Books in Languages other than English

[iridius]

I have an English, Spanish, French and Russian ebook collection.
I had them in separate directories prior to Calibre, but now I want to decide if I should use separate libraries or if there is a language option for metadata, I haven't noticed it.

Also, are there any metadata plugins or sources for Spanish, French or Russian books I got a little from the default ones, but would love a dedicated one for each? Thanks.

[ldolse]

If I recall seeing some recent discussion that language will be added as a metadata field at some point in the near future.

There is a plugin for amazon.fr which seems to have capabilities to grab metadata for multiple languages, and also for Nicebooks, which I believe is all French. Most of the non-english plugins are disabled by default. Go to preferences-> Advanced -> Plugins -> Metadata Download to configure them.

[Manichean]

Moderator Notice
Moved thread to appropriate subforum.

If you decide to put them all in the same library, you can set up a saved search that you can use to restrict the library view to only books of a certain language. You could use tags to do that, or a custom column, depending on how you like it.

[Mixx]

I went back-and-forth and ended up with just one library and tagging the language and then defining a user category "languages" with the elements of English, German, ...

Now I have a category language and I just click on any of the elements to select. This is an alternative to saved search. More obvious and easier to handle in my opinion.

Drawback: new languages have to be added to the category definition explicitly. But then again, I do not add languages that often .

Cheers, Mixx

[iridius]

Thanks... I don't know if I want to combine my libraries or not at this point. I have an English Fiction, English Non-fiction, Spanish, French and Russian library. The libraries are so big, it gets unwieldy and slow already, so I don't think to combine all would be great till I get on an even faster computer... Sata 6.0 with SSD RAID and triple SLI and newer Mobo... sorry wrong forum. Anyway, if I do, I think the custom column method is more to my liking. Although now that I think about it I'm confused.

What's the difference between "defining a user category" and a custom column?
I've done the columns for "Edition", "Read", "Metadata Done", and "Genre", is that the same as a "user category"?

[kiwidude]

What Mixx did above was the following:
- add a tag to each book like "English", "German" etc
- Using the tag viewer pane on the left hand side (Shit+Alt+T if not visible) and click on the "Manage user categories" button
- Add a new user category called for example "Languages"
- Add to that user category your various tag values of "English", "German" etc

That user category now appears in the tag browser and can be used to quickly filter your library by that particular tag within the "Languages" user category. You don't have to add a user category as you could just click on the tag names within the Tags category there. However it is a nice way of grouping a specific subset of your tags, authors, series etc, particularly if you have a lot of them.

[philandjan]

I have two different libraries set up; one English and one French.

Calibre is very good at letting you switch between libraries with just one click.

This works very well for me because I want to keep the libraries separate. It might be different if I wanted to access English and French books by the same author at the same time. Then I would consider the use of additional metadata/columns or user categories.

I have learnt the true meaning of "Keep It Simple, Stupid" often enough!

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by philandjan

I have two different libraries set up; one English and one French.
I have learnt the true meaning of "Keep It Simple, Stupid" often enough!

Simple is one library. That's the way Calibre was designed, and multiple libraries is the latecomer. Using multiple libraries, you lose the Content Server for the non-loaded library, you lose access to the non-loaded books and custom recipe scheduling breaks.

The latter problem is now fixed - as of the next release - but multiple libraries still doesn't work quite as well as a single library with tags. The main reason to use multiple libraries is where you need different custom columns for the libraries, but I don't consider that to be "simple"