this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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Thankfully, AI is super expensive and Calibre will probably never make calls by default because someone needs to pay for it (and the current implementation is bring your own key anyways). I can't imagine the usecase of AI in an ebook reader other than textbooks without answer keys or index high prose.
Calibre is much much more than an ebook reader. Actually if anything the reader is one of the poorer aspects of it imo. It is a whole ebook and ebook library management and editing software. And reading the stuff about AI that people have been calling for it sounds like people want it to organize their library, do some "smart" operations for hundreds of books and stuff like that. But also just "explain to me what this means" type of stuff.
To me using Calibre as just an ebook reader feels like using Photoshop as just an image viewer
I can see the usecase, I just don't find it useful myself.
I hate that the reader part registers itself as a default program for every file format. I didn't mean to open this txt files with Calibre 😭
Calibre is also kind of a pain to use. I tried to use it once and went back to my syncthing folder of pirated epubs. The idea seems great but it doesn't seem like it would make my life any easier.
It's a massive beast and the UI is messy, ugly and daunting. But nothing else just does all the things it does. It works for my purpose (metadata editing, book jacket, library management, conversions etc). I don't enjoy using it but there's just nothing to replace it for me.
You can avoid the GUI entirely by using the included command-line tools. Haven’t done it myself though
I could see a hypothetical machine translation suite integrated directly into the reader being a useful tool, especially if it allowed interrogation, correction, and revision by the user in a way that an LLM could actually almost sort of do well enough for a casual context. I mean it would still be frustrating and error prone, but for a book without extant translations it could potentially be better than trying to bulk process it with a separate translation tool.
Although that's not what they added. If I'm reading this right, what they added was the ability for it to make API calls to LM Studio, which is a framework (I believe open source too) for running text models locally with (also open source) model weights, with the current integration features being something about being able to "discuss selected books" with that local chatbot or ask it for recommendations, although I have no idea how any of that is supposed to work in practice. Since it is adding backend compatibility with local models, the machine translation angle I mentioned is at least a feasible addition that a plugin could add.
The whole thing's silly and has extremely limited actual usecases, but anyone getting up in arms over it allowing compatibility with other, entirely locally-run open source programs is being even sillier. It's not like they're replacing extant functionality with ChatGPT API calls or some nonsense, just enabling hobbyists who go through the trouble of setting up this entire other suite of unrelated shit and manage to get it working to then do something sort of silly with it.