It's a big shame that whenever anything related to Calibre is posted, top comments will often be how arrogant is author is. I used to think the same. But when I read his comments history in GitHub, he doesn't seem a dick to me at all. So I googled his name, and end up in a forum. It completely changed my mind.
Contrary to what people believe, Dovid Goyal is the most friendly programmer to his users. He spent lots of time answering questions in the forum https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166. His answers include where is a menu located, how to convert a book from one format to another, helping the user to debug the exact the problem with Calibre. He has been doing this daily and is very responsive. You can expect an answer to your question in the same day. (The forum used to allow you to read user's comments history anonymously, but now you need a account to do so)
One of the reasons Calibre has become the de-facto gold standard for ebook managers is that he always tried very hard to help users, who are often non-technical (they are largely just "book people").
I think he's just a bit fed up with geeks who like to question everything at every turn; he is not the sort of person you should look to for philosophical debates on the state of software. For years, Calibre got a bad rap for the interface not looking "cool" enough, meanwhile he was busy actually helping people do what they want to do with their books, for free. Plus, his mother tongue is not English and some communications can come off as brusque even when they are just meant to be direct and to the point.
Its funny you say this. I remember initially being turned off by Calibre because it looked like library software, and I naively thought "if it looks ugly, it works ugly". Later on I learned how wrong I was. Its so easy to use.
I can't say I'm a fan of the GUI (part of this is me not needing most of its many features, which are doubtlessly useful for others), but the Calibre command line tool `ebook-convert` is fantastic and handles conversions pandoc can't. I love Calibre for this.
>One of the reasons Calibre has become the de-facto gold standard for ebook managers
Gold standard? What the hell are you smoking? The software is absolute garbage. The reader is slow and conversion is broken. I have tried every version for years and it never improves. It can't even convert tabular data properly.
You need to scroll using the scrollbar because scrolling with the TouchPad doesn't work. Well, it kind of works, but it takes about 20 seconds to register a scroll and ends up scrolling a few pages.
Convert the PDF of "Dive Into Python 3" by Mark Pilgrim into ePub and look at the resulting mess. First page:
"AreyoualreadyaPythonprogrammer?Didyoureadtheoriginal“DiveIntoPython”?Didyoubuyit on paper?
What happened to the spaces? You will find numbers throughout pages, often in the middle of a page, which are the page numbers from the PDF.
I made a searchable PDF of my W-2 using Abby Fine Reader and tried to convert that to ePub. The end result is a blank page. I created tabular text of my computers: CPU, and GPU, and memory. I saved as PDF and converted it to ePub; the table is gone with one entry per line.
I can’t say for the other features - I’ve never used Calibre - but if spaces were lost during the pdf conversion that means that the text layer did not have the spaces. Not much you can do in this case, really.
I think Kovid is awesome. He produces extremely high quality OSS for free and he's been doing it for years, while providing almost instant support to anyone that has a question. It makes me sad that people like to shit on someone doing so much good for so many people for free. By the way, kitty is amazing, it's the only terminal that properly renders wide unicode characters - even Alacritty has many bugs in this area still. And it's blazing fast, has a built in terminal multiplexer, and native wayland support.
I wonder how many commenters were just parroting what they had heard about him. I get the feeling it's not uncommon for negativity about someone to be amplified by people doing that. With enough comments saying the same thing, it's easy to believe it's true.
Personally I never participated in spreading that, but I absolutely was swayed by the negative comments to avoid touching Calibre. I already find myself fact-checking a lot of things given how much bullshit people spread, but I guess I have to step that up and be more wary about what people say here (I've been more trusting of things on HN than on sites like Twitter).
Remember this idea whenever you see people online talking about other open source projects.
9/10 people are doing exactly this: parroting what they heard with no research done.
Especially on hacker news, remember this idea so the next time you enter a thread, you won't be the one parroting things you heard from other people.
Calibre itself is awesome. I've been using it for over 10 years and it's a testament to its software excellence (which reflects on its owner/creator) that it's still an excellent and useful piece of software.
I agree. I am an enthusiastic fan of the Kitty terminal emulator [1], another of his creatures, and I am following its development (though I never managed to contribute with some code). Kovid's answers on the GitHub forum are often short and sound a bit harsh sometimes, yet he's ready to accept others' suggestions and stand corrected when needed.
> yet he's ready to accept others' suggestions and stand corrected when needed.
Over the years, the community has volunteered time and time again to develop a new UI for Calibre that would at least bear some resemblance to all the other applications we use on our computer. They would do all the work. His response has always been no.
And there has been his hostility to criticisms of security flaws in his code.
You say that like you think such an endeavor would require zero of his time when in fact it would be a large undertaking for him as well in reviewing a large contribution and then having to credentialize it anyways to move forward with the project.
Also, there are an infinite amount of people who say they will do something, but won't actually do it. Has anybody who said they could do a UI overhaul actually started it and arrived at something worth sharing? The fear of the creator being "hostile" to your fork is a convenient excuse but doesn't actually stop you from maintaining a UI fork. Shit or get off the pot.
But the first thing you learn when you run a project with contributors is that contributions aren't just free work that you get to mindlessly merge into master. In fact, it's very likely that reviewing the code, correcting the code, managing the people (and their emotions), credentializing in the code, pulling the code/impl back on a viable course, dealing with UI bikeshedding, etc. are far more work than just doing it yourself. And if it's not something you think is worth that effort, then it's definitely not something you want to just outsource to "the community". And after all that, you aren't even guaranteed a UI that's better than what you replaced.
