[saxondawg]

I'm bewildered by the claim that Calibre has a difficult, user-unfriendly interface. I'm a fairly simple guy and it made perfect sense to me from the beginning. The thing about Calibre is that it goes a long way in being all things to all people. For the power user who is willing to dive into plugboards, etc. (not me), there are options to take it as deep as he wishes. For those who want a nice cataloging of a book collection, with little customization, that can quickly be done as well. It seems like there is a certain amount of unreasonable having-it-both-ways in some of these requests: They want it all simpler, but they want it to cater to specific author sorting (which adds a level of complication). For someone else, it won't be author sorting but some other pet concern about his or her collection.

While I took to Calibre from the beginning and use it every day, my brother was actually confused by it and couldn't convert books. I asked a couple of questions and discovered he was trying to convert .pdfs to kindle e-books. The problem was not with Calibre, but his lack of understanding--a lack many casual users will share--that .pdfs are a special case. Maybe those are the 80% to whom everyone refers. The myth is that almost any software will be simple enough for the quick-and-dirty crowd to use. My brother probably downloaded Calibre, in haste, just because he found out his Kindle wasn't taking the .pdfs he wanted on it. He had that single purpose and wasn't about to stop and learn the program, watch the videos, etc. There is a learning curve for almost any program on a computer. Read the amazon.com Kindle customer discussions and you'll see very quickly just how ignorant the very casual user is. And most of them will never take the time to master software or hardware.

I use Microsoft Word for a living, as an author, and find that nearly everyone I know uses it without knowing 90% of the features right under their noses--even though they've been Word users for years. They can hit the button for italics, maybe two or three other functions. Otherwise it's a typewriter. They can't use styles, review, or other sets of features. And their eyes widen in panic if you offer to show them. But they'll tell you Word is "too complicated."

I agree with Kovid's sentiments in this thread. He has provided a program that is as simple as possible for the very casual user, with minor tradeoffs here and there, while offering powerful features for those who want to go farther. As his installations climb above 6 million, this will bring more and more people who think the program should be this or that to their liking--but the number in itself says he must be doing something right.