I’ll admit that reading books is not my favorite thing. In fact. I rather dislike books and prefer TV. Having said that, if I am going to read a book it will be a digital version. That’s why I adore Calibre, folks.
Today, that open source software gets a bump to version 9.11. While it’s a minor version release, it’s actually pretty significant.
The biggest addition, in my opinion, is a new option to export annotations as a standalone HTML webpage. Highlights and notes can now be viewed in any modern browser with support for both light and dark themes. Users can also search through annotations and filter them by highlight style, making it easier to revisit important passages from books you’ve read.
The built-in e-book viewer also gets a small but welcome upgrade for AI users. Calibre’s Ask AI feature now supports the {selected} placeholder when entering free-form queries, allowing selected text from a book to be passed directly into prompts without the extra copy and paste steps.
As usual, developer Kovid Goyal also cleaned up a handful of bugs in this release. Version 9.11 fixes an issue where text areas in the e-book viewer would not always resize correctly when the window size changed while scrollbars were enabled. It also resolves several regressions introduced in the previous release, including problems affecting Python templates in the book details panel and custom column default values when adding new books.
The application’s built-in news download feature received some attention too, with updated support for publications including Scientific American and Phoronix. Those are two very important news sources for nerds!
Want to download version 9.11? You can grab it here. If you do try it, be sure to share a comment below.
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