Calibre Will Answer Your Questions About Books

Calibre has officially released version 8.11.1, and the biggest feature is a brand-new tab in the e-book viewer’s dictionary lookup panel that lets you talk to an AI about the e-book. This should give you a quick, contextual answer, summary, or explanation without having to leave the application.

The coolest part is that this isn’t tied to a single, proprietary AI. Calibre’s new feature is designed to support hundreds of AI models. You can connect to a wide range of providers, including big names like Google and GitHub, as well as platforms like OpenRouter, and even locally running models via Ollama. This means you have total control over which AI you use, and many of the supported models can actually be used free of charge.

All you have to do is highlight text and open the “Ask AI” tab in the dictionary lookup panel. You can then ask the AI anything about the text you selected, and you’ll get an answer to help you.

Luckily, this feature is completely optional. If you’re not into the whole AI thing, you don’t even have to worry about it because no AI-related code is loaded unless you actively go into the preferences and configure a provider. If you don’t set up the AI, then it’s the same app you would get before the update, with a few bugfixes.

Along with the AI feature, the 8.11.1 update also includes a helpful little quality-of-life change that shows the keyboard shortcut for each category right in the tooltip of the Preferences window. This is a great way to smart memorize them, and removes any need to look up shortcuts on Google or in a settings menu.

Of course, no update is complete without a list of bug fixes and performance tweaks. The e-book viewer saw a fix for an issue where modifying an existing highlight could accidentally create duplicates in some books. The Calibri team also squashed a bug on Windows where some very large e-books had a few non-working links.

There’s another fix that makes sure the Esc key correctly closes footnote popups even when the popup has keyboard focus. This will help fast readers stay on pace without unneeded interruptions. For those who use it, the Windows build also now signs the .pyd DLLs in addition to the regular .dll files.

This may not seem like much, but it’s because this update came so soon after the last one. In 8.10, which came out on September 5, the book list got a cool update that let you control the tooltips displayed for every column using a customizable template. If you haven’t used it yet, you can just right-click the column header and choose “Define tooltip template” to set it up.

It feels like an eventuality for every app to end up with AI features, so Calibre getting it is not a surprise. While I’m not a fan of these kinds of updates, it could be argued that it takes the e-book viewer from a great reader to an interactive study tool. If you want to take advantage of this new feature, you’ll want to make sure you update to Calibre 8.11.1 or download it from the official website.

Source: Calibre