Calibre 0.9.18 now available in APT repository

I have imported Calibre 0.9.18+dfsg1-1bzr and its dependencies into my Apt repository for Ubuntu quantal (and Linux Mint 14). Although this isn’t the latest software release, it is the latest release published in Ubuntu raring. This makes it very easy to backport with pbuilder.

This version or later is required to work around a bug in Calibre that prevents importing eBooks in AZW3 format. Amazon Kindle for PC uses AZW3 format. If you want to buy books and use DeDRM to actually own them, you should upgrade to this version of Calibre.

Using Calibre 0.8.x, you’ll get this error when reading or converting AZW3 eBooks:

Python function terminated unexpectedly
‘utf8′ codec can’t decode byte 0x9c in position 17669: invalid start byte (Error Code: 1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “site.py”, line 132, in main
File “site.py”, line 109, in run_entry_point
File “site-packages\calibre\utils\ipc\worker.py”, line 189, in main
File “site-packages\calibre\gui2\convert\gui_conversion.py”, line 31, in gui_convert_override
File “site-packages\calibre\gui2\convert\gui_conversion.py”, line 25, in gui_convert
File “site-packages\calibre\ebooks\conversion\plumber.py”, line 1009, in run
File “site-packages\calibre\customize\conversion.py”, line 239, in __call__
File “site-packages\calibre\ebooks\conversion\plugins\mobi_input.py”, line 40, in convert
File “site-packages\calibre\ebooks\mobi\reader\mobi8.py”, line 92, in __call__
File “site-packages\calibre\ebooks\mobi\reader\mobi8.py”, line 418, in expand_text
File “site-packages\calibre\ebooks\mobi\reader\markup.py”, line 310, in expand_mobi8_markup
File “site-packages\calibre\ebooks\mobi\reader\markup.py”, line 51, in update_internal_links
File “encodings\utf_8.py”, line 16, in decode
UnicodeDecodeError: ‘utf8′ codec can’t decode byte 0x9c in position 17669: invalid start byte