Calibre is a one-stop solution for eBook reading as an almighty and open-source software. There are a lot of eBook lovers and developers contributing to this software and make it the household name in the ebook area.
But nothing is purely perfect in this world. Calibre also has its drawbacks: The ugly and unfriendly interface.
Calibre Alternative 1. Epubor Ultimate
Among all the eBook DRM Removal & eBook Converter software, Epubor Ultimate is the best alternative to Calibre. In many areas, it is even better than Calibre. It supports 5 most popular formats: EPUB, PDF, Mobi, AZW3 and TXT.
Using Epubor Ultimate to remove eBook DRM and convert eBook format is much easier to use for people who are not that familiar with computer skills.
Pros: Gorgeous design; User-friendliness; Excellent customer support; Removing DRM from Kindle, Kobo, Google Play, Nook, etc.
Cons: There are some limitations for the free trial version. (You have to pay $24.99 to get the full version)
Want to know more about Epubor Ultimate? Get more details here: Epubor vs Calibre | Official Review.
Calibre Alternatives 2. Epubor eBook Manager
Epubor eBook Manager is an all-in-one eBook management software for you to manage your eBooks from different sources. It supports you to classify, modify, convert and transfer your eBooks. It can catalog eBooks from your devices, Kindle for Mac/PC, Adobe Digital Editions and Calibre by automatically scanning. And your books will be sorted by authors, languages, publishers, and formats. You can also add tags to classify all books. By editing the eBooks metadata such as title, introduction, author, book cover, language, publisher, ISBN, date and so on, you can modify all eBooks. Also, it offers amazing user experience and best customer support.
Pros: Extremely easy to use; Beautiful interface.
Cons: It cannot decrypt ebooks in a stable way.
Calibre Alternative 3. Epubor Reader
Epubor Reader, is the most beautifully designed ebook reader with really powerful functions in a user-friendly interface. As the best alternative to Calibre in ebook reading feature, it supports multiple ebook formats, including EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, PRC, TXT, HTMLZ, etc. It offers you a fully customizable reading experience and enables you to view, organize and manage all your ebooks in all kind of formats in a single library. What an excellenent place to manage and read all your ebooks.
Pros: Better interface than Calibre; Free to use; Supports multiple ebook formats.
Cons: No support for reading DRM-protected books; The free version only allow you to add 20 books at most.
Jonny Greenwood joined Epubor since 2011, loves everything about eBooks and eReaders. He seeks the methods to read eBooks more freely and wants to share all he has got with you.
Another 'feature' of Calibre which is obviously caused by some pathetic bug in the Calibre python file handling code is trying to rename books and getting nonsense permission and lock etc. errors when the database is on a NAS; in my case FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201503270027 with full user file permissions to a Windows 7 mapped share of a ZFS ZRAID2 dataset with windows permissions and filesystem support.
If you can't rename a folder because your code is moronic, like still having unclosed explicit or implicit directory locks, including directory watches or current directory handles, or doing unnecessary fail causing stuff, you can still switch to the copy and delete move approach, then leave what's left for a later clean-up, preferable marked for later deletion by name or marker file!
It really stinks that the help rejects fixing this broken code so that it works properly with a NAS .. L A Z Y!
For now, I'll just tolerate renaming a book, exit the part failed metadata edit, re-edit the metadata of the new index name, then clean out the no longer unindexed junk later.
Yes, I noticed Calibre developper are rude morons. I didn't speak to them, but I read on the forum, they don't care if users ask for an improvement of the not so good thing, they claim their ways are the best possible.
I don't like Calibre, because of the way it manages the folder. Calibre forces me to organize my books in a way that is not comfortable. They didn't understand that some users uses Calibre to edit, and then use android apps to read. The apps get really confused with the fact each book is put in a folder with the author name. If I have 900 books, I have to go and fetch each of my books in each folder... That's crazy.
They could add an option to let the user decide the way he wants his book to be managed in folders, but now, they have the best solution, and if you prefer another one, you are a moron. Everything is like this, there is only one way to do things, their...
The way tags and categories are managed and edited, is also a true heachache. To find an option in Calibre, you need to go and fetch in a ton of submenu, it's a nightmare.
I'd like to quit Calibre, and no hope it could become better, because developpers are autistic. Yes, awful interface, that's true.
However, I didn't find a software to edit metadata and tags, find covers, as Calibre do, but with an interface to read, that prevents eye straining.
I would use Moon Reader, but still needs Calibre to make a Calibre library that could be recognized by reading softwares, and also, reading softwares are too basic regarding metadata/tags editing.
It's a shame, I would prefer to use Calibre fully.
Calibre is a monolithic, spaghetti mess of untyped Python code which is painful to figure out for even an experienced developer like me, but it still seems to be the most comprehensive, free, ebook organiser & reader software.
Because you can't easily categorise a lot of books because of the crappy and slow Not-Invented-Here 'database', I am forced to set up loads of library folders to make it manageable, because saved searches can't be layered, so are useless for this. Some people have suggested sharing the book and database files, but that is a very very stupid idea which will lead to data corruption e.g. the locking collisions and data corruptions I saw for Microsoft Access and Visual Sourcesafe.
Too much config. requires manually editing config text files, which is so not OK.
What I hope happens, but doubt ever will are:
* Calibre at least uses a proper fast database for indexing, at least SQLLite and a fast search engine like Lucene.
* Calibre gets layered search with a much faster database, so that I only need one main Calibre directory.
* Calibre is properly split into modularised components with web services, so that the user can swap out the UI and add remote control e.g. using light weight tablet UIs and for headless installs on a NAS.
* Migrate most of the code away from horrible Python and it's obviously inadequate libraries, I'd prefer Java.
What others or I could look at is to retain the Calibre file system and database, so that it can be used for the unimplemented gaps, reverse engineer them and start to write replacement compatible software which does things more professionally with proper web services i.e. not in (untyped) flaky Python. If Java is used the Calibre plugins may be supportable using the scripting API, Jython and adapter objects.