What? How? “Add Books” is a book icon with a plus sign. “View” is a magnifying glass. “Remove Books” is a recycling symbol. “Preferences” is the usual settings-esque gear icon. “Device” is an e-reader. “Send To Device” is an e-reader with an arrow. I’ll grant you that some are vague, like “Download Metadata” being a globe, but the other major part you’ve glossed over is that all of these have their titles directly underneath them. There is no need to guess as to what they do.
> menus are nested and super-specific
I fail to see how that’s bad. Tree-like menus are extremely intuitive, and prevent having 50 items in a single column.
> I fail to see how that’s bad. Tree-like menus are extremely intuitive, and prevent having 50 items in a single column.
Stuff like "Edit metadata > Merge book records > Merge only formats in first selected book - delete others" feels extremely intuitive for you? Calibre tries to cram every workflow under the sun into tree menus, because it's the easiest way to make commands accessible in a GUI. Meanwhile, stuff like the book details panel is completely underused. And we didn't even talk about metadata plugboards yet.
I love Calibre for being the Swiss army knife of ebook management it is, but sometimes I want to have merely a humble knife to spread butter on my reading habits; something that lets me intuitively CRUD an ebook library without forcing me to think whether I want to add files to my book records, add data files to my book records, or add from folders and sub-folders.
So does Windows.
> while download cover and input options share a downward chevron icon
This may be version-specific to be fair; I checked 7.8 and the latest, 8.0.1, and the two icons are differentiated in both. In Preferences, "Metadata download" is a cloud with a downward arrow, whereas "Input options" is a downward chevron.
> Titles are shown underneath main toolbar actions, but not in the statusbar or modal windows, for example.
Mine definitely does for all of those. Are you sure you don't have something configured differently, or perhaps there are differences in OS default behavior (I'm on MacOS)?
> Stuff like "Edit metadata > Merge book records > Merge only formats in first selected book - delete others" feels extremely intuitive for you?
Yes. "Book records" definitely sounds like metadata to me, so that's where I would look for it. The "Edit metadata" menu has 7 options on my build. Of those, only "Merge book records" expands, and it expands into 3 options, including the one you mentioned.
There may also be age differences at play here, specifically with respect to what GUI era your formative computing years were in. I got into computers in as a kid in the 90s (DOS, then Windows 3.1, 95, then a mix of Linux distros and successive versions of Windows). Calibre to me looks and feels like a slightly fancier version of programs I grew up with. Nero Burning ROM [0], foobar2000 [1], and of course, WinRAR [2]. Microsoft Office design peaked with 2000, IMO. 2003 was technically fine, just that it adopted XP's visual styling, which I found appalling.
In contrast to dense UIs, we have modern web apps. If I want to change the appearance, is that under Profile, or Preferences? How do I get to either one? Do I click on the vaguely person-shaped icon, the hamburger icon, or do I have to go Home first?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Burning_ROM
Where? Deleting to the recycle bin uses the recycle symbol, which isn't permanent deletion, you can undo it. And if you try to delete a file permanently, you get a red crosss
But also, it's not like Windows has great design to use as an argument
Not for everyone. I use this function to merge files into one entry after importing. So my mindset at that moment is on the files, and the metadata are just a secondary topic. But I can see how this is a topic where you can dispute endlessly, and no answer is perfect.
> The "Edit metadata" menu has 7 options on my build. Of those, only "Merge book records" expands, and it expands into 3 options, including the one you mentioned.
It shouldn't expand at all. This is the kind of complicated and dangerous job where a dialog with more information and feedback would be justified. Maybe something like a table where each row is a metadata, each column is a book, and you can select which source is used for the final result. The way it is now, I always have to be extremely careful to use the correct one, even select in correct order, and not screw it up.
That button isn't permanent, it moves the files into ~/.local/share/Trash/files/
(Unless it changed after the version I'm on)
1. Right click on the book to get menu at the top of the window.
2. Click go to
3. Pick which type of "go to" you want ("location")
4. You now get a full screen UI with a single input box
5. Now you get to enter a page number.
Other ebook readers, even the crappy DRM-encumbered web apps, give you a slider.
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Also rendering a page is very slow, so you scroll to go to the next page, and apparently nothing happens for quite some time. Also it takes two ticks of the scroll wheel to paginate, even in the absence of any internal scrolling. So you're wondering if the page is rendering or if you need to scroll more and potentially overshoot.
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Opening the bookmarks UI reflows the page, potentially pushing what you wanted to bookmark out of sight onto the next page.
I don't think the reader UI is there for ... reading books. At best for checking out what the conversion steps did.
I just drag books to it, sometimes edit the titles and then export them to a Kindle.
When the Kindle gets fully locked down I'll get a Kobo or whatever is in fashion and works well with Calibre at that time.
