calibre 0.7.0 released!

[kovidgoyal]

Almost a year has passed since calibre 0.6.0. It's now time for calibre 0.7.0.

A more complete list of new features is available at http://calibre-ebook.com/new-in/seven. An excerpt:

It has been nearly a year since calibre 0.6.0 was released and calibre has come a long way since then. calibre has always been amazingly flexible. 0.6 was all about bringing that flexibility to the conversion engine and device support. Today calibre supports conversion from/to dozens of formats and can connect to scores of devices. The focus of 0.7 is bringing that same flexibility to the calibre User Interface.

To that end, users now have the ability to freely resize all the major User Interface elements, add their own custom metadata to the book list, and add their own categories to the Tag Browser.

Another major area of improvement is performance. Various parts of calibre have seen optimization and caching improvements. Startup times and large library performance have been dramatically improved. With a library of ten thousand books, you will see an improvement of between 10 and a 100 times in the speed of startup and common operations like editing metadata.

When connecting to devices, calibre now caches the metadata it reads from the files on the device. This means that on subsequent connects calibre will build the list of books on the device very fast. If you like to keep large collections of books on your device, you will find this feature a godsend.

You can watch a video of the new user interface improvements at http://calibre-ebook.com/demo#tutorials.

As always, get the new release from: http://calibre-ebook.com/download

[FizzyWater]

The website still has the same message about "if you're installing from a version older than 0.6.17...". Is that still true for this? Or should we uninstall any 0.6 version first?

[kjk]

I can see my iPad!

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

The website still has the same message about "if you're installing from a version older than 0.6.17...". Is that still true for this? Or should we uninstall any 0.6 version first?

yes it's still true. If you're upgrading from version before 0.6.17 you need to uninstall first. For versions after 0.6.17 you're fine

[tulsa]

woo hoo! Can't wait to try it out!

[DoctorOhh]

Glad to see its release.

[Stinger]

Kudos to the development team on the release! Also a great job on that video going over the new features Kovid, well done!

[Demonthus]

Hi I have made an account just to say this: 0.7.0 completely screwed up my reader's collection organization.

I've had about 700 works organized into 10 collections at this point, using criteria such as new fiction, old fiction, science, etc. Due to my e-reader's slow refresh rate, it helps to know exactly where books are located.

However, this latest version of calibre automatically "updated metadata" on my books, effectively turning 10 collections into 200. My previously meticulously created collections have been destroyed, and the books have been scattered to the wind. A good deal of my books had no metadata, so calibre put each one in it's own collection based on title. Shall I find a novel in "Pesticides", "Man-Woman Relationships, Drama" or perhaps "Sisters -- Fiction"? Needless to say it defeats the concept of collections if each collection has only a couple books.

Of course, I don't want to be entirely pessimistic so I offer the suggestions that you create a setting for automatically re-organizing the entire reader. I know the easiest thing would have been to not update calibre, or (God forbid) stuck to Sony's Reader Library.

Anyway, I'll return to spending the next several hours deleting books and re-adding them

[kovidgoyal]

calibre turns tags into collections. That has always been the case. You can turn off that behavior by going to Preferences->Plugins->Device interface plugins and customizing the SONY plugin to not use tags to create collections.

The only difference in 0.7 is that calibre automatically recognizes books on your device that are also in your library and updates their metadata. Most people would consider that a good thing.

I've even added a note about that in the what's new page under Incompatible changes

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Demonthus

However, this latest version of calibre automatically "updated metadata" on my books, effectively turning 10 collections into 200.

Sounds like something stemming from the combined device interface plugin for Sony devices. The documentation said if you had changed the plugin you would need to redo it.

Originally Posted by Demonthus

My previously meticulously created collections have been destroyed, and the books have been scattered to the wind. A good deal of my books had no metadata, so calibre put each one in it's own collection based on title. Shall I find a novel in "Pesticides", "Man-Woman Relationships, Drama" or perhaps "Sisters -- Fiction"? Needless to say it defeats the concept of collections if each collection has only a couple books.

Assuming you had a version more current then 0.6.17 updating Calibre should not have affected your collections within the calibre library. What version did you update from?

Originally Posted by Demonthus

Of course, I don't want to be entirely pessimistic so I offer the suggestions that you create a setting for automatically re-organizing the entire reader.

