needed

It's bloated crap with horrible interface, implemented by a literal pajeet. It doesn't allow you to store books in your own hierarchy in addition to metadata, because for some weird ideological reason Pajeet opposes custom folder structures, forcing you to only use tags, just like iTunes or similar crap. Some parts of it are just broken with WONTFIX status.

For some reason, there seems to be no alternatives. The only sane alternative I know is MyRuLib, but it's in Russian only.

There actually is a hack that I discovered that let's you do so, but it's kind of cumbersome and so damn complicated I basically gave up trying to organize my books that way. It's kind of pathetic that people treat Calibre as the gold standard for book managers. It literally doesn't let me open up epubs with any other reader, even if I explicitly specify the mime-type to another reader and explicitly disallow Calibre from opening up epubs. I don't understand the guy's fucking glitch, that he packages an epub reader with his library manager. I'm not a huge Unix fan, but for fucks sake, package the two blatantly separate pieces of software as two different things.

Is there another piece of software as sprawling, bloated, and with such a horrible UI that's used by as many people as Calibre?

Emacs. The difference is that elisp is made to be so bloated and can be extended and modified in real-time. Calibre is one monolithic, impenetrable blob that has somehow wriggled its way to becoming the standard, possibly in part because people don't read enough, and most ``literary types" don't understand computers enough to protest.

systemd

A lot of designed-by-committee legacy engineering/CGI software is like that. 3DS Max, ANSYS, Photoshop, MATLAB etc.

Except this one's made by the one guy, who, despite having full control of the project, can't overcome shit taste.

There is. Op

That was a pretty unequal analogy, user. The primary object of consumption for music is not the album cover; the primary object of consumption in a book is something you look at. The way the text is formatted and presented is also massively important to the readability and even the quality of prose of a book (this is doubly true for poetry.) Arguably, ebook is much better suited as a graphical object that a strictly text-based object.

I just use zathura.

>Calibre
Sorry, I don't use mexican software.

Times New Roman is pretty decent.

You could also do Helvetica Neue.

>don't use Mexican software
Nice try, Juan.

Hey blyat, is that the new crack for Adobe CC apps?

We're talking about a book manager, not a book reader. The contents beyond metadata don't fucking matter.

That's like saying a music player should be navigable by the sounds it makes.

That's a book reader, you fucking retard.

Zathura is a document reader, you fucking moron.

I'm interested in this too specially if it also offers a web based interface like calibre does.

Is there any ebook reader on ganoonix?

Don't get your hopes up. Half the people in this thread are still convinced that this thread is about ebook readers.

Yes.

Is it, you nigger-loving jew?

That wasn't apparent in the first image, and you should know that.