What Are The Best Plugins For Calibre Ebook Reader For Manga Fans?

As far as the plugin ecosystem goes, it feels somewhat DIY. So you search up a plugin to add support for a new ebook format and you find a GitHub repository with 3 stars and a last commit from 2018. It works perfect for a while and then it breaks Calibre in an update. It’s a bit of a trade-off as the official Calibre plugin index is much safer but there are less plugins of a niche nature.

Yeah, I pretty much gave up on trying to find a good plugin and just buy EPUBs from Kobo when they're on sale. The books are DRM-free if you request that they not be DRMed at checkout. I don't want to be a part-time project to support the use of purchased books on future devices. That's just not what I paid for. Every few months, there’s another ‘OMG Plugin Broke’ post in the subreddit after an update and everyone frantically tries to find the new GitHub repo for their favorite plugin. I don’t get paid by the hour, and the hassle to read books I paid for in full is quite sufficient to make me sour on the whole thing. The best plugin is often another bookstore.

I am coming here to look at fonts that people recommend. The defaults are giving me eye fatigue.

I just use a warm-ish background, make the text a little bigger, and call it a day. Never really messed with the settings much beyond that.

Okay, here's the opposite perspective on this: For some people, a tablet might still be the best option to read comics. Even if you’re mostly reading Western-style comics in color, some webtoons in vertical scroll and color, and some manga, a Kobo is a very specialized reader for reading novels and manga. The Clara Colour is a nice upgrade to the 6-inch screen of a Kobo, but it’s still a 6-inch screen. Mid-range tablets have larger screens in full color, and you can use them to read comics on a variety of services (including many that have excellent apps) for reading novels and manga. Yes, there is some eye strain, but that can be mitigated by reading in dark mode or with blue light filters, etc. This is a good choice for people who read a lot of media in a lot of different formats, and not just novels and manga.

Recently it has become a lot harder for me to download manga, due to an influx of DMCA notices. To combat this, I use RSS feeds from the blogs of many of the translation groups. I add their blogs to an RSS reader (I use Feedly) and they notify me whenever there is an update to a series that I am following. Typically the update will be a direct download link to the cleanest version of the chapter or volume, posted on the group’s blog, allowing me to download it before it is taken down by a DMCA notice. It requires a bit of an initial setup but in the end it is very effective.

I've encountered this issue more than a few times. The main culprit is usually file format compatibility. Kindle supports MOBI, AZW, and PDF, but newer versions of Kindle don't support MOBI anymore, which Calibre defaults to sometimes. Another reason could be the email address you're using to send the ebook isn't registered to your Kindle account. Amazon has strict policies about which email addresses can send content to your device, and if it's not on the approved list, the transfer fails silently. DRM protection is another common roadblock. If the ebook has DRM, Calibre can't send it directly unless you use plugins to remove the DRM first, which is a gray area legally. File size can also be an issue—Amazon imposes a 50MB limit for email transfers. Lastly, network issues or temporary Amazon server problems can interrupt the transfer process. It's frustrating when it happens, but checking these factors usually solves the problem.

To me, translation quality is a huge differentiator that gets lost in the comparison of the various apps. While official translations from VIZ, Kodansha, etc. are done professionally in localized dialogue, fan translations on aggregator sites can range from excellent to terrible. Some are even translated via machine to be near incomprehensible gibberers. If you really want to read and appreciate the story and dialogue in a manga, it is worth paying for the official apps to get the best translation and typesetting (which is almost always cleaner and more consistent). It’s also very important to consider the quality of translation when deciding between apps. I’ve stopped reading a series on an aggregator site of manga translations because of poor translation. However, reading the same series through an official app was wonderful, because the translation was professional and even the dialogue was localized to read better. Typesetting was also better distributed and more consistent. When you’re offline for a long time and can’t look up a fanmade summary within seconds to figure out what happened, you want to make sure you have a good translation to begin with. Sometimes paying a little more for an app is worth it because you’re paying for quality content, as the author intended it to be read.

A social graph to discover more of what your friends are reading would be amazing to have integrated into an app, similar to how the official Webtoon app has friends that you can follow. Most manga reading is a solo activity, so an app that combined an amazing reader with a very light social aspect to connect with friends and get them to read a book that you think they would enjoy would be the best. Algorithms can suggest content, but personal recommendations are so much better. That’s why I think the best book recommendations come from friends and family, and I would love an app that has a good reader integrated with a social layer of minimal intrusion that allows users to easily follow friends and send each other recommendations.

I find that Automation = Safety. Hence my backup is entirely automated and will thus not fail as it depends on no human memory. On Linux I wrote a small bash script that uses rsync to synchronize my ~/Calibre Library folder and the entire ~/.config/calibre folder to a large enough folder on a backup drive. This script first checks for the presence and then kills the ‘calibre’ process (with a friendly warning message). Then it does the actual work using rsync with the archive flag and verbose switching. The whole operation is logged with a timestamp in the end. I use cron to run this little script every Sunday at 3 AM. A second cron job then uses rclone to synchronize the contents of the above-mentioned backup folder with a Tresorit cloud folder once a month. The output of all operations is written to a log file which I then occasionally check. As rsync only synchronizes changed blocks (unlike a full copy) it is very fast and efficient. All in all I have perfectly reliable and completely automated backup of all my ebooks (which is what Calibre is for in the first place) – and this with minimal initial investment of time and completely invisible afterwards.