The AI integration in question, from the Calibre changelog:
- Allow asking AI questions about any book in your calibre library.
- Right click the "View" button and choose "Discuss selected book(s) with AI"
- AI: Allow asking AI what book to read next by right clicking on a book and using the "Similar books" menu
- AI: Add a new backend for "LM Studio" which allows running various AI models locally
It seems pretty harmless really.
I understand some people feel that AI is overhyped and don't particularly like it, but this level of weird knee-jerk "anything AI is the devil incarnate" response is just as ridiculous, IMO.
Recommending books based on reading history is one of the very few uses of AI I'd consider good. With enough metadata about books it will be able to recommend similarities better than anyone, with appropriate topical filters. Storygraph is a Goodreads alternative trying to make use of this.
It would probably be better to use a deterministic graph algorithm to do this, but it's seemingly too hard for anyone to do properly.
Not just useless but another fork that only confounds newcomers and users looking for help. We can be generally opposed to AI without making it a boogeyman.
I had to look into the changelog to see what they meant but it’s not too intrusive IMO [1]. That being said, I find it way easier using calibre-web-automated [2]. Everything is through a web server, has usual control, and syncs with Kobo. All it takes in one docker compose and you’re up in less than 10 minutes.
I personally think Goyal should focus on making Calibre’s UI less unpleasant before adding yet another bolted-on AI chat textbox, but this doesn’t feel very productive or useful.
Post this when a release is made. Currently this fork doesn't have any commit (beyond stating the intention of the fork without explaining why) and it is useless.
As best I can tell Goyal started adding AI-related code to Calibre back in August, merging the LLM tab work from https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/pull/2838, and created the chat widget in November with commit 41d0da4267dc6f7f7e48fb9bb7e8609a2e251cb7.
I looked at forking the project myself:
the challenges are that it's a very quirky application,
its design and implementation doesn't share conventions with any other application,
and the build system is complex and unique to Calibre.
It's a shame there's no good open source ebook library application with a more conventional design.
Shoving AI into everything,
even when it defaults to "off" (for now),
is getting old.
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[ 38.5 ms ] story [ 680 ms ] threadBetter remove it.
- Allow asking AI questions about any book in your calibre library.
- Right click the "View" button and choose "Discuss selected book(s) with AI"
- AI: Allow asking AI what book to read next by right clicking on a book and using the "Similar books" menu
- AI: Add a new backend for "LM Studio" which allows running various AI models locally
It seems pretty harmless really.
I understand some people feel that AI is overhyped and don't particularly like it, but this level of weird knee-jerk "anything AI is the devil incarnate" response is just as ridiculous, IMO.
It would probably be better to use a deterministic graph algorithm to do this, but it's seemingly too hard for anyone to do properly.
> Supports hundreds of AI models via Providers [...] no AI related code is even loaded until you configure an AI provider.
This fork is pretty much useless.
[1] https://calibre-ebook.com/whats-new [2] https://github.com/crocodilestick/Calibre-Web-Automated
I looked at forking the project myself: the challenges are that it's a very quirky application, its design and implementation doesn't share conventions with any other application, and the build system is complex and unique to Calibre.
It's a shame there's no good open source ebook library application with a more conventional design. Shoving AI into everything, even when it defaults to "off" (for now), is getting old.