Calibre Alternatives

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by dunhill

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

Originally Posted by BetterRed

. . .

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:



BR

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I downloaded Octary for Windows. Apart from Acronis VirusTotal scanners gave it a green tick, MWB and Defender flagged as 'dangerous' so I installed in a sandbox.

I looked at Octary a while back based on an acquaintance's suggestion. At that time, I think it was v0.2.something. I installed it in a VM and then removed it since it did not support USB connection to non-Amazon ereaders. I just looked at the current version (v0.3.0-alpha.5) and it still says "*USB connection support for Kobo, Nook, and PocketBook coming soon."

During my limited testing back then, editing metadata failed more often than it worked, the file compression made several books unreadable, etc. Definitely a work in progress.

Edit: Located the installer used for the original install. It was v0.2.0-alpha.1 on 2025-Dec-19.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

...

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.

But, facilitates doesn't means it's actually implemented… it's not.

BR

[DNSB]

Just for the heck of it, I created a new VM, updated it and then installed Octary. Not much different from the last time though importing a small calibre library was faster. It still shrinks covers during import (1000x1500 => 400x600) and some features require a $4.50 per month Patreon account to enable them (web profiles, shelf view, cloud backup).

[DNSB]

Perhaps the messages about Octary should be moved to a new thread since they have little to do with calibre 9's beta testing.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Perhaps the messages about Octary should be moved to a new thread since they have little to do with calibre 9's beta testing.

Octary also has little to do with properly dealing with eBooks. You need to pay a lot for some of the features. That's $54 a year. No way I'd pay for that for a program that wants to be calibre but never will.

While it's a work in progress, all features need to be free so they can be used and tested.

[un_pogaz]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

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.

So Yes and No.
Yes calibre store the series index into the main book table, but also No because it store it into a "book-series intersection table" too. And store it into "book-series intersection table" is the behavior for custom series.
My guess is that the series index in the book table is a legacy data and that Kovid still not remove for reason.

The real limitations is that Calibre allow only a unique instance of book_id by intersection table, because each "book-series intersection table" and "series name table" pair is connected to a column field.

When Octary use a single pair of "book-series intersection table" and "series name table" for it entire library, without taking into account of uniqueness of book_id in the intersection table, and seem determines wich one is the main or subseries by store it in a other thrid table (not sure of that, you shared example library don't contain such data but extrapolated from the db architecture)

I don't know how Octary render the fact that a book have several series attached to it, but the very table nature of Calibre (one cell, one value) lead to the current and relevant behavior.

[Sirtel]

Well, I also tried Octary, just from curiosity. Ugh. The experience was pretty awful. First off, the UI is dark mode only, which I hate and never use. Second, there is almost no customizing the display - you can't choose what is displayed or where, no resizing anything, no sorting or grouping by tags and so on. You can read the description only in the edit metadata window, it seems, or else you can see only a few lines of it. No custom categories, as was already mentioned.

I could go on, but there's no point. Uninstall, and fast. I really can't think of any reason why people would prefer this to calibre, unless they want only the simplest and most basic experience and don't want to even think about customizing anything.

[BetterRed]

They want something more like the apps on their smartphones and tablets.

BR

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

They want something more like the apps on their smartphones and tablets.

BR

They want a desktop program to behave like an Android/iOS app?

[BetterRed]

I wish my iPhone would be more like my Windows desktop.

[Comfy.n]

Fortunately, some apps have a web version, acessible by desktop browsers. Those are becoming increasingly rare though, in my perception.

[BetterRed]

Not sure which I 'hate' more - web apps or iphone apps.

My all time favourite was XServer apps running on Solaris with Tektronix X-Terminals doing the front of house razzmatazz… then along came IBM with their cloneable PC-XT.

[Comfy.n]

Desktop people are in extinction