[jesscat]

I've been using Calibre for a little while now, but there's something I don't understand. When I started using it, I had all my ebooks in a directory (My documents/My ebooks). I used "Add Books" to add them to Calibre, and when I added a book, Calibre created a new folder (with subfolders) for the book in my chosen directory (My Documents/Calibre ebooks), and copied the book file into the new location (it remains in the old location, but Calibre doesn't care about that).

Okay - that's fine. So then, what exactly is the purpose of the "Save to disk" function? Hasn't Calibre already effectively saved the book to disk, when I "added" it to Calibre and Calibre copied it to my "Calibre ebooks" directory? Why would I ever need to use the Save to Disk function? Is it simply to allow easy backup? I've seen a few things suggesting that saving to disk has something to do with changing book file metadata, but I can't quite figure this out, and I can't find anything in the documentation to help me.

Maybe this question is related to something that's confusing me in the thread about the new beta version - people keep talking about loading their libraries into the new version of Calibre, and how long it takes. But when I install a new version, all my books just appear right there. There's no loading time. I don't even think I understand what a Calibre library is - isn't it just the list of book folders and subfolders in my designated Calibre directory? Does this have something to do with Saving to Disk?

I feel like I'm failing to understand some important aspect of Calibre, and again, I've not been able to find anything in the documentation that lays any of this out. I'm not even sure I'm formulating my questions correctly, and it may be that the answers are somewhere in the forums if only I knew where to look, but I've failed to find them, so I'd be incredibly grateful if someone who gets it (maybe really what I'm asking is how Calibre works???) could explain to me.

Thank you! :-)