Calibre 6.0 Released with Full-Text Search, ARM64 Support on Linux, and Qt 6 Port

Calibre 6.0

Calibre creator Kovid Goyal released today a new major version of this popular open-source ebook management software, Calibre 6.0, which introduces exciting new features.

The Calibre 6.0 release is the first to be ported to the latest Qt 6 open-source application framework, offering users a more modern interface and most probably a smoother performance. This means that Calibre will no longer support 32-bit CPUs as Qt 6 doesn’t support them and that some third-party plugins may not work until they’re also ported to Qt 6.

Another major new feature of the Calibre 6.0 release is full-text search, as Calibre is now capable of indexing the full text of books in your library. You can use the full-text search feature to search for words inside any book by clicking on the FT button at the left edge of the search bar.

There’s also great news for ARM users as Calibre 6.0 is the first release to support the ARM64 (AArch64) CPU architecture on Linux. This means that you’ll finally be able to install your favourite ebook manager on your Raspberry Pi computer (or a similar board) running an ARM64 distribution.

Among other noteworthy changes, Calibre 6.0 brings an updated firmware to the Kobo driver, improves the Dark Mode to allow you to control it via Preferences > Look & Feel in Settings, from where you can also choose different icon themes for light and dark modes, and adds a new option in the Amazon metadata download to prefer the Kindle edition when there are multiple book types results in search.

Calibre 6.0 also adds a “Read aloud” button in the viewer controls to let you read books aloud from the current page via text-to-speech engines, adds a new “Add your own columns” option in Preferences lets you customize how “yes” and “no” columns are displayed, and automatically adds tags present in the add tags input when clicking the OK button.

Moreover, it’s now possible to use Calibre’s calibre:// URLs to perform various actions, such as to create links to individual books or locations inside books that can be accessed from other apps.

As expected, several new news sources have been added and numerous others were improved, and a handful of bugs were fixed. For more details, check out the release notes on the official website, from where you can also download the Calibre 6.0 release as binaries for your GNU/Linux distribution.

Last updated 2 years ago

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