New in calibre 8.0

Welcome back, calibre users. It has been just over a year since calibre 7.0 was released. There has been a lot of work on calibre in the past year. The main new features are a new Neural Engine for more realistic sounding Read aloud and text-to-speech functionality and out of the box support for the Kobo KEPUB format.

• Improved Kobo support

  calibre has much improved out-of-the-box support for Kobo e-book readers. It now natively supports the Kobo KEPUB format. You can view, convert and edit KEPUB files in calibre. Additionally, EPUB books are automatically converted to KEPUB when sending to Kobo devices, to take advantage of the Kobo native renderer. This can be disabled in the Kobo driver preferences.

  Before calibre 8.0, to gain some of this functionality required installing third party plugins. These are no longer needed and calibre 8 and newer automatically do not load the plugins even if they are installed. All the functionality from the KoboTouch Extended, KEPUB Input/Output and KEPUB Metadata reader/writer plugins is now built into calibre.

  
• A new neural engine for more realistic Read aloud

  The E-book viewer in calibre now uses the Piper Neural Text-to-speech engine for realistic sounding voices, in many different languages. Even nicer this engine is local only which means no data is sent to any cloud servers for text-to-speech functionality.

  
• A tool to create audio overlays when authoring e-books

  To complement the above Read aloud improvements, the calibre Edit book tool now has a new facility that allows e-book authors to use the Piper TTS engine to create audio overlays for their books so that they can be read aloud even when reading them with software that does not have text-to-speech capability.

  Furthermore, by adding some simple markup to the HTML of the book, authors can have different parts of the book read using different voices, creating a more immersive and interesting experience. This tool can be accessed via the Tools menu in the editor.

  
• E-book viewer: various improvements

  The E-book viewer in calibre has had various improvements, both major and minor. Most importantly, the speed of opening books for the first time has been greatly improved. A four hundred thousand word EPUB file now opens in under a second on typical hardware.

  The E-book viewer now has support for displaying and jumping to paper book page locations, when the page location information is present in the book being viewed.

  The E-book viewer has added support for profiles. All viewer settings can now be saved in profiles and quickly switched between.

  
• PDF conversion: Automatic header/footer removal

  One of the most common problems with converting PDF files to ebook formats is that page headers and footers get interleaved with the body text. calibre now has a new PDF conversion engine that automatically detects and removed headers and footers in most cases.

Éste es un momento adecuado para dar unas gracias enormes a la comunidad de calibre que ha contribuido generosamente con su energía y entusiasmo, y sin quienes muchas de las características anteriores nunca habrían visto la luz del día.

Note that some of these features were actually introduced during the lifetime of the 7.x series. This document describes new features as compared to 7.0

Ver los cambios en las versiones principales anteriores de calibre: 7.0, 6.0, 5.0, 4.0, 3.0, 2.0, 1.0, 0.9, 0.8, 0.7.