[anarcat]

Author here, fancy seeing this here (again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190657)! I keep updating that article as I find things, the most progress there is is in ebook readers. I mostly use Koreader on a Kobo now, but they also have an Android app which I used when I had a tablet (which has been unfortunately bricked recently). This meshes well with Syncthing as I have read progress propagate everywhere, and I use git-annex for archival / backup / redundancy.

I still use Calibre for importing books. I think I could get rid of it if I had Something that would:

1. take a book and search for missing metadata (e.g. publication date, author, title, series, publisher, cover)

2. record addition date (git-annex or filesystem m/ctime could be used for that)

3. ... well, that really is it

Really, I don't use Calibre for anything else anymore. In the article I talk about the book browser, but I don't really use that anyway. I'm actually considering "flattening" my archive so that all books are in the same directory. That would make Koreader possibly more usable as it would directly show book covers while browsing around. It might also make navigating through a file manager better for exactly the same reason.

More broadly, I wish we had better file managers on the Linux desktop. What I'm looking for, repeatedly, is something that would show me a preview of what's inside a folder, kind of a photo gallery / music browser / ebook browser all rolled into one. The generic idea is that if there's a `cover.jpg` or whatever it's named inside a folder, use that as a icon or at least some sort of overlay when displaying the folder. I'm not sure how that would work, I'm not a designer, but I can't help but think there Must Be A Better Way here.

[majora2007]

Hey, Kavita creator here and noticed you don't have any mentions of Kavita for epub readers. Kavita is not a Calibre replacement, but has a built-in epub/pdf reader along with some series-based organization.

https://www.kavitareader.com/

[anarcat]

interesting project! added, thanks!

[gryf73]

There was a time, when I was so fed up of the Calibre being so bloated, while all I needed was just a convert capabilities, that I started to rip off parts of the Calibre, clean it up, make things simpler, removing unnecessary things and trying to understand what is happening behind the conversion, resulting with ebook-converter[1], which simply do the conversion, without all the management/downloading rss/editing/what have you. It is usable right now, but I'd say it's still somewhere in between alpha and beta stage. You could give it a shot.

[1] https://github.com/gryf/ebook-converter

[anarcat]

wow. that is courageous!

looks like an interesting project... but I must admit it's not really something I use or need anymore. I used to do some book conversions when I would only find (say) a `azw` or a `mobi` file and would need to convert to `epub` but these days (a) I just find a `epub` but even if not (b) koreader can read `mobi` files and a lot more i can throw at it and (c) `azw` files are basically unconvertible, if I followed that correctly.

Speaking of which, do you do the DeDRM dance?

thanks!