Calibre, a widely used open-source e-book management software, has released version 9.6, the sixth maintenance update in the 9.x series. The main highlight this time is the improved full-text search.
Search results now appear in a card-based layout with book covers, replacing the previous compact list view. The original layout remains available and can be re-enabled from the full text search window. Additionally, a new word-prefix completion mode allows search suggestions to match any word beginning with the entered characters.
Library management includes several minor enhancements. Users can now configure bookshelves to maintain consistent book heights within groups. In the book editor, file list navigation has been improved, allowing users to move items to the top or bottom of the list using Ctrl with the left or right arrow keys.
This release also addresses a range of bugs across different components. A fix resolves an issue where notes could be lost when changing the lookup name of a custom column.
On top of that, the e-book viewer corrects an issue where playback speed controls could cause unintended chapter skips when using the Piper neural speech backend. Annotation syncing problems affecting some Android devices with the Firefox browser have also been resolved.
Two security-related changes are included. The e-book viewer no longer loads background images from external sources. Additionally, TXT input handling is now restricted to ensure resource files are read only from within the book contents.
Other fixes include correcting the handling of the “asciiize” option in TXT output for inline tables of contents, ensuring text field changes are applied only when values differ, updating completion suggestions dynamically as the cursor moves, and resolving a Windows-specific issue by forcing calibre.exe to terminate on exit in certain cases.
The content server and viewer components also receive updates, including improved reliability for annotation syncing and general stability enhancements.
Finally, Calibre 9.6 further expands its built-in news sources. New additions include L’Humanite, Telerama, and Le Parisien. Updates have also been made to existing sources such as BusinessLine, Naked Capitalism, Le Canard Enchaine, Le Monde, Courrier International, and L’Equipe.
For more details and the full list of new features in Calibre 9.6, see the changelog. The update is already available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
