diff --git a/bypy/sources.json b/bypy/sources.json
index 6d91dbf282..3767058255 100644
--- a/bypy/sources.json
+++ b/bypy/sources.json
@@ -679,6 +679,15 @@
         }
     },
 
+    {
+        "name": "cchardet",
+        "unix": {
+            "filename": "cchardet-2.1.7.tar.gz",
+            "hash": "sha256:c428b6336545053c2589f6caf24ea32276c6664cb86db817e03a94c60afa0eaf",
+            "urls": ["pypi"]
+        }
+    },
+
     {
         "name": "msgpack",
         "unix": {
diff --git a/setup/arch-ci.sh b/setup/arch-ci.sh
index d4ac1c7d6f..6954f7b0d9 100755
--- a/setup/arch-ci.sh
+++ b/setup/arch-ci.sh
@@ -5,5 +5,5 @@
 
 set -xe
 useradd -m ci
-pacman -S --noconfirm --needed base-devel sudo git sip pyqt-builder chmlib icu jxrlib hunspell libmtp libusb libwmf optipng podofo python-apsw python-beautifulsoup4 python-cssselect python-css-parser python-dateutil python-dbus python-dnspython python-dukpy python-feedparser python-html2text python-html5-parser python-lxml python-markdown python-mechanize python-msgpack python-netifaces python-unrardll python-pillow python-psutil python-pygments python-pyqt5 python-regex python-zeroconf python-pyqtwebengine qt5-x11extras qt5-svg qt5-imageformats udisks2 hyphen python-pychm python-pycryptodome speech-dispatcher python-sphinx python-urllib3 python-py7zr python-pip 
+pacman -S --noconfirm --needed base-devel sudo git sip pyqt-builder chmlib icu jxrlib hunspell libmtp libusb libwmf optipng podofo python-apsw python-beautifulsoup4 python-cssselect python-css-parser python-dateutil python-dbus python-dnspython python-dukpy python-feedparser python-html2text python-html5-parser python-lxml python-markdown python-mechanize python-msgpack python-netifaces python-unrardll python-pillow python-psutil python-pygments python-pyqt5 python-regex python-zeroconf python-pyqtwebengine qt5-x11extras qt5-svg qt5-imageformats udisks2 hyphen python-pychm python-pycryptodome speech-dispatcher python-sphinx python-urllib3 python-py7zr python-pip python-cchardet
 chown -R ci:users $GITHUB_WORKSPACE
diff --git a/src/calibre/ebooks/chardet.py b/src/calibre/ebooks/chardet.py
index 56bbe69de6..54e4acbac2 100644
--- a/src/calibre/ebooks/chardet.py
+++ b/src/calibre/ebooks/chardet.py
@@ -102,13 +102,21 @@ def substitute_entites(raw):
     return ENTITY_PATTERN.sub(xml_entity_to_unicode, raw)
 
 
-_CHARSET_ALIASES = {"macintosh" : "mac-roman",
-                        "x-sjis" : "shift-jis"}
+_CHARSET_ALIASES = {"macintosh" : "mac-roman", "x-sjis" : "shift-jis"}
 
 
-def detect(*args, **kwargs):
-    from chardet import detect
-    return detect(*args, **kwargs)
+def detect(bytestring):
+    try:
+        from cchardet import detect as implementation
+    except ImportError:
+        from chardet import detect as implementation
+        return implementation(bytestring)
+    else:
+        ans = implementation(bytestring)
+        enc = ans.get('encoding')
+        if enc:
+            ans['encoding'] = enc.lower()
+        return ans
 
 
 def force_encoding(raw, verbose, assume_utf8=False):
diff --git a/src/calibre/test_build.py b/src/calibre/test_build.py
index b37fb1bcfb..961a86a9dc 100644
--- a/src/calibre/test_build.py
+++ b/src/calibre/test_build.py
@@ -69,10 +69,10 @@ class BuildTest(unittest.TestCase):
         del CHMFile, chmlib
 
     def test_chardet(self):
-        from chardet import detect
+        from cchardet import detect
         raw = 'mūsi Füße'.encode('utf-8')
         data = detect(raw)
-        self.assertEqual(data['encoding'], 'utf-8')
+        self.assertEqual(data['encoding'].lower(), 'utf-8')
         self.assertGreater(data['confidence'], 0.5)
         # The following is used by html5lib
         from chardet.universaldetector import UniversalDetector