KISS for New calibre Users

[travger]

Originally Posted by Starson17

Most of my books were in decent shape for reading as TXT format, and I had too many to wait until they were all converted.

Oh, you must be rather forgiving. I was thoroughly irritated with the lack of italics (don't remember the book, not very long one). Couldn't understand when character just thought or actually said an opinion.

Separate cleanup library seems now for me more convenient, maybe in the year or two it changes. Still, it's easier then to merge them than to separate unclean entries from the main.

[kiwidude]

@travger - it is less of a problem if you only have one unique variation of a format - e.g. an RTF and an EPUB. The real problem is when your two variations are of the same format - e.g. two EPUB of the same book. What do you do then? Either you have to have duplicate book entries (so your Calibre library starts to degrade quickly in quality, usability and performance) or you have to decide on only one to keep, which you can only do by visual inspection, which is very time consuming.

So if I am going to be spending the time opening book formats to compare and decide a winner, I don't want to have to do it yet again down the track to compare with other formats when I come to cleanup the book. Hence I only do it "once" at the time I pick a format to add to Calibre.

As for seeing what books I have - it is just as easy to type in my search box in windows explorer "name:xxx" as it is to do a lookup in Calibre. Of course I would love it if every book I had was in Calibre, but I've resigned myself to only having the books I really care about/intend to read in there instead.

Everyone has their own way - I am another who cannot bear to read from .txt converted books but whatever you are happy reading with then go for it.

[travger]

Actually I had more in mind my practices now with new downloads. I do have loads of duplicates in the books folder, those get whittled away very-very slowly. Maybe I'll get decent epub/mobi 5 years from now, then I don't have to choose between pdf and rtf. But if said epub/mobi has some dubiosities, I can check other formats.

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

...That was the balance that ended up working for me anyways. Like I said, if I was starting from scratch today I would just use the "author by author" gradual approach to add from windows explorer to Calibre. The risk for people who have multiple conflicting formats of a book is to try to add them all to Calibre - my advice is find your best format and only add that one in. You can associate the Calibre ebook viewer with the various file types like epub, mobi etc so it is just a double click to open them from the explorer search results.

That point just sank in. So, I've noticed that OS X has excellent search feature out in the OS, I've been using it a lot on "Raw Books" folder. So that's one way of avoiding having a "needs-cleanup" library, when combined with the other point about adding a few at a time per author from there into one calibre library and fixing metadata and formats together at that point. Knowing me, though, I'll try to do too much at once and have the backlog problem too.

Originally Posted by Starson17

I keep them all in one and tag them according to whether they've been cleaned up. I use the content server a lot, and if I don't keep them in one library, I can't access them, or find out if I've got a book or all books in a series, etc.

Most of my books were in decent shape for reading as TXT format, and I had too many to wait until they were all converted.

Being retired I don't travel much anymore so normally I don't need to use the Content Server. During my first month or so of calibre use I investigated the Content Server as a way to have 2 views of 2 different libraries open at once, see if it would be more useful to me than generating a CSV catalog out to Excel for printing purposes - before I learned the server couldn't look at two libraries simultaneously or printing was impractical for a large library and started to rely on booklist in calibre library view, a catalog on a device, or a copy of relevant library open on a side-by-side computer. Neither Content Server nor Catalog give me enough of my tags densely enough (as opposed to a second calibre instance open on separate computer method), or maybe I just didn't set either up correctly to begin with. So I