A new update to the Calibre ebook manager is out and it brings more natural sounding text-to-speech (TTS) voices, as well as AVIF image support and better handling of PDFs that put text in columns.
Calibre v9.16 adds support for Kokoro, an open-weight TTS model, to its Read Aloud feature1 (which to state the bleedin’ obvious, will read the content of books to you).
The new voices are sound to sound ‘much more natural’, especially in English.
Kokoro voices aren’t preinstalled or included in Calibre itself. You choose one via the backend picker in the Read aloud configuration panel and the voice is downloaded on demand when you next hit play.
You can listen to audio samples of the new voices online, without needing to download them first, if you wish to ‘try before you buy choose.
Fans of the software may be pleased to see focus return to prosaic work after a run of releases that addd generative AI integrations which, arguably, have little to do with the reason people install this (to read and manage e-books).
Other changes
Calibre’s news integration in v9.16 supports downloading content from online publications that block automated scraping of their content, such as The New York Times and The Economist. It uses the Camoufox browser to bypass anti-bot mechanisms.
The ebook viewer permits book to store up to 1MB of data, persistently. This should allow custom settings to linger between session and, for interactive titles, save progress, etc. Printing to PDF from the viewer allows margins to be set in metric units (hurrah).
Calibre’s PDF support is bolstered through better handling of PDFs with right-to-left text and multi-column pages, while DOCX output now make images inside links clickable.
Other changes span the gamut: support for rendering AVIF images in files; hierarchically sorting empty tags with children (but no actual books) in the tag browser and a button to reset the window layout if customisation tweaks ruin the vibe.
Plenty of fixes make it in, the Kobo driver was updated to work with the latest firmware and Calibre is now said to startup faster for users with large libraries.
Getting the latest Calibre update
Calibre is free, open-source software for Windows, macOS and Linux, and you download Calibre from the official website.
On Linux, Calibre is installed and updated via a command-line script which downloads the binary, extracts it to a system location and create the .desktop shortcuts needed to integrate it with the desktop environment, e.g., launcher shortcuts, etc.
Alternatively, you can get Calibre on Flathub, an unverified build. A Calibre snap, also unofficial, was recently added to the Snap Store.
- Read aloud isn’t a new feature; Calibre added the neural Piper TTS engine in v7.18, and the app offered a more rudimentary text reading feature prior to that. ↩︎