[nickredding]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

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?

You are obviously not familiar with the 80% of which I speak. These are people that expect a window to pop up asking them what they want to do when they plug a device in to a USB port. They would typically not know how to get to the file system on the device, and if they could, they wouldn't know what folder to put the books in, and if they did they wouldn't realize the ebook format might not be compatible and needs to be converted. Furthermore, if you explained all this they would likely not retain it if it's something they only do once a month.

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.

True, but there is a large universe of free books out there that can be accessed with a few clicks of the mouse via a web browser (one of the few technical skills the 80% have consistently mastered). But what then?

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.

The problem with the calibre UI is it looks complicated and unfamiliar. Unlike 95% of Windows/Mac apps it's not icon-based in terms of object management (it's list-based). In short, it is intimidating and fairly shouts at the user "this is for serious users only!!" Well, at least you'd agree with that!

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.

You have no evidence of this. 6 million is a drop in the total population bucket of computer users. And how many of those 6 million installs are actually being used?

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?

My point is that calibre looks unfamiliar and complicated.

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.

We agree on this, calibre is for the 20%, not the 80%.

@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

I have no reason to swim against the stream with calibre, and your comment about the button for a "permanent" switch makes your attitude to this crystal clear.

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

I think I have adequately explained why you are completely wrong on this. End of my participation in this discussion.