Kovid Goyal released Calibre 9.16 today as a new stable update to this open-source, free, and cross-platform e-book management software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems.

Coming three weeks after Calibre 9.15, the Calibre 9.16 release is a hefty one, bringing support for high-quality Kokoro voices to the Read Aloud feature, which sound much more natural than the Piper voices, especially for English, and support for downloading news from websites that block automated access by using the Camoufox headless browser.

Calibre 9.16 also adds support for right-to-left text and better handling of multi-column pages to the PDF Input feature, adds support for reading images in the AVIF format, and adds a new option to the tag browser to let you sort hierarchical tags that have only children but no actual books as folders before all other tags at their level.

The Edit Book feature was improved in this release to allow skipping of problems of a particular type, indicate what ToC (Table of Contents) entries, if any, are in the file being currently edited, and update CSS selectors when automatically fixing invalid IDs.

On the other hand, the E-book viewer received a new option to display the immediate parent ToC section in headers or footers, and support for specifying margins in metric units when printing to PDF. Moreover, the E-book viewer now lets e-books store up to 1MB of data persistently, updates the “Pages from paper edition” value faster, and correctly handles dark mode theme color overrides.

EPUB 3 to EPUB 3 conversions were also improved to preserve IDs on navigation elements so links to them continue to work, while the Book list now respects horizontal alignment settings for all icon-only column types, and the Cover grid is no longer being rendered too small in some specific cases.

Calibre 9.16 also improves the PDF Output feature by fixing an issue with trailing content at the end of individual HTML files being lost when the files use multi-column layout and a regression in the Calibre 9.x series that caused conversion of some e-books with vertical writing to fail.

On top of that, Calibre 9.16 adds the ability to search rules across the Tag mapper and HTML/CSS transform rules, support for removing individual entries from the search history dropdown, support for resetting the main window layout, and support for exporting and importing saved games in the “Create your own Adventure” feature.

Kobo support has been improved as well with the addition of newer firmware, the DOCX Output now supports clickable images inside links and preserves non-breaking spaces, and various operations are now faster when dealing with large libraries, such as startup, deleting many books, sorting by series, searching and refreshing the Tag browser.

Last but not least, Calibre 9.16 fixes saving and restoring of layouts when the alternate book list visualisations is currently active, adds support for clearing FB2 metadata, such as series, comments, etc., when they are cleared in the app, and hardens the Content server, while improving support for older web browsers when using the book details page in the Mobile view.

New news sources have been added in Calibre 9.16, including World Socialist, Poetry Magazine, The Believer, and Respekt, while the Reuters, Heise, The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, La Jornada, Naked Capitalism, and The Saturday Paper news sources have been improved.

Check out the release notes for more details about the changes included in Calibre 9.16, which you can download right now from the official website as binaries for 64-bit and ARM64 Linux systems, as well as binaries for macOS and Windows systems. You can also install Calibre as a Flatpak app from Flathub.