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kovidgoyal · 01-02-2026, 01:46 AM

Hi all,

I am excited to announce betas for calibre 9. The major new feature is a "bookshelf view" that can be used in calibre in addition to the existing book list and cover grid views. To try it, click the layout button in the bottom right corner and switch to Bookshelf view. See the screenshot below for what it looks like. Betas are available at: https://download.calibre-ebook.com/betas/

You can hover over any book spine and it will show the full cover. Keyboard and mouse controls all work as expected. Double click to view a book, just as in the cover grid view. Right click and you can choose to group the books on the Shelves by author, publication year, rating, etc.

You can configure the shelf view in Preferences->Look & feel. The hover animation can be changed or disables. And you can choose whether and how you want the cover thumbnail displayed on the spine.

Additionally, the version of Python and Qt and various other dependencies have all been updated, which may be a source of regressions, so testing is appreciated.

Note that the width of the spines is based on an estimation of the number of pages in the book. For this there is a new Pages column in calibre that is maintained automatically and updated when you add new books/formats to calibre. You can view the pages column by adding it to the book list view via Preferences->Add your own columns. When you add the pages column, it will initially say "calculating". The page counts for all books will be updated gradually in the background at the rate of about a 1000 books an hour. Once all existing books have been counted, new books added will get their updated pages value in a second or two. You can also configure the bookshelf to instead use an existing custom column via a template.

Because of the addition of the Pages column if you install the beta it will update the database schema to add the new column. The updated database will still work with older calibre versions, but the pages column will get out of sync since older calibre will not update it. You can ask calibre to update the pages column by going to Preferences->Look & feel->Bookshelf and clicking "Recalculate page counts".

Thanks and Happy New Year!

P. S: The bookshelf view was developed largely by MR member un_pogaz

01-02-2026, 01:46 AM	#1
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 45,800 Karma: 28586150 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	Beta testers for calibre 9 needed Hi all, I am excited to announce betas for calibre 9. The major new feature is a "bookshelf view" that can be used in calibre in addition to the existing book list and cover grid views. To try it, click the layout button in the bottom right corner and switch to Bookshelf view. See the screenshot below for what it looks like. Betas are available at: https://download.calibre-ebook.com/betas/ You can hover over any book spine and it will show the full cover. Keyboard and mouse controls all work as expected. Double click to view a book, just as in the cover grid view. Right click and you can choose to group the books on the Shelves by author, publication year, rating, etc. You can configure the shelf view in Preferences->Look & feel. The hover animation can be changed or disables. And you can choose whether and how you want the cover thumbnail displayed on the spine. Additionally, the version of Python and Qt and various other dependencies have all been updated, which may be a source of regressions, so testing is appreciated. Note that the width of the spines is based on an estimation of the number of pages in the book. For this there is a new Pages column in calibre that is maintained automatically and updated when you add new books/formats to calibre. You can view the pages column by adding it to the book list view via Preferences->Add your own columns. When you add the pages column, it will initially say "calculating". The page counts for all books will be updated gradually in the background at the rate of about a 1000 books an hour. Once all existing books have been counted, new books added will get their updated pages value in a second or two. You can also configure the bookshelf to instead use an existing custom column via a template. Because of the addition of the Pages column if you install the beta it will update the database schema to add the new column. The updated database will still work with older calibre versions, but the pages column will get out of sync since older calibre will not update it. You can ask calibre to update the pages column by going to Preferences->Look & feel->Bookshelf and clicking "Recalculate page counts". Thanks and Happy New Year! P. S: The bookshelf view was developed largely by MR member un_pogaz Attached Thumbnails