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Spotlight: Ozzie Fernandes

Core Maintainer of Calibre-Web

Ozzie Fernandes
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What did your early life look like?

My parents lived on a farm in the western part of Germany. I was always fascinated by computers and software and the things you can do with them. I first did an apprenticeship as electrician and later on decided to study electrical engineering in a city nearby. After getting my engineer’s degree, I moved to Southern Germany, and I’ve been living and working there ever since.

Where do currently work?

I have been working for a Swiss company for 17 years now, developing industrial measurement equipment for water analysis.

What is Calibre-Web?

Calibre-Web is a modern app for browsing, reading, organizing and downloading e-books. The project allows you to access and organize your e-books from anywhere in the world. You can download and install it directly from github.com/janeczku/calibre-web, or you can use one of the pre-built Docker images listed on the project page. The documentation is in the wiki.

Calibre-Web Logo
1 year
since first release
94
total contributors
2.7K+
GitHub stargazers

How big is the core maintainer’s team?

I’m the only one.

What inspired you to contribute to Calibre-Web?

I have loved reading books since my early childhood. After a holiday with more time for reading books than books, I bought one of these new e-book readers (a Sony PRS-505). I started organizing my e-books with the famous Calibre program. I didn’t like Calibre’s web interface, so I started searching for something more beautiful. After trying some programs I stumbled over Calibre-Web. It looked beautiful and had a feature every other program was missing: you could edit the e-book meta-data (like author, title and so on), which was to me important for a good e-book library. I soon discovered some problems, so I started enhancing the program.

Are there any success stories that you would like to share?

Internet in a Box, a self-contained, inexpensive appliance to provide content and applications in an offline world, presented their project and Calibre-Web in Wikimania 2019 in Stockholm.

What is coming up in the next release?

A few things that I’m excited about:

  • the long awaited integration of login via LDAP, enabling a centralized user management, essential for companies.
  • the possibility of syncing the Kobo eReader with your private e-book collection.
  • per user based books access restrictions
  • the ability of merging e-books of different formats in your database

What is your vision for the future of this project?

An easy installable, easy usable web app for accessing and organizing your e-books.

How can support the development of the project?

Supporters can donate to my PayPal account at ozzie.fernandez.isaacs@gmail.com.

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