[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

The main complaints are:

- It is extremely complicated
- It is ugly
- It's slow
- They don't like that it is updated every week or two weeks

Well, it's as complicated as you make it. If you want, you can use only the Metadata window, convert books, and send/remove them from your device. That is exceedingly simple, and for many people, it's enough; Calibre's defaults are sensible.

Generally speaking, what Calibre does by default is what you would expect it to do.

I did just find myself readjusting. My default eBook view is an Android tablet, and I have several. Two have identical hardware but different Android versions - 4.4 KitKat and 5.1 Lollipop, respectively. I transfer books to the tablets via USB cable, but Android handles that differently in 5.1 than it did in 4.4. One difference meant that I had to go through device configuration and specify the location Calibre transferred books to. There's a default list, and it transfers to the first location in the list that exists on the target device. That meant that books got transferred to a Books directory on my external card when they actually live in eBooks. FBReader was configured to look in /mnt/extsd/eBooks for new additions, and never saw the stuff sent to Books. "Wait a minute! Calibre said it transferred those books. Where are they? Oh. That's where they went. Remove and re-add to the correct place..."

With regard to looks, I'm not a fan of the default interface either, but I have removed all the big icons. I only have three menu's: Main, Add Books, and Preferences, and all book-related options are in the context menu. I've also installed an alternative icon set (Monstre), and Calibre looks very clean now.

I haven't thoroughly redone the interface yet. I did dispense with the large icons and substituted the smaller ones, but I need to redo where various plugins appear.

You can have a look at the attachment to see how my main calibre interface looks. (Yes, I'm running over 500 jobs, because I've changed some options, and I now need to polish those into the EPUBs, and I also own over 50 Delphi Classics, of which I won't ever read everything )

I've never gotten that enthusiastic. I did just go through an exercise of standardization. My default eBook viewer these days is an Android tablet, using the open source FBReader for Android as the viewer. FBReader handles ePub, Mobi, FB2 and a few other things native, and PDF, DjVu, and CBR/CBZ via plugins. I decided to standardize on ePub, and went through a conversion exercise to get a lot of things originally acquired as Mobi files into ePub format., and delete the formats that weren't ePub. I do still have a Palm TX PDA with a Palm Mobi viewer on it, but it's the work of a moment to do an ePub->Mobi conversion for stuff I might want on it.

(I did once see Calibre want so much memory Windows increased the size of the page file, but that was a special case.)

On speed, I have to say that calibre indeed isn't very fast, but it's fast enough for most things. It doesn't NEED to be blisteringly fast. Some people just state that "it should have been written in C++", unhindered by any knowledge regarding programming. If Kovid had written calibre in C++, we would probably have seen one release every half a year, and it'd probably have 20% of the features it has now.

Kovid writes in Python That provides much faster development, and Calibre is inherently cross platform because Python his been ported to just about everything.

One thing I find significant is the effect of steady increases in hardware power. You no longer have to write in a compiled language like C++ to get acceptable speed, because the hardware can run stuff written in Python or Java with adequate performance.

I do note from poking around elsewhere that Kovid seems to have an experimental port to C# in the works. Microsoft has officially made .NET open source and has been contributing to the Mono project that brings .NET to Linux. This provides C# under Linux as well, and OS/X.

C# may well be faster than Python, so it will be interesting to see this develop.

On updates, I can only say: "Who cares?" Would you rather wait 6 months for a bug fix? Nobody forces you with a gun to your head to install all updates. For my part, Kovid could update calibre twice a day, or every hour, should there be a way to do so short of running from source. I'm not obliged to install them. Sometimes, I don't connect my reader to the computer nor do any organizing for weeks on end. Calibre then just sits idle, or is used very little. Then, at some point, I'm starting to use it seriously again (adding new books, organizing unorganized parts of the library), and then I'll update everything.

I prefer to keep current, and it's about 5 minutes to update here. (I have a 100mbit/sec Internet connection, so getting the new release is quick.) I have the 64bit Windows version, the 32 bit Portable version on a USB drive, and the Linux version since I dual boot.

The bugs fixed are generally things that don't bite me, but Kovid is constantly adding features, too, so keeping current is useful.
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Dennis