Exploring Calibre 7.0 E-Book Manager: A Look at the New Notes Feature and Audio EPUBs Support

Calibre’s developer Kovid Goyal publicized the release of Calibre 7.0, the most recent stable version and a significant update to this potent, open-source, and cross-platform e-book management software.

More than a year after Calibre 6.0, Calibre 7.0 comes with the functionality to save notes, which include links, images and rich text formating for authors, series, publishers, tags, and their related elements. These notes can be searched, linked within the application or exported as independent HTML files by users.

An intriguing addition in Calibre 7.0 is support for “Audio EPUB” books, which feature a voice reading the text. However, this feature may not work on Linux systems, as stated by Kovid Goyal, due to challenges with proprietary codecs.

A long-awaited feature in the new Calibre release is the capacity to store “data” files linked with a book and a built-in function to manage these files. Users can add additional data files to a book by selecting the book, right-clicking the “Add books” button, and choosing the “Add data files to selected book records” option.

“You can also manage the data files by right-clicking the Edit metadata button and choosing Manage data files. The data files are simple files stored in the data sub-folder inside the book’s folder. A common use for such files is storing alternate covers or supplementary material associated with the book,” said Kovid Goyal.

Last but not least, Calibre has gained its own private Trash Bin that bypasses the computer’s Trash. This makes it possible to restore a book and its data, after an accidental deletion, with just one click. The Trash Bin function also lets you examine recently removed books.

Further, Calibre 7.0 provides support for HTML image maps to the E-book viewer, includes a “Show items in selected books” option for managing tags and authors, and updates the content server with a new button to return to the Book Details page at the top level of controls and the capacity to show the three newest books in the default library.

It also introduces support for new news sources like Bookforum, Kirkus Reviews, and Poetry Magazine, and enhances support for existing news sources like Financial Times, National Geographic, Hamilton Spectator, MIT Tech Review, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Project Syndicate, Cumhuriyet, Foreign Affairs, Harvard Business Review, and Wall Street Journal.

Indeed, a plethora of bugs and issues were addressed for enhanced stability and reliability, therefore don’t hesitate to examine the complete list of changes for more information. Concurrently, Calibre 7.0 is available for download from the official web page as binary packages for 64-bit and AArch64 (ARM64) systems that you can operate on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution without the need for installation.

Updated 12 hours ago


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