Calibre 9.16 adds Kokoro voices for read aloud, Camoufox integration & updated Kobo driver

In its latest update, Calibre has rolled out version 9.16, introducing significant enhancements to audio accessibility and web scraping capabilities that address longstanding user demands. The headline feature is the integration of Kokoro high-quality voice synthesis for the read aloud function, which delivers notably more natural-sounding narration compared to the previous Piper voices, particularly for English language content. Meanwhile, privacy-conscious newsreaders gain a powerful new capability: the Camoufox browser now enables downloading articles from websites that actively block automated access, circumventing anti-scraping measures that have increasingly restricted news aggregation workflows.

Beyond accessibility improvements, the update brings substantial refinements to PDF handling and format support. The PDF input engine now properly renders right-to-left text and manages multi-column layouts with greater accuracy, while AVIF image format support expands compatibility with modern web graphics. Under the hood, performance gains accelerate operations on large libraries: startup times, bulk deletions, series sorting, and tag browser refreshes all benefit from optimization work. The Kobo driver receives firmware updates for newer devices, and Windows users will appreciate cleaner uninstallation that unregisters default program associations and clears cached data.

For power users and e-book editors, the release introduces several workflow-enhancing features. The Edit Book module allows Check Book to skip specific problem types, shows which table of contents' entries exist in currently edited files, and auto-fixes invalid IDs while updating corresponding CSS selectors. The e-book viewer can now persist up to 1 MB of data, display parent ToC sections in headers/footers, and print to PDF with metric unit margin specifications. Additional polish includes sortable hierarchical tags displayed as folders, searchable tag mapper rules, removable search history dropdown entries, and an adventure game export/import function for “Create Your Own Adventure” projects, alongside roughly a dozen bug fixes and updated news sources.