Garjola Dindi has a very interesting post on using Calibre from within Emacs. Dindi already read his books from within Emacs using nov.el for Epubs and pdf-tools for PDFs but because he manages his library with Calibre, he had to leave Emacs and open Calibre to handle administrative chores on his library.
Recently, he (re)discovered calibredb.el and realized that he could use it to handle those administrative tasks without leaving Emacs. Calibredb.el wants to use ebook-reader and evince to open books so Dindi had a make a simple adjustment for that. Otherwise, everything worked out of the box.
I do almost all of my reading on an iPad so this doesn’t come up for me even though I have used Calibre on my laptop in the past. I sometimes read technical books on my laptop but I usually just fire up pdf-tools directly to do it. Dindi reminded me, though, that there’s a lot of benefit to reading technical material on a laptop: it’s easy to take notes with Org-mode and to leave bookmarks or other links into the book you’re reading.
The downside is that I haven’t been very diligent about organizing my books so I always have to go searching for them. That’s exactly the problem that Calibre solves, of course, so Dindi’s post has inspired me to consider reinstalling Calibre and getting my library in shape. At least for technical books, that makes a lot of sense.