In deep mid-winter nothing beats curling up with a good book, in-front of a roaring fire – the crackle of all the unwanted Christmas tat your nearest and dearest bought you chars, melts, and burns providing a warm aural soundtrack.

Thankfully, not everyone’s feeling as seasonably irascible as I am – like the folks behind open-source ebook reader, manager, and converter Calibre. They’ve hand-wrapped a bug-fix update to help tide us over the festive season.

Hurrah!

As gifts that arrive in late December go, Calibre 7.23 is a modest one: more ‘last-minute box of chocs’ than something you really wanted but fills a gap in the schedule, all the same:

  • Ability to manage data files associated with a book in content server
  • Right-click on a cover in the Edit Metadata to see it in a popup window larger
  • Option to expand Tag browser tree to show last current item when library was closed
  • Import and export stored template added to Preferences > Template functions
  • Misc improvements to edit columns with fixed sets of values
  • Resolve doi.org links
  • HTMLZ files now open on more systems
  • Amazon metadata plugin updated for markup changes in some books
  • Le Canard Enchaine added to news sources

Welcome set of fixes — but like most xmas gifts, nothing you’ll remember a week after opening!

Get Calibre 7.23

If you fancy installing Calibre on Ubuntu, you can get an older version from the Ubuntu repos. Either search it out by name in App Center (remember to enable DEB filtering) or run sudo apt install calibre to skip the hurdles.

If you want to install the latest Calibre on Ubuntu you should use the official method, which some folks find a bit of a bauble ache as it requires running a script from the command-line each time:

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

Note: the first time you run this command on Ubuntu 24.10 (and possibly 24.04, though I didn’t check) you may be required to install a libxcbpackage first (I had to).

Alternatively, the Calibre Github releases page offers a standalone binary. Download, extract, enter folder, double-click to run. This won’t integrate with your OS unless you do it yourself.

More of a non-binary fan? You can get Calibre on Flathub, but it is an unverified package.