Coming three weeks after Calibre 9.13, the Calibre 9.14 release is here to introduce more AI features, including the ability to generate book covers using AI with different cover styles such as romance, sci-fi, pulp fiction, etc., as well as Anthropic and Grok backends for Claude and Grok models, while removing the GitHub backend."

I don't have it installed at the moment but wonder how easily you can disable that stuff.

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[–] alamar@lemmy.world 32 points 6 days ago (5 children)

I loved Calibre before all the AI stuff. I've decided to fork the project and gut out all of the AI features. I'm tenatively calling it Calibre- (Calibre minus) just for the giggles. Not sure if other people care about this or not, but an AI-gutted calibre is coming.

[–] uninvitedguest@piefed.ca 19 points 6 days ago (1 children)

https://github.com/grimthorpe/clbre

[–] alamar@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Thanks for this and I see arcalibre too. I’m a bit worried that neither have updated in a number of months now, but I’ll see if I can help out there before continuing on with my own thing.

[–] NeryK@sh.itjust.works 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Most of these "project-but-without-" forks tend to be abandoned rather quickly unfortunately. Maintaining compatibility with a large codebase that is not yours is not the fun part of software development.

I would say clbre and arcalibre are already abandoned, looking at the activity on these repos (none in clbre, and issues/PRs piling up in arcalibre). If you can envision yourself still dedicating your time to this endeavor 5 years from now, you might as well move forward with your own thing.

[–] alamar@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I mean, that's a good point, but it's a fundamental part of the Fee part of FOSS. I don't "see" myself doing anything 5 years from now but it doesn't necessarily mean it wouldn't be worth the effort. But you also have a good point. They do seem dead, and I don't want to add another dead project on top of the others. But I am pretty serious about having calibre-like thing that won't incorporate AI. Does that mean I should start a new thing, or quasi-robinhood calibre into a new thing. I don't know yet, but I do get your point.

[–] NeryK@sh.itjust.works 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I might have phrased that badly with the 5 years thing. Obviously no one doing open source owes anyone else their time or effort. I do think that projects which stay afloat for a significant amount of time are those where the maintainers keep using the software for their own purpose.

In any case, I wish you good luck with that project, and might become a user if it comes to fruition too.

[–] alamar@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Yeah, I get what you mean. And thanks. I'm going to give the rereading Project a chance to respond to my message, but after a few days I'm going to move forward. I've already gutted the AI features, I just need to fix what yanking that out broke and then fix the ui.

[–] Kory@lemmy.ml 6 points 6 days ago

Interesting. Please let us know about your project once it's ready.

[–] artifex@piefed.zip 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

If you’re into self hosting at all check out caliber-web, which uses a calibre-compatible db/backend but a web-based fronted. I switched about 3 years ago after importing my old calibre db and never looked back (household is doing around 90 books/year)

[–] alamar@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

I'll checkout Calibre-web. It seems like it does a lot of what I need it to do!

[–] Ghost_Mermaid@lemmy.zip 2 points 6 days ago

I think you should call it Librarian.