I have upgraded with no problem but I have yet to connect my Sony device. I'm going to hook it up now and move around a few books to see if I can help replicate your problem.

Originally Posted by Demonthus

Anyway, I'll return to spending the next several hours deleting books and re-adding them

Deleting and re-adding them from your reader or from Calibre itself?

[Demonthus]

The only difference in 0.7 is that calibre automatically recognizes books on your device that are also in your library and updates their metadata. Most people would consider that a good thing.

Well, at first I thought it was because the Sony Reader automatically puts tags and series into separate collections. However, the reader library doesn't do this, only calibre. I think this is why: http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual...he-sony-reader - "When you add tags to a book’s metadata, those tags are turned into collections when you upload the book to the SONY reader."

Assuming you had a version more current then 0.6.17 updating Calibre should not have affected your collections within the calibre library. What version did you update from?

Whatever the most recent update was, I just updated within the last week.

Deleting and re-adding them from your reader or from Calibre itself?

From the reader, as the collections stick around even if they're empty. I figure it's faster to format the device and add books in batches than go through and re-organize each and every book and collection.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Demonthus

Well, at first I thought it was because the Sony Reader automatically puts tags and series into separate collections. However, the reader library doesn't do this, only calibre. I think this is why: http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual...he-sony-reader - "When you add tags to a book’s metadata, those tags are turned into collections when you upload the book to the SONY reader."

This is not new it has been the way Calibre works for at least 18 months. Have you been using both Calibre and Sony's reader software to send books to your device?

Originally Posted by Demonthus

From the reader, as the collections stick around even if they're empty. I figure it's faster to format the device and add books in batches than go through and re-organize each and every book and collection.

If your tags(collections) in calibre was accurate then you can use Calibre to remove the books in your reader then highlight and send them back to your reader.

What were you doing when you noticed extra collections?

I have unchecked download tags in my metadata download plugins (under preferences - Plugins) in each Google, isbnDB, and Amazon. This stops tags from automatically being added when you download metadata.

I hope you work out what occurred to cause this hiccup.

[Demonthus]

This is not new it has been the way Calibre works for at least 18 months. Have you been using both Calibre and Sony's reader software to send books to your device?

Yes I have, for stuff like books from Project Gutenberg I'd use the Sony software and add all of them to one collection because it was faster than importing into calibre since they were already in epub format.

What were you doing when you noticed extra collections?

Well I had just update calibre, so calibre is what I was doing!

I have unchecked download tags in my metadata download plugins (under preferences - Plugins) in each Google, isbnDB, and Amazon. This stops tags from automatically being added when you download metadata.

I just did that, thanks for the tip.

Is there any way I can edit the metadata of books on the reader which are not in the calibre library? (800 books and 450 collections, haha)

[Alan P.]

Hi,
Calibre user since late '08, had every version, just updated today (6/4) to .7 and... nothing. The icon doc jumps briefly, then nothing, and double clicking on the program in the applications window does nothing either. Restarted, same thing. Using: G5 Power PC w/ OS 10.4.11
Help! I love and need this program working, wish I didn't overwrite the old version...

Thanks in advance - A.P.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

The only difference in 0.7 is that calibre automatically recognizes books on your device that are also in your library and updates their metadata. Most people would consider that a good thing.

I missed this post by Kovid. No more mystery it performed as expected.

Originally Posted by Demonthus

Yes I have, for stuff like books from Project Gutenberg I'd use the Sony software and add all of them to one collection because it was faster than importing into calibre since they were already in epub format.

When you try to use both Calibre and Sony software to manage books on your device your asking for trouble.

Originally Posted by Demonthus

Well I had just update calibre, so calibre is what I was doing!

You were obviously new to calibre because in any recent previous version as soon as you transferred any books via Calibre you would have noticed a bunch of collections added to your reader created from tags.

Kovid did document this new feature and linked to it in the first post of this thread.

Incompatible changes

• all the SONY drivers have been combined into a single driver, so if you previously customized a SONY driver, you will have to redo the customization.
  Also note that, calibre turns tags into collections, so it will create new collections for existing books on your reader, if they have tags but don't already have collections on the device.
  You can turn off this behavior by going to Preferences-> Plugins-> Device Interface plugins and customizing the SONY plugin.