Calibre is a popular open-source eBook reader for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It is also available for the ARM platform (Linux).
It happens to be one of the best eBook readers for Linux.
After a year and a half of development, a new major upgrade for Calibre has finally landed.
Calibre 6.0: What’s New?
While it is a big deal to put an end to the 5.x series of updates, you do not get a big list of additions.
However, the release includes significant improvements and a few feature additions that I will be highlighting here.
Full-Text Search
With Calibre 6.0, you can search the entire text of all books in your library collection.
This should come in handy for users, who want to quickly search for something specific, even though they do not remember the name of a book.
It will help you find things quickly when you need them.
Support for ARM and Apple Silicon
Calibre 6.0 adds support for ARM64 on Linux and Apple Silicon.
It will no longer work with 32-bit systems, considering Qt 6 does not support it.
Easy Dark Mode Switch & Icon Themes
You can now easily head to the preferences, and tweak the look/feel settings to toggle the dark mode.
A quick switch could have helped, but it should be good enough. By default, it respects the system preference, so it should not be an issue for most.
In addition to this, you also get to choose icon themes for your preferences.
Switch to Qt 6
You can expect some unmaintained third-party plugins to no longer work with Qt 6 on Calibre 6.0.
Essential plugins that have been ported to Qt 6 should work as you would expect.
Other Changes
Along with all the upgrades, you get a few improvements and changes that include:
- No support for Windows 8.
- The Calibre:// URL scheme is more useful to create links and can be accessed from other programs.
- Improved “Read aloud” button to start reading the book text using OS’s text-to-speech engine.
You can also check out its official announcement for more information.
Download Calibre 6.0
Calibre 6.0 can be downloaded from its GitHub releases section. You have to download the archived package for Linux (ARM64/AMD64) and extract it to run the executable.
In either case, you can also install it using the Flatpak package from Flathub.
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