shelf-like display of the covers of the book in a collection

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I think Alfa is a pointless & inferior application for ebooks.

I think so too, but for some people it may be suitable - namely those who want their library manager to respect their personal folder system. It seems it has its fans, or it would have been abandoned long ago.

[Quoth]

Long ago Penguin paperbacks seemed to be random.
Only some of my fatter paperback books have horizontal or partially horizontal. The hardbacks, especially older ones, tend to have horizontal text.
About 3000 books dating back to actual Victorian editions. Older books (before 1930s?) may not have any publisher name or logo on the spine. All newer ones do have a name or logo.

[Quoth]

Re: Alfa

Originally Posted by Sirtel

It seems it has its fans, or it would have been abandoned long ago.

Wordperfect, Wordstar, Lotus Notes, MS IIS, McAfee, MS Exchange and Sharepoint still have fans too.

[foice]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I see little to no value in being able to display ebook covers in a random order. I always tried to keep my physical books sorted by author/series/title (I had about 1,800 hardcovers and 5,000 paperbacks). For me, calibre's current display options are more than acceptable. Given that my physical library organization always had the spine facing out, the information visible was pretty much what I see in the main library view in calibre though organized horizontally rather than vertically.

With 14,900 ebooks in my main calibre library, I need to be able to sort and search to keep track of what I already own. Even with my XYL's library of ~2500 books, I find that quite often that an ebook she expresses interest in was already obtained a few years back since so many free/0.99 ebook offers are recycled pretty regularly when the author produces a new ebook in a series.

Aside from anything else, I suspect that you would have to fork calibre and create your own code to display books in a random order and with a spine view. From Kovid Goyal's previous posts, he has little interest or time to work on such requests. Perhaps you could add a little windows with an image of a night table with your current reads and soon to be reads stacked on it?

What you said is too long. You should have written "I do not need this, I do not care". You are wasting on CO2 with these rants.

[foice]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

What's stopping you from creating a custom column like that, filling it with values for only those 10 books and sorting by that column? No need for manual dragging. Anything can be done with a saved search, tag or a custom column.

I have that column at this point. It is a starter. I am thankful to those who suggested that. I still believe that having to add a number to an item to later rank them by sorting it is not an equivalent process to what I had in mind. Once again, a close proxy would be to lie the books with the cover up on a big table and start to group them a bit, remove some it's not a good time to read for whatever reason, then finally select my next read ... not based on a number that I have to invent, but just based on seeing the book. Some famous apps made a lot of money by asking users to swipe left or swipe right to express like-dislike ... you have to admit that the medium you use to select affect your choices ... but yes Calibre has all it is needed to _some users_ I do not need to hear that again please.

[foice]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Unfortunately you're far from the first person to tell us how much they miss physical books. After the 5th, 10th or 15th time it's getting somewhat irritating.

Then again, we argue about many, many other things besides paper vs digital. Some of us even participate in the politics & religion forum which exists only for arguing.

Have you guys ever considered that you "jump to conclusions" just because someone pronounced the P of "physical books"? Conversations on the internet need to be less human than those in real life.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by foice

What you said is too long. You should have written "I do not need this, I do not care". You are wasting on CO2 with these rants.

Yawn. You might be happy with the shorter post, I prefer to explain my thinking a bit more.

As for wasting on CO2? An interesting theory. Do you stop breathing while not reading what I write? Does your breathing speed up so you produce more CO2 while reading what I wrote? What exactly does "wasting on CO2" mean? An analogy to tripping on LSD? A meaningless phrase?

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by foice

I do not need to hear that again please.

And why do you think I need to constantly hear how you want to sort your ebooks in a totally random order? If you don't like Calibre, don't use it. No one is forcing you to.

BTW, I choose my next reads as my mood takes me all the time. I just select a few books I feel like reading and tag them accordingly, with a temporary tag. Why this wouldn't work for you and why you think you need to drag the books around by hand, I have no idea.

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by foice

What you said is too long.

You do know you're posting in a public forum, right? People can reply however they wish, and you won't necessarily like what they have to say.

It seems to me that you shouldn't be using Calibre at all. The point of Calibre is to organise your library, which is exactly the opposite of the disorganised library you seem to want.

[pdurrant]

It seems to me that foice is not saying that they don't want to use calibre, but that they would like an extra capability in calibre. Which is entirely reasonable.

And this thread has been useful, in that it's got foice a work-around, and allowed them to bring into focus what they do want.

Now whether there's any developer also interested in the kind of feature foice describes and willing to create it is another matter.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

It seems to me that foice is not saying that they don't want to use calibre, but that they would like an extra capability in calibre. Which is entirely reasonable.

There are several ways to achieve what the OP wants, and more than one was suggested to them. But they seem to be fixed on only one way, which is doing it like they'd do it with physical books. IMO that's really unproductive. Ebooks are much more flexible than paper books, so why not use their strengths instead of lamenting that you can't do it in exactly the same way as you did with paper books?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

There are several ways to achieve what the OP wants, and more than one was suggested to them. But they seem to be fixed on only one way, which is doing it like they'd do it with physical books. IMO that's really unproductive. Ebooks are much more flexible than paper books, so why not use their strengths instead of lamenting that you can't do it in exactly the same way as you did with paper books?

That is NOT what the OP is doing. They are asking for another way of working with their ebooks.

Wanting to arrange ebooks in reading order by dragging images of the books seems to me to be an entirely reasonable thing to want to do.

It might not be what you want to do, and calibre might not currently support it. But it's not at all unreasonable to ask about it.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Wanting to arrange ebooks in reading order by dragging images of the books seems to me to be an entirely reasonable thing to want to do.

Not to me. That's what you do with physical objects, not with digital ones.

[pdurrant]

I've just noticed that calibre has a cover image view that's an alternative to the list view. The order in the cover view is whatever order was last selected in list view.

It seems to me it might not be too much work to have the cover view allow re-arranging of titles if a "manual order" column was set up as the sorting criteria.

As I said, it might not be what you want to do with ebooks, but it might be very welcome to others.

[John F]

This thread reminds me of this post:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...postcount=4091