Calibre 9.15 introduces an optional “Create your own Adventure” writing game, plus e-book viewer improvements and bug fixes.

An interesting week for this to land

Calibre adding an AI feature the same week The Document Foundation published “Yes, no AI is now a feature” is a coincidence worth noting, because the two projects are answering the same question differently.

It is worth being precise about what each is doing, because “AI feature” covers very different things.

TDF’s objection was to AI in the default configuration of software deployed in schools, hospitals, and law firms, with specific conditions: no telemetry, provider independence, format integrity, genuinely optional, supportable for a release lifetime.

Calibre’s addition is an optional creative toy, not a core workflow feature. Nobody managing an e-book library encounters it unless they go looking.

Those are compatible positions. A library manager offering an opt-in writing game and an office suite declining to put an assistant in front of a hospital administrator are not in disagreement; they are different products with different users and different stakes.

The question worth asking of any such feature is the one TDF made explicit: where does the inference happen, and what leaves the machine. A local model answers it cleanly. A remote API in a library manager that indexes your entire reading history is a different proposition, and is the detail to check rather than assume.

Calibre’s actual value

Worth restating, because the storytelling game is not why anyone uses it.

Calibre is the most capable e-book library manager that exists, and its strongest features are unglamorous:

Format conversion between EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, PDF, and most things, which is how you read a book you bought in one format on a device that wants another.

Metadata management, including fetching covers and details, which turns a directory of badly-named files into a browsable library.

Device sync to e-readers over USB.

DRM removal via third-party plugins, for books you own, where the legality varies by jurisdiction and is worth understanding before relying on it.

calibre-server, the part self-hosters care about: a web interface and OPDS feed, so your library is reachable from any device.

calibre-server --port 8080 --enable-auth /path/to/library

Behind a reverse proxy with TLS if it is reachable from outside, or better, over WireGuard and not exposed at all. Our self-hosting guide covers why the VPN route is the sensible default.

The reader question

Calibre’s built-in viewer has improved considerably and is genuinely usable now, which was not always true.

For reading rather than library management, dedicated applications, Foliate on GTK or KOReader on e-ink hardware, are more pleasant. Linux Mint is adding an EPUB reader to its XApps for the same reason: Calibre is a library manager with a reader attached, and that is more than most people want when they simply have a book to read.