Citadel - Calibre-compatible book management tool

[davedeacon]

https://github.com/every-day-things/citadel

Looks like this is designed to be "Calibre with a nice UI".

Some discussion about it on Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38988019

[Quoth]

It doesn't really exist yet. It's an aspiration by someone who thinks Calibre is slow and awkward (it's not) and it doesn't look like the person has much experience.

A lot of discussion there by people that either don't how to work Calibre, or don't understand what it does.
Calibre isn't a multi-user library system, like a lending library or video library has. Nor is it a document management system for offices. It's primarily to manage ebooks (and thus ebook metadata) for an ereader for one person, though it can do more. The conversion, epub editor and viewer are important tools to complement the basic ebook repository, metadata editor and transfer features. The 3rd party plugins make it an even more useful tool.

There is nothing wrong with the calibre GUI for what it is that it does.

I predict Citadel will never make it and it's far too early for a one person project to be on Github.

[Terisa de morgan]

I see another issue. If you want something like that for everybody.... to have to build it from github is not the way, really. And all Quoth's comments reflect one big common issue: I want an app which does everything.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

I want an app which does everything.

That's why we have MacOS, MS Windows, Linux, BSD, iOS and Android.
What works best is specialised tools and an operating system to support them and allow them to communicate.

Parts of Calibre actually run stand-alone: Epub Editor, Convert, Viewer. Which makes sense.

[Sirtel]

AFAIK there have been similar plans and projects before. For some reason they never come to anything. The developer soon loses interest and moves on to something else.

I have never had problems with calibre UI, but then I've been a heavy user for a long time. And I'm not even remotely familiar with MacOS or its application guidelines (Calibre ignoring those seems to be a common source of complaints), so for me the UI is perfectly fine.

There are other popular and widely used programs with even more complicated and labyrinthine UIs (Adobe Photoshop, GIMP). Calibre is by no means the only one that's geared toward functionality rather than simplicity.

[Sirtel]

Reading those comments, especially the ones about crashing etc., I really wondered. Calibre is one of the most stable programs I‘ve ever used, and I have used it on many different Windows computers, from very low-end to very expensive, with a library of tens of thousands, for more than 12 years. Never had any crashing or other instability. Everything just works. Seems strange to me that there are people with instability problems.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Reading those comments, especially the ones about crashing etc., I really wondered. Calibre is one of the most stable programs I‘ve ever used, and I have used it on many different Windows computers, from very low-end to very expensive, with a library of tens of thousands, for more than 12 years. Never had any crashing or other instability. Everything just works. Seems strange to me that there are people with instability problems.

Me too, since XP. The last versions for XP and Win7 still work well on the VMs. Switched to Linux completely in 2017, but I have a VM and real laptop both with Win10 and recent calibre.

Linux Mint with Mate Desktop, so no issues there except having to add a library once for an upgrade.

Of course if people put the library on a share or a synced folder (all contrary to FAQ) they'll have issues.
I've over 7,100 titles. Some people have 10x that. They must be magical creatures or aliens as a human can't read that much

[gbm]

The fact that calibre opens in 1.64 seconds with 3719 books and is sable makes me wonder how it could be faster. if I was using a cpu with pci4 or 5 bus and NVMe SSD sure it would be faster.

bernie

[JSWolf]

I've used calibre since it first came out and wasn't called calibre. I have never seen any program that can replace calibre.

[Karellen]

If it's just a nicer UI, (and personally from what I saw, I don't think it is) why not create a new skin for Calibre?

Can skins be installed on Calibre? Doesn't look like you can from a quick look around settings.

[Martinoptic]

You can change the icon sets though in calibre.

[Sirtel]

Those folks want fewer options to be immediately visible, so as not to confuse the poor dears. I don't think that can be done with a skin. It would require writing an alternate GUI, which neither Kovid nor other main contributors are interested in doing, and no one else has ever done it either.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by gbm

The fact that calibre opens in 1.64 seconds with 3719 books and is sable makes me wonder how it could be faster. if I was using a cpu with pci4 or 5 bus and NVMe SSD sure it would be faster.

bernie

It takes about 10 seconds for my main library (over 30,000 books) and 3 seconds for a subset library (about a tenth of that) on a laptop with i7, 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD. But then I have tons of plugins and lots of custom columns; I assume those have an effect on the opening speed.

[BetterRed]

Anyone who thinks the calibre UI is complex should have a look at Autodesk software… MS Fluent ribbons in sidebars even, on a Mac no less.

[Comfy.n]

I find it disgusting that the developer announces they're "building a tool to replace Calibre". Sounds presumptuous and disrespectful. They could do whatever ebook management software they want without even mentioning Calibre. Also it somehow reminds me of Citadel Securities shorting shareholder's assets

At least they issued a warning of possible library corruption