Calibre 8.6.0 Delivers Dramatic Database Speed Boost

Calibre, the dependable cross-platform e-book viewer, manager, converter and more continues to publish new update regularly, the latest arriving this week.

Anyone managing a well-thumbed libraries of e-books, comics, PDFs and other supported files will appreciate hearing that the Calibre 8.6 release improves the performance of restoring the database by “an order of magnitude”, per Calibre’s development team.

It does this by using SQLITE savepoints when restoring individual books, netting big gains. One contributor said it “brings the time to restore my 5.5k book database from over 5 hours to only 5 minutes” – which really is ‘an order of magnitude’ faster!

Coupled with the 30% faster opening of large EPUB files in the e-book viewer (a change added in the Calibre 8.3 release a couple of months back), it’s great to see Calibre’s contributors making such sizeable performance gains.

Other changes in Calibre 8.6.0 include:

• Content server user preference adds checkbox for password changing
• Tweaks gains option to show sort value for series in Tag browser
• Default output format for Kindle is now AZW3 (previously MOBI)
• Manage authors/items pages add ‘Search “not in”‘ & ‘Filter “not in'”
• Misc news source improvements

Plus, the usual bug fix footnotes are included, several focused on resolving regressions earlier builds introduced like broken fading of background images in the ebook viewer, and quirks in viewing PDF files in Calibre on Windows.

The tag browser also once again enables searching for books by the first letter of a series, and ensures that Next/Previous buttons in the metadata editor paginate to what the next/previous item in the order when the dialog was opened, not the order after a change gets made.

Installing Calibre 8.6 on Ubuntu

Calibre is free, open source software available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Official installers for Windows and macOS can download installers for the latest release from the project website, while Linux users can get the new release in a few ones.

To install Calibre on Ubuntu using the official Linux binary package, run the following command (taken from the Calibre website) to download the Calibre installer script and move the binary it fetches to the relevant system location to easy launching.

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

On Ubuntu, it may be required to install the libxcb-package, depending on which packages have been added/removed since you installed Ubuntu.

Alternatively, go to the Calibre Github releases page and download the latest Linux release from there under the ‘assets’ heading. Extract the TXZ, enter the folder, and double-click to run. This won’t create an app launcher or shortcut, however.

For less fuss, a Calibre Flathub listing is available, albeit unverified and a little tardy in updating to the latest binary release (at the time I write this it’s still on v8.5.0).