MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Calibre as a helper for PRS-505 navigation?

kevin_boone · 02-12-2009, 06:49 AM

Hi

I was wondering to what extent Calibre (or just the calibre metadata database) could be useful in generating documents to assist in navigating a large book collection on a PRS-500.

I'm one of those people who likes to keep lots of books around, not because I'm a particularly fast reader, but because I can never figure out in advance what I want to read. I have the same problem with my MP3 player, but that's a different matter ...

I currently have about 200 books on my PRS-505, which only use a fraction of its capacity, and that's without using expansion cards. But already it's pretty hard to find stuff. So far as I can tell, you can't even get a list of authors and then find books by a selected author. There is a `list books by author' facility, but even then the author you want may be ten pages away from the starting point.

The relatively slow screen refresh rate of the PRS makes this navigation even more frustrating.

Calibre is quite helpful in that it can generate PRS `collections' according to tags in the metadata. Even that becomes a bit cumbersome if you have large numbers of tags, but it's certainly a step up from what Sony offers, so far as I can tell.

It seems to me that Calibre, or some program that worked on the Calibre database, could be quite useful here.

For example, it would be relatively easy to scan the database and generate a new LRF document (via HTML?) that contained a list of authors, each of which linked to a new page (or set of pages) with books by that author. Or a document that listed all books (in title order, or author order, or both) along with their summaries or comments.

I don't know how useful any of this would be -- it would be more useful if you could actually navigate from an index document of this sort to the real books; but I don't think the LRF format allows for that (does it?). It may have already been implemented, for all I know.

If nobody else is interested, I'll probably throw something together for my own purposes using perl and sqlite3, which would spit out HTML which I could feed into html2lrf. But I thought I'd see if anybody else was interested and whether there's scope for a collaborative effort

Best wishes
Kevin

02-12-2009, 06:49 AM	#1
kevin_boone Enthusiast Posts: 35 Karma: 10 Join Date: Feb 2009 Device: prs-505	Calibre as a helper for PRS-505 navigation? Hi I was wondering to what extent Calibre (or just the calibre metadata database) could be useful in generating documents to assist in navigating a large book collection on a PRS-500. I'm one of those people who likes to keep lots of books around, not because I'm a particularly fast reader, but because I can never figure out in advance what I want to read. I have the same problem with my MP3 player, but that's a different matter ... I currently have about 200 books on my PRS-505, which only use a fraction of its capacity, and that's without using expansion cards. But already it's pretty hard to find stuff. So far as I can tell, you can't even get a list of authors and then find books by a selected author. There is a `list books by author' facility, but even then the author you want may be ten pages away from the starting point. The relatively slow screen refresh rate of the PRS makes this navigation even more frustrating. Calibre is quite helpful in that it can generate PRS `collections' according to tags in the metadata. Even that becomes a bit cumbersome if you have large numbers of tags, but it's certainly a step up from what Sony offers, so far as I can tell. It seems to me that Calibre, or some program that worked on the Calibre database, could be quite useful here. For example, it would be relatively easy to scan the database and generate a new LRF document (via HTML?) that contained a list of authors, each of which linked to a new page (or set of pages) with books by that author. Or a document that listed all books (in title order, or author order, or both) along with their summaries or comments. I don't know how useful any of this would be -- it would be more useful if you could actually navigate from an index document of this sort to the real books; but I don't think the LRF format allows for that (does it?). It may have already been implemented, for all I know. If nobody else is interested, I'll probably throw something together for my own purposes using perl and sqlite3, which would spit out HTML which I could feed into html2lrf. But I thought I'd see if anybody else was interested and whether there's scope for a collaborative effort Best wishes Kevin