After a brief hiatus since the release of Calibre 8.8, developer Kovid Goyal has announced the arrival of Calibre 8.9, the latest stable version of this open-source e-book management software. This update introduces several notable enhancements.
One of the key features in Calibre 8.9 is support for embedded fonts in HTMLZ output, improving the aesthetic quality of e-books created in this format. Additionally, users will benefit from a new color swatch in the Annotations browser, making it easier to distinguish the types of highlights present in documents. Furthermore, when users merge books by dragging and dropping, they will now be able to see the cover of the target book.
This latest version also adds a sub-menu to the right-click menu on the Fetch news button, providing access to recently downloaded news sources. Enhancements have been made to the way books are matched in the Library window, particularly during initial searches using book titles, as it now removes trailing text that may hinder finding correct matches.
In terms of functionality, the Content server has been improved, addressing an issue that occurred when editing a book’s metadata that affected both the cover and other fields. Moreover, the book editing features have been refined to ensure that text pasted from the clipboard is normalized to NFC form. Several news sources, including The New York Times, Todoist, and Tagespost were updated, while Startechery was added as a new source.
For more details about the changes in this update, you can check the release notes. Calibre 8.9 is available for download from the official website, with options for both ready-to-use binaries (for 64-bit and ARM64 architectures) and a source tarball for those who prefer to compile from source.
Additionally, users can install Calibre as a universal Flatpak application from Flathub, which is designed to operate on almost any Linux distribution, or through the stable software repositories of their chosen GNU/Linux distribution.