Hi all,
After several months of development, calibre 7 is ready for beta
testing. The headline feature is the ability to add notes to any
author/series/tags/publisher/etc.
To use this feature, right click (or ctrl click on macOS) on the author
name in the tag browser or book details panel and choose Edit notes.
After creating the note, there will be a little pencil icon next to the
author name in Book details that you can click to see the note. In the
popup that opens to see the note, there is a button you can click to
copy a calibre:// URL used to display the note. All notes in your
library can be searched by pressing Ctrl+shift+n or adding the Browse
notes tool to the toolbar. This search is a full text search. Notes
support basic HTML formatting, colors, links, images, etc.
You can also view and edit the notes via the calibre Content server.
Another new feature is that the calibre viewer has gained support for
Audio EPUB files. These are EPUB files with embedded audio, typically of
a human reading out the text. Now, when you click the Read aloud button
in the viewer controls while viewing such a file, the embedded audio is
used instead of Text to speech. Note that this may not work on Linux
because of issues with patented audio codecs but should work on both
Windows and macOS. Freely available EPUB books with embedded audio can
be downloaded here:
https://www.readbeyond.it/ebooks.html
All the calibre dependencies have also been recompiled to their latest
versions, especially Qt, which I am hoping wont cause any issues, but
past experience does not lead me to be confident.
The betas are available (with version number 6.99.x) at:
https://download.calibre-ebook.com/betas/
On Windows you can install the portable version to test it alongside of
regular calibre. It is safe to run the beta on an existing library and
then switch back to regular calibre. Any notes you create will simply
not be visible to regular calibre. The only exception is if you delete
an author/tag/whatever in regular calibre, the associated note wont be
cleaned up.
Please report any issues you find in this thread. Thanks for helping.
For those of you running from source, calibre7 corresponds to the
"notes" branch, which will eventually be merged into the "master"
branch before the release of calibre7.