[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by chaley

This brings up another question. Kovid mentioned that it would be nice somehow to start transfers from the device instead of from calibre.

I can see folks valuing this ability.

Originally Posted by chaley

One way to do it would be using the to-come content server interface. You could browse your books using the same interface the app presents for books on the device (to the extent possible), select, and download books. We would support (somehow) an ondevice indication. The advantage of this solution is that the content server exists and is made for this purpose.

The fact that the content server exists is a big plus. Two UIs wouldn't have to be a bad thing if clearly labeled up front as to their function. One Button to enter Local connection a Second button to enter Mobile connection. The mobile connection could be setup to access the Calibre content server and possibly public OPDS catalogs such as Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, Manybooks (see Moon+ Reader) or even have the ability to add your own catalog so folks could access their books via catalogs setup on their own NAS and not have to have a separate computer running calibre.

Originally Posted by chaley

Another way to do this would be to permit you to talk to calibre over the device interface instead of the content server. The problem I have is to decide how it works. It is easy to imagine adding the equivalent of calibre's "in library" to our UI -- some sort of checkmark on the display. The more interesting question is showing books that are in the library but not on the device. We would need to show both OnDevice and InLibrary, which isn't hard but will take some thought. However, do you see a list of *all* the books in your library? Does it support searching? Does our grouping interface work? Is any of this possible with reasonable performance?

Good questions. If you could implement something along these lines I'm sure many folks would be very interested. But if you implemented a subset of what you could do with calibre locally, there would always be folks whining about what it can't do and why can't I do this and that... It might be a support nightmare. But it would certainly be a challenge.

Originally Posted by chaley

Any thoughts? Would accessing calibre when connected as a device be useful? Or is the content server sufficient?

I think using the content server might be best. Any possible support nightmare would be limited by the fact that the content server is a different beast. If you gave it a decent front end with a nice search feature in addition to the new feature to get free books from public OPDS catalogs folks would be very happy. Even the folks that never use the content server would benefit from the possible PD books available. Maybe even have access to Mobileread from this Mobile connection view.

Feature suggestion: When I am in FBReader (not my reader of choice) and select a book I am presented with what essentially is a book jacket similar to what calibre allows you to insert into your book. First the book Cover, then Book Info (grabbed from the metadata) including Title, Author, Series, Series index, Tags, Language and Description. Following this is the path and name of the book as it sits on the Android device.

If you could insert a book jacket similar to this into what you have now, folks would go bananas. They are always looking for a better way to view book info prior to reading. You could eliminate the need for folks to insert books jackets or create catalogs.

If you presented this pseudo book jacket to the user after s/he selects a book, with navigation Read or Back buttons, this would greatly add value to your user. If they choose Read then you have the same pop-up that asks which reader they wish to use. If they choose Back you return them to where they were prior to selecting the book. I believe FBReader creates a temp file in cache to accomplish this feat.

Wish you luck.