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By Paul Biba

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From the Calibre website:

It has been nearly a year since calibre 0.6.0 was released and calibre has come a long way since then. calibre has always been amazingly flexible. 0.6 was all about bringing that flexibility to the conversion engine and device support. Today calibre supports conversion from/to dozens of formats and can connect to scores of devices. The focus of 0.7 is bringing that same flexibility to the calibre User Interface.

To that end, users now have the ability to freely resize all the major User Interface elements, add their own custom metadata to the book list, and add their own categories to the Tag Browser.

Another major area of improvement is performance. Various parts of calibre have seen optimization and caching improvements. Startup times and large library performance have been dramatically improved. With a library of ten thousand books, you will see an improvement of between 10 and a 100 times in the speed of startup and common operations like editing metadata.

When connecting to devices, calibre now caches the metadata it reads from the files on the device. This means that on subsequent connects calibre will build the list of books on the device very fast. If you like to keep large collections of books on your device, you will find this feature a godsend.

Some of these improvements are described in more detail below.

  • User Interface improvements
  • Device driver improvements
  • Performance improvements
  • Improvements in the conversion and metadata engines
  • Creation of catalogs
  • E-book viewer improvements
  • USB syncing with the iPad
  • Incompatible changes

This is an appropriate time to trow out a big thank you to all the calibre developers who have contributed most of the major new features listed above. An incomplete list of contributors is available here.

Note that many of these features were actually introduced during the lifetime of the 0.6.x series. This document describes new features as compared to 0.6.0

 
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