You can also switch between list and thumbnail view. Fortunately many features of the user interface have became configurable so you can reconfigure the icon toolbar at the top and use menu instead, you can open/close various sub-windows displaying tags and other metadata filters at the left, cover carousel at the top, details at the right. I was using Calibre only for some conversions and to copy books to my Sony PRS-500 for quite a few years, because the UI rubbed me wrong way. This also means that everybody can use his own subset of features. Because it has very high number of features, advanced configuration options and different use-cases. What you describe in later posts looks like configuration error.Ĭalibre is an overkill for the vast majority of users.

I am pretty sure you can make it work on your system. And it doesn’t seem to work properly on my system… I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, but Calibre’s GUI is also not something I would enjoy using. I do not need tags, ratings, filtering, editing functionality, formats conversion, so Calibre seems a bit overkill. I'm afraid I'm not competent enough to go that far hereīut for me personally, as I've started looking for the alternative right from the beginning, it is a complete lack of clarity and aesthetics (attractiveness) in the way this product is designed in general, not just in GUI.Īnd yes, it is strange that with a great number of users Calibre doesn't seem to have an active development community with knowledgeable UI contributors. There is a number of articles on subject of good user interfaces on the internet written by the experts of industry. Maybe that's why the UI is not that important to me. From time to time I use such features as conversions, the viewer and the editor. I just add books, tag them and transfer them to my reader.

Making a different UI for calibre is of course a huge task, but somebody with a different idea could contribute with some pictures, just to see what they are talking about. What would a well-planned, cool, professional UI look like? Maybe I'm too basic, but I can't understand the complaints about the calibre UI.

Calibre mac alternative