The issue I see here is, there is some demand for a version of calibre that does nothing else but "put book on reader". This version is presumably supposed to be targeted to those people that have no needs beyond "put book on reader". The problems I have with that are:
1) Why use calibre at all in that case? What does calibre buy you over just using the file system?
2) Where are these books going to come from? If they are DRMed amazon books, then just having amazon deliver them to your device is a much better solution that copying them to your computer and then copying them from your computer to your device, via calibre or otherwise.
2.1) If they are DRMed epub, you will have to figure out how to download them using Adobe Digital Editions, find the actual file somehere hidden on your comuter, add it to calibre and then transfer to your device. Just using ADE is easier, it provides a perfectly adequate, get book and transfer to reader function. And in any case, if you are willing to figure all that out, I highly doubt that having a few extra buttons on a toolbar is going to faze you in calibre.
2.5) If they are pirated, you would have to figure out how to pirate in the first place.
4) Again, what is so complex about calibre? There are extra buttons on the toolbar, whose function you may not know. As I outlined before the actual basic use case with calibre is extremely simple. If you are the kind of person that gets fazed by that, you're never going to be able to use calibre to the extent that you get any benefit over just using windows explorer, without someone else (like the family tech guy's) help.
This is a serious question. calibre today has over 6 million installs, the vast majority of which are by people that are in no way good with tech. I remain not convinced that calibre is actually hard to use. Undoubtedly, there are people who find it hard to use, my point is that, would they actually find anything that exposed more functionality than the add books/send to device button easy to use?
@fesja: You say that the large number of calibre users is because there are no alternatives to calibre. As a matter of fact there are many alternatives. None of them succeeded. Of the top of my head: Alfa ebook manager, Hamster ebook manager (which actually uses calibre code under the hood, and is free), a couple of OS X specific programs that I cannot recall the names of. A couple of paid windows programs. And of course all the device specific ones, like K4PC or the SONY and Kobo software.
My vision for calibre is that it is a tool for people that are serious about maintaining a collection of personal document/books/etc. I am not trying to compete with tools designed purely for throwaway content consumption. This probably means that calibre is never going to be universally used, and for people like us, that know what calibre is capable of, that is a shame, but I believe that there are more than enough people in the world for whom calibre will remain an excellent value proposition.
@kiwidude: Your main gripe is about author sorting. I agree that it is a pain if you are not happy with the calibre default. But really, are people that only want to get book, send to device going to care about how author names are sorted?
@nickredding: If you are willing to maintain an alternate UI that only exposes a couple of functions, I am open to discussing it. But I remain skeptical of the need for it. Perhaps, if you flesh it out some more. Exactly what would it have and what would it leave out? How would it simplify the functions it has, compared to the current UI? My minimum requirement for such a UI be that it provide a prominent (and permanent) switch to advanced UI button. And that I will not have to maintain it
EDIT: In summary, I am unable to envision a subset of calibre that would actually be useful to a lot of people in the just put book on reader category