Replacing Calibre

2024-01-13

Calibre is an excellent tool — if you believe that a swiss army knife with 95 attachments is an excellent tool.

However, if you enjoy being able to reach into your bag, grab your pocket knife and immediately know how to use it, Calibre is the worst tool you could use. That’s why I’ve been writing a backwards compatible replacement for Calibre. It’s called Citadel, and here’s a short demo video.

In case you didn’t notice, it’s quite rough!

Citadel, a prototype replacement for Calibre

Citadel is a Tauri desktop app that reads & writes Calibre libraries (SQLite database + existing book files) and helps you manage them. It has a Svelte frontend (that can be run over the internet) and a Rust backend (which supports headless HTTP server mode). Most of the work to read & write Calibre data is in a separate crate called libcalibre, which I hope to separately publish in the future so that others can create robust Calibre tools.

So far, you can:

• List all of your books as a cover view or table view
• Add a new book
• Edit the title of a book
• Copy a book to a folder on your computer, e.g. a SD card that’s attached to your computer (for ereaders)

As you can tell, this is incredibly early software with little functionality and a propensity to crash if you look at it wrong (I have a few too many panic-y .unwrap()s).

It’s early days for the project! Calibre has been around for 15 years and has ~450k lines of Python. Citadel has maybe ~3k lines of Rust, and maybe another 1k lines of Svelte/Typescript.

But it’s a prototype, and it’s working today, and I’m slowly replacing my Calibre usage with an app I wrote myself that doesn’t take 8s to boot on an M2 Max Macbook Pro.

Citadel is open-source and on GitHub. There are no release builds yet and it’s only been tested on my M2 Macbook. It should work elsewhere, but if you run into issues please let me know!

Addendum

Why Svelte + Rust?

I picked Rust for the backend because I wanted to learn it. This is a hobby project! I’m allowed to do whatever I want.

For the frontend, I wanted to use something that isn’t React, having been using it at work for 2+ years. I know Vue & Svelte pretty well, and I wanted another project to use Svelte in (besides my Logseq/Raindrop plugin and my Logseq slipbox plugin), so that’s why it’s a Svelte frontend. It’s specifically web-tech because I already know how to write web frontends. I tried Swift before! But it took too long to make progress.

With a native backend, a fast-to-write-and-maintain frontend, the use of native webviews (the binary for macOS is 18MB), and the option of splitting the frontend & backend up to connect them over HTTP, going down this route has been a great choice so far.

A note on libcalibre

I’ve separated all of the logic of “how to talk to a Calibre library” into a crate called libcalibre. It’s (experimentally) written applying DDD, but I’m not sure how well I like that.

The crate itself is pretty flexible — you should be able to use it in a CLI tool, or compile it for another language and make a true native e-book library management app. I started doing that before, in Swift, before realising that I was working to learn both Swift as well as all of Calibre’s business logic, which made progress infuriatingly slow.