I can't speak towards his attitude toward security flaws, but I think his reaction to not wanting Calibre updated is reasonable.
Anytime a UI is updated, you're going to completely modify the behavior or of the people that are using it. So any change someone else is making that isn't as closely tied with the product as he is, is probably going to be suboptimal. Not only from a user experience perspective, but also from his ability to answer questions on the forum as people are asking him questions about how to achieve certain things.
This means that he'll HAVE to be closely tied with a redesign. Which is probably not where he wants to be spending a significant amount of his time.
There's also the added complexity of legacy users that are just book people, that are quite used to the design as it is, so any migration over the new one, no matter how gradual, is probably going to make the product harder for them to use.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with him, but his reasoning is valid. This isn't a project where you just hand off to someone completely new and let them do what they want. That's how you end up with a broken product.
Goyal doesn’t have to be closely involved in the forum helping users. I question the importance of his doing so while the UI is what it is. It could be that while a small number of users are helped by his personal attention on the forum, a much larger number of users are left frustrated by the UI.
The UI isn't pretty and it can be clunky at times, but it's functional. UI is hard, and I guarantee a lot harder than you think it is just by how flippantly you've described the endeavor so far.
Also, be wary of judging someone by how they choose to spend their free time. Notice how you haven't actually lifted a finger yourself, just judged others for how they lift theirs with zero skin in the game.
He doesn't HAVE to be, but he is. Isn't that a good thing?
> It could be that while a small number of users are helped by his personal attention on the forum, a much larger number of users are left frustrated by the UI.
This is just speculation. Without data to back it up, I can say the reverse is true too.
Since there isn't a large number of users that are posting about how terrible the UI is(on the Calibre forum), it's probably functional enough and people can navigate it.
Buttons look like buttons, not text. It's better than modern UIs. I fear that if he gives in, this and similar small details would change so it looks nice instead of being easy to use.
I've never had any real issues with the UI. I run it locally, and sync it to a cloudserver where I run it headless.
Both the local and web ui are fine IMHO. They allow me to get things done and the work.
It doesn't do all that calibre does obviously but it does most of what I need. It's not per see a fork as it only uses the same database formats and directly call calibre for conversion but it's as close as you get to a "modern" gui on top of calibre.
As usual, the people actually doing the work and the people complaining are strictly different subsets.
Based on what else I've seen about him -- admittedly only this thread -- I would guess that while he would not assist or change his behaviours, he would not actively try to frustrate it.
> yet he's ready to accept others' suggestions and stand corrected when needed.
I think this is fine and somebody who cant accept this needs to go outside and breathe. Sometimes you gotta put your foot down about something until you are convinced otherwise.
Mobileread is THE forum for ebook and users there are amazing in general. And they reply fast. I once asked a question there and get 3 to 4 useful, relevant answers in 5 minutes.
Edit: as for Kovid, he's just the type of person who speaks direct to the point without any extra words. Some people are not used to that. He's very helpful and responsive for feedback/bug report and really hard-working.
I think most of it had to do with the security holes that he refused to fix that left a bad taste in peoples mouths. I think it had to do with https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 etc.
Well, reading that thread, he fixed every vulnerability in the helper utility that had a demonstrable exploit. Some of the others he didn't fix because they were not easily exploitable: keep in mind, the utility was only used if the core os functionality was not present. That whole thread came across as "I am a security researcher who gets paid lots of money to find CVEs so you should listen to me" and Kovid taking issue with that attitude.
I once opened an issue on his kitty project, asking about right-to-left support. He answered me by saying (falsely, and condescendingly) that the problem was with the CLI apps I ran. But I had screenshotted just typing “echo یک نوشته راست چین” (or sth similar, it was months ago). I, unfortunately, replied to this with a non-respectful (but not rude) comment, which he then answered with another nonrespectful comment and closed the issue. Overall, my impression of him is that he is a kind, productive, but arrogant person; I’m thankful of the man.
Last week I asked him a question on MobileRead. Something simple that I overlooked on the UI and he could have been snippy about it. He answered the same day and was cool about it. In fact, I’ve probably asked 15 questions there over the years and he’s always been quick to respond and polite.
Goyal makes a lot of people uncomfortable because he is obviously on the spectrum. Of course a lot of Free Software hobbyists are, and I wouldn’t dare to exclude myself from that. But there is certainly a feeling that it would be better for a project to use neurotypical volunteers for the public-facing aspects of development, like taking feature requests. It would save both Goyal and the people posting on the various forums a lot of rancor.
> Goyal makes a lot of people uncomfortable because he is obviously on the spectrum.
Never mind the first question that popped up in my head (Why would you care?), but _Why would that even occur to you?_ Why would you even look at people that way to begin with?
Assuming that Goyal is on the spectrum is the charitable thing to do. It allows one to excuse his brusqueness and defensiveness as simply something he was born with. That is the conclusion I gradually made over years of watching Calibre development and a conference appearance of his on YouTube. Many of his critics probably just think that he is a jerk and egomaniac who refuses to see things from others’ perspectives.
> Assuming that Goyal is on the spectrum is the charitable thing to do. It allows one to excuse his brusqueness and defensiveness as simply something he was born with.
Contrary to what people believe, Dovid Goyal is the most friendly programmer to his users. He spent lots of time answering questions in the forum https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166. His answers include where is a menu located, how to convert a book from one format to another, helping the user to debug the exact the problem with Calibre. He has been doing this daily and is very responsive. You can expect an answer to your question in the same day. (The forum used to allow you to read user's comments history anonymously, but now you need a account to do so)