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Old 02-01-2026, 09:13 PM   #1
BetterRed
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Posts: 22,262
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Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Sydney Australia
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Calibre Alternatives

Quote:
Originally Posted by dunhill View Post
Over the years, I've seen many book management systems that try to be more aesthetically pleasing than Calibre, but that glittery makeup falls off in the long run. Meanwhile, given Calibre's regular updates and constant evolution, no one else will ever achieve that. Calibre is multiplatform, and many of its clones rely on Calibre's code. There, I've vented!
Did you actually read my post

Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed View Post
. . .

I help coordinate reading group of 25±5 at my local public library. Over the past couple of months three members (mac users) have moved from calibre to Octary - it has a migration feature. The clincher wasn't Octary's glitz and glamour, it was support for multi-level series and universes.
I downloaded Octary for Windows. Apart from Acronis, VirusTotal scanners gave it green ticks, MWB and Defender flagged as 'dangerous' so I installed in a sandbox.

It creates Author folders, and Book folders within them, and it has a sqlite database that has a similar schema to calibre's.

Calibre stores the series index in the book table, Octary stores it in the book-series intersection table… this facilitates many-to-many relationships between books and series - like calibre provides for Authors and Tags.

There's no provision for custom columns, plugins, templates, or octary:\\ URLs etc - basically its calibre without the features for geeks, with some wrinkles ironed out, some baubles like wishlists, reading stats etc… and a glossier but vaguely familiar UI:

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BR
Attached Files
File Type: zip octary library.zip (1.81 MB, 5 views)

Last edited by BetterRed; Yesterday at 02:12 AM.
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