Alternative e-book viewer for version 4
 

I have spent a large part of the day checking out Calibre 4.0 and there a few nice improvements, but for me the e-book viewer is a total disaster. The litany of issues and defects are far too many to recount here.
Has anyone found a mechanism by which to disable/uninstall the e-book viewer and force Calibre to always use an external program to read all books in a library.
Dave

Wouldn't it be better if you instead politely fed back on some of the most important issues you have to Kovid and give him time to modify the viewer if he agrees with you. Its not like calibre is not updated very quickly, or that you could not step back to version 3.48 and wait for the smoke to clear.

On desktop I use Foliate for reading ebooks. On Mac I use Apple Books.

Try right clicking on ePub or whatever format you have and then select “open ePub with” or open azw3 with, etc.

Yes, the basis of your statement is true and I am a great supporter of the excellent work Kovid has done on this fantastic program.. Unfortunately, Kovid, (or others who might be involved with the project), have in my opinion (AND I AM DEFINITELY ENTITLED TO AN OPINION) have made a serious "Wrong Turn" with the e-book viewer. If you had actually bothered to read my post I said "The litany of issues and defects are far too many to recount here.", which means I would spend weeks feeding Kovid (or others who might be involved with the project) the issues I have with the viewer component.
IN MY NOT SO HUMBLE OPINION Calibre 4.0 was an overly excited and rushed release. Just take a look at the documentation https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/ which claims to be version 4, but is in fact version 3.
Sory Kovid, I love your work, but if you go for version 5, please pull in a whole host of beta tasters in. There are a whole lot of us out there ready to back you up.
Dave

Fine for a "One Off" shot, but I am looking for a default solution.
Dave

If you won't help by posting what you found that doesn't work properly, then you don't deserve our help.

It's hard to provide a default solution for one unknown problem let alone a litany of unknown problems - please enumerate your top five issues.

BR

Fine, but Kovid has produced an excellent program, so why should we have to go to the desktop to read files that the software was designed to read.
Dave

OK! I would be happy to do exactly that, but that is only going to produce negative commentary and a load of blah! blah! blah! And I don't have time to waste on BS.
At the end of the day there is ONE and ONLY ONE who can definitely respond to my issues and that is Kovid or whoever reworked the new e-book viewer.
Sadly, Calibre is not open source so we (the great unwashed) cannot contribute to improvements or corrections.
Dave

Rubbish - calibre is open source, has been forever!!

calibre - Get Involved

kovidgoyal (Kovid Goyal)

BR

Just FYI there was a month long beta for calibre 4 with IIRC over a hundred pieces of user feedback. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=322850

Preferences: Behavior:Use internal viewer (on right): REMOVE tics for those you want your OS to support (those must have registered for the format as default open)

Like beauty, ugly is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. For me, the new reader is pretty much perfect, and much more to my taste than the previous one. I do feel sorry for Kovid having to see thread titles like this one though - "the ugly new reader" is a very harsh assessment of all his hard work.