14 DAY TRIAL // Calibre creator Kovid Goyal announced today the release and general availability of the Calibre 4.0 series of his popular open-source ebook management app for Linux, Windows, and Mac.
Believe it or not, it's been two years since the Calibre 3.0 series was introduced, and now, the time has come for fans of the best free ebook management software to get a brand-new release that introduces new technologies and new features, along with dozens of improvements.
"It has been two years since Calibre 3.0. This time has been spent mostly in making the calibre Content server ever more capable as well as migrating calibre itself from Qt WebKit to Qt WebEngine, because the former is no longer maintained," said developer Kovid Goyal.
What's new in Calibre 4.0
Highlights of the Calibre 4.0 release include a completely re-written ebook viewer that focuses on presenting the book text to users without any kind of distraction, and new capabilities for the Content server to edit metadata, add or remove books, as well as to convert books to and from all of Calibre's supports formats.
The Calibre Content server is now a full-fledged interface to your Calibre libraries. On the other hand, the new E-book viewer shares a codebase with the in-browser viewer, which would allow the developer to add support for new features, such as the long-anticipated annotations.
Under the hood, Calibre 4.0 uses the modern Qt WebEngine web content rendering engine, which integrates Chromium's fast moving web capabilities into Qt, as a replacement for the now deprecated Qt WebKit. This means that the Book Details panel no longer uses a full browser engine for rendering.
On the downside, if you have used advanced styling in your comments, they may not full work in Calibre 4.0 as it supports less HTML and CSS. Additionally, this changes the markup used for header and footer templates when converting ebooks to the PDF format. You can download Calibre 4.0 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems right now from our free software portal.
