Only a week after its previous 8.0 release, Calibre, the beloved open-source eBook management software, has rolled out version 8.1, bringing a mix of new features, bug fixes, and expanded platform compatibility.
Perhaps the most user-friendly new addition is the updated Edit Metadata dialog, which now allows users to right-click on a book cover to edit it with an external program.
Another welcome change appears in Virtual Library Tabs. Locked tabs will now stay fixed in place, as they can no longer be reordered accidentally. It’s a simple but effective usability improvement, particularly for users juggling large collections or maintaining finely tuned virtual libraries.
On the platform support front, Calibre 8.1 introduces the ability to connect to devices on FreeBSD. For macOS users, several regressions introduced in version 8.0 have been corrected. These include the restoration of “calibre://” URL functionality and proper icon rendering in menus.
Moreover, this version specifically addresses a startup error that, while not affecting functionality, was nonetheless an annoyance for users on macOS.
Kobo e-reader fans will also notice a couple of thoughtful improvements. One fix ensures that hyphenation settings are correctly applied when generating KEPUB files. Another tweak ensures that the leading whitespace is retained in sentence span tags, which prevents awkward breaks when highlighting across styled text.
Apart from those, Calibre 8.1 also tackles a range of other issues:
- Full-text search is back in action for archive formats like ZIP.
- FB2 books can now be read again in the browser-based content server.
- Annotations are now safely updated in real-time, avoiding potential data loss due to locked databases.
- The Ebook Viewer has received a few quality-of-life improvements, including accurate font size controls and better crash handling to ensure temp files are cleaned up.
Lastly, several curated news sources—including Horizons, The Economist, and Granta—have received improvements in addition to all the technical updates.
Check out the changelog for more details and the complete list of novelties in the Calibre 8.1 open-source ebook management tool.
