A new version of Calibre, the Swiss-army knife for e-book management is out, and it brings some notable new features for e-bookworms to dig into.

Calibre 8.0.1 boasts improved support for Kobo e-readers, with Calibre now equipped to natively edit, view and convert Kobo’s proprietary KEPUB file format to regular EPUB files for reading on non-Kobo devices and apps (like Calibre itself).

Additionally, users of Kobo devices can now use Calibre to convert EPUB to KEPUB automatically when sending books across, saving time and hassle of first converting and then sending.

Calibre can now convert to/from Kobo’s KEPUB

I’ll admit, I hadn’t heard of KEPUB before writing this post (but then why would I? I’ve never owned a Kobo e-reader). Sidetracked by curiosity, I went to find out why Kobo uses a proprietary extension of EPUB which only works on its e-readers, and how it differs to EPUB.

Benefits of KEPUB:

  • Integrated reading statistics tracking
  • Better typography, hyphenation and paragraph justification
  • Smoother page transitions and animations
  • Expanded set of annotation tools
  • Integration with Kobo’s built-in dictionaries
  • Kobo-specific metadata
  • Chapter navigation tweaked for Kobo’s UI

Oh, and there was another bullet point I couldn’t in good conscience list as a “benefit” but is, nonetheless, an important distinction for the Kobo’s format versus vanilla EPUB:

  • Kobo DRM

If you have a Kobo e-reader and a stash of EPUBs you’d like to convert to KEPUB for any of the reasons listed above, upgrade to Calibre 8.0.1 (or later, if you’re reading from the future).

Other changes in Calibre 8.0.1

There’s an interesting adjustment in Calibre 8.0.1 that allows connecting to a ‘folder’ on a specific connected device. This will help users on Chromebooks since the OS treats external USB mass storage devices (like e-readers) like folders.

Calibre 8.0.1 also adds:

  • Better auto completion in prefix mode
  • Option to suppress author search links in book details
  • Table of Contents editor supports moving multiple selected items
  • Updated Calibre app icon on macOS (in keeping with macOS style)
  • Kobo driver adds support for new firmware on Tolino devices
  • Improved/updated news sources (still no OMG! :( )

Whilst bug band-aids resolve several issues:

  • Renaming authors to names with commas in now works
  • Fixed tab navigation to focus edit fields in book list when columns hidden
  • Catalogue generation allows templates to access database for notes
  • Full text search now indexes text in ZIP and RAR archives
  • Misc metadata downloading fixes
  • Fix for filenames when downloading books from external resources
  • Calibre no longer fails to start if KoboTouchExtended plugin enabled

In all, Calibre 8.0.1 adds another engaging chapter to the tool’s ongoing story. They say never judge a book by its cover, ever true of Calibre: what it lacks in UI and UX it makes up for in essential utility.

Install Latest Calibre on Ubuntu

CLI distribution is the official – but not only – way to install Calibre on Linux

Calibre is—as I’m sure you know—free, open source software for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Users on the first two platforms can download installers for the latest release from the project website – no fuss.

Ubuntu users can install Calibre from the Ubuntu repos but that version will be older and won’t come with all of the changes listed in this post.

To install the latest version of Calibre on Ubuntu you can use the official Linux binary.

This can be downloaded and installed using the official Calibre installer script, plus a command to move the binary to the relevant root location for easy launching: 

sudo -v && wget -nv -O- https://download.calibre-ebook.com/linux-installer.sh | sudo sh /dev/stdin

Note: to run the command on Ubuntu you may first have to fetch the libxcb-package, depending on which packages have been added/removed since you installed Ubuntu.

Alternatively, go to the Calibre Github releases page and download the latest Linux release from there under the ‘assets’ heading. Then extract the TXZ, enter the folder, double-click to run) — you don’t get an app launcher (unless you make one) using this method.

Finally, you can find Calibre on Flathub but it is an unverified package.