Quote:
Originally Posted by GhostHawk
...Personally I have had nothing but bad experiences with Caliber. It took forever to add books, and it made a total hash of my folder where I had been storing my library...
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Part of the reason for your first sentence may be in your second sentence. It sounds like you were trying to use your source folder for your calibre library(per the developer, calibre is spelled with a lower case c). Calibre doesn't oraganize files, it organizes books. Most people use the old, traditional folder, filename tree structure for organization which isn't always the most efficient way to organize things, especially when there is more than one way to organize things. Calibre uses metadata (tags), kept a separate file, for organization and sorting. In the initial process of setting up your library, calibre reads files from a source folder, processes them as necessary, then stores them in it's own library, leaving the original files untouched. If you try to defeat calibre's system, such as directing calibre to use your source folder as the calibre library, you will wonk up your original system. People have a hard time accepting that calibre's way of organizing with metadata instead of folder and file structure is more efficient because it is radically different than the way most people are used to. To get around that unease, many people, including myself, retain their original files in a folder in addition to the folder the library calibre uses although it's not really needed. Storage space on HDDs is cheap nowadays so just think of it as planned redundancy (fancy term for back-up).
I personally find calibre to be much better than anything I've tried, free or otherwise. The current version is much better that it was when I started using it earlier this year and it keeps getting better. It also has a very avtive user forum one can go to for help, including from the developer. There may be programs that will convert files from one format to another faster than others, but for overall organization, conversion, and loading of books into devices, calibre can't be beat (it even has its own reader although you can use another one by changing the filetype asscociation). If you know something better, please let me know. So far every one I tried wasn't as good as calibre.