The popular free ebook tool Calibre has reached version 8.8. While it isn’t super exciting, it does deliver a handful of useful changes.
This update improves EPUB3 support, especially for Japanese-language books. Calibre now handles -epub-text-emphasis properties properly during conversion, which means vertical text and ruby annotations in Japanese EPUBs should look a lot better.
The built-in e-book viewer also gets a small upgrade. When using the Google-powered lookup feature, results now appear more clearly, making it easier to get definitions or translations without leaving your book.
Kobo users will be happy to hear that the latest Tolino firmware is now supported. Calibre’s Kobo driver has been updated to ensure syncing and transfers work as expected.
The Piper Neural TTS (text-to-speech) engine got a backend overhaul too. It no longer needs an external binary to run, which should improve performance and stability.
A few bugs were also squashed in this release. Sorting CSS rules by name now works properly in the Edit Book reports. Custom tag-based columns used in similarity searches are finally treated as multi-valued, as they should be. And folders with misleading file extensions (thanks, Apple Books) are no longer mistakenly imported when adding books recursively.
EPUB3 output has also been improved. If the nav file contains more than just the table of contents or isn’t part of the spine, Calibre will now handle it more gracefully.
News junkies get some love too. Calibre’s built-in news source support has been updated for The Economist, Washington Post, Indian Express, Wall Street Journal, De Tijd, and Press Information Bureau, delivering cleaner daily digests.
Calibre 8.8 is available now for Linux, macOS, and Windows. You can grab it from calibre-ebook.com.
