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Originally Posted by radius
Keeping in mind I might not be up to date...
- don't like the way it stores books on disk (ie: the directory names with parenthesized numbers can potentially conflict with Dropbox versioning, pulling covers out of books, zipping HTML etc)
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Google Drive, not Dropbox, uses numbers in parentheses for versioning. And that is because it is braindead, and not only calibre has this problem. Google Groups had a bunch of people complaining, some regarding calibre, some regarding naming schemes for pictures, IIRC. That is only a problem if you actually want to use Google Drive, of course.
You don't like the way it separately stores the cover.jpeg? All it costs is a bit of disk space, and not really very of that either. Would you prefer it be in the database??? I don't see what that helps. And calibre needs to keep a copy of the metadata, for obvious reasons.
No help for the ZIP instead of OEB (Open EBook files), I suppose. (Curious: what are those actually used for, to an end user?
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- don't like the way it looks, especially the icons
- UI doesn't feel polished. Feels like it takes many button presses to do common things. It also feels sluggish and not snappy to me, even on fast hardware.
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Fair enough. Personal preferences and all that, if it doesn't work for you no problem.
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- don't like the auto-generated styles when doing conversions. Also, the default formatting during conversion seemed pretty heavy-handed to me
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I don't particularly like it either, but if I am just using calibre to send-to-device I don't care. I make sure to keep the original format intact and if I need to change anything in it, I edit manually.
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- felt like it slowed down a lot after a few thousand books (this may have gotten better; I vaguely remember some kind of database update coming down the pike around the time I gave up on Calibre)
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Yes, there is a new db backend from version 1.0 which is much faster, and various improvements along the way. Note that most slowdowns seem to come from using custom columns that must be computed per book every time the column is viewed. Especially if it uses the function for reading the book filesize from disk
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I understand why Calibre has fans, but between command line conversion tools, and the native tagging and metadata tools of my computer's filesystem, I don't really see much value add in Calibre for me personally. Especially since I consider my ebooks to be my "archival" copies and not just artifacts meant for display on particular hardware.
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I ♥ calibre.
But if you can get along without it,
!
I do enjoy hearing from someone who actually understands what calibre is for and still doesn't like using it, but acknowledges that is only a personal preference and not indicative of calibre itself. It gives a useful perspective on what calibre is good for and where its shortcomings lie.
Fascinating stuff.