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 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.