[geek1011]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

First let me say that I have concerns not objections. I'm not the target market for a kepubify calibre plugin so all I have is opinions - which you're free to ignore. After all, I'm not the one who will will be fielding support questions in these forums

Opinions are what creates discussion.

The following is all personal opinion. I fully admit to being somewhat of a pessimist by nature, but then again, as someone once said "a pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist"

I'm usually like that too.

My first question would be why are kepubify users asking for it to be included in calibre? What are the features which aren't already available in KoboTouch (KT) and KoboTouchExtended (KTE)? The answer to this question is fundamental to what ought to happen next.

Mainly speed, stability for large books, and some of the built-in CSS mods (such as the full screen fixes until recently, the CSS inliner to deal with the buggy FW and some buggy books, etc).

I don't know all the features in kepubify. Do you replicate some/all the add-ons in KTE?, some of the ones in the base KT? If so, this would be my biggest area of concern - similar features - but done differently (possibly). If/when a user posts here to say that one of these duplicate features isn't working as they expect they are not going to know whether it's KT/KTE or kepubify plugin causing the problem or possibly a conflict between the two. The latter could quickly degenerate into conflict between the two sets of developers. There are no winners if that happens. For that reason, personally, I'd avoid all duplicate features, e.g. leave metadata handling to KT.

The metadata handling all will be in seriesmeta (an add-on tool for kepubify), which is a standalone tool which will not be included in the Calibre plugin. It can be used along with Calibre without issues though.

As an aside, if it was up to me I'd remove some of the existing KTE add-ons because I don't think they belong there. But it isn't up to me, so I just don't use those and leave others in peace to do as they wish. It's fairly common for users to want all their favourite features gathered together in one place. Many developers have difficulty playing 'Bad Cop' so they prefer to say 'yes' when deep-down they know they should say 'no' Feature-creep and -duplication ensues, to the benefit of no-one in the long run.

I have a well-defined scope for kepubify. Kepubify (the converter part only) will only:
- Convert epubs to kepubs
- Apply fixes to book-breaking (i.e. book is not readable) CSS and HTML layout which are in multiple books by a publisher
- Remove extra MS/ADE/iBooks/Calibre cruft
- Apply CSS modifications to fix or tweak bugs (see above) or Kepub features (like hyphenation)
- Manage basic recursive converting to an arbitrary output directory (for ease of use)

Seriesmeta will do anything to do with metadata management on Kobo devices as long as it does not interfere with Calibre or the Kobo store.

If your kepubify plugin was just going to be an epub-to-kepub (and possibly azw3-to-kepub) format-shifter - with the aim of adding a physical kepub to the calibre library without going through the full epub-to-kepub conversion process (as per Kepub Output plugin) then I wouldn't have any particular concerns about that. It's extra add-ons which duplicate the work of KT/KTE or other published plugins which concern me.

You are correct in not having any concern.

Thanks for the feedback! This will probably clear up other people's questions as well.