First Builds of Arcalibre 0.0.1

February 18, 2026

Last month, we said that one of the main goals of the rereading Project in 2026 would be to get pre-alpha builds of Arcalibre up and running. Though it's been a long process getting there, today, we're happy to make the very first builds of Arcalibre 0.0.1 available.

So far, Arcalibre is only supported on Linux and x86-64 machines (work is progressing on other platforms), and installation is a bit less smooth than is ideal. It's also, we cannot stress this enough, pre-alpha software that might irrevocably damage your e-books. All the same, should you be interested in giving Arcalibre a go, please read on!

Features and Major Changes

All AI antifeatures have been completely removed.
Arcalibre ships as a Python wheel, a kind of package that can be more readily used from other Python libraries and applications.
Some features that should be usable outside of Arcalibre, such as spell checking, HTML parsing, and internationalization have been moved into separate packages that can be used independently.
Arcalibre can be built and run using Python's virtual environments feature, decoupling Arcalibre from any other Python interpreters on your system.

Known Issues

There's still a very long way to go towards making Arcalibre a usable library manager, and getting a minimal build working has meant breaking a lot of things that were working. Some things to keep in mind if you decide to test:

UI translations other than English are not yet supported.
News recipes are currently broken, and should be fixed in future builds.
While e-book importing and metadata editing are partially supported, the e-book viewer is currently broken, and should be fixed in future builds.
Geopolitical data such as country and language codes are not up to date, and will not reflect recent changes.
Various errors may be printed to the system console while running Arcalibre.
Icons, splash screens, and other art assets still refer to the original Calibre project.
Arcalibre currently must be launched from the command line; shortcuts and other desktop integration features are forthcoming.

Installing Arcalibre 0.0.1 (17 February 2026 build)

Currently, Arcalibre 0.0.1 (17 February 2026 build) is only supported on Linux, with x86-64 processors, and using glibc-based distributions. Installing Arcalibre currently requires uv; if you have uv installed and available, you can install Arcalibre by running:

uv tool install --python 3.14 --extra-index-url https://codeberg.org/api/packages/rereading/pypi/simple/ arcalibre==0.0.1+17f3bb2

Here, the --extra-index-url tells uv where to find Arcalibre, and 17f3bb2 refers to the 17 February 2026 build of Arcalibre 0.0.1.

If you do not already have uv, you can use the following command to download uv and Arcalibre together:

curl -LsSf uvx.sh/arcalibre/install.sh | sh -s -- --extra-index-url https://codeberg.org/api/packages/rereading/pypi/simple/

Either way, once you have installed Arcalibre, you can run it by running arcalibre from the command line.

Reporting Issues

If you decide to poke around and encounter something broken that wasn't already mentioned above, please let us know! Some great ways to report problems:

What's Coming Next

This is the beginning, not the end, of Arcalibre's journey. The rereading Project is still working on building out governance, and there's a lot of work to do on getting Arcalibre itself to where it needs to be.

A major theme of development so far has been porting native code from the Calibre project to use standard Python build tooling, making it easier to build on multiple operating systems and platforms. We plan on keeping this work going, reducing the amount of platform-specific code that needs to be built outside of Python tooling.

Special Thanks

A huge shoutout to @SnoopJ@hachyderm.io and @cthos@mastodon.cthos.dev for testing earlier one-off builds, to @whitequark@treehouse.systems for advice and support, and especially to @ddelemeny@mastodon.xyz for contributions to Arcalibre's new PDF handling library! Thank you as well for everyone who has chipped in to help out with money for hosting forums, object storage, and domain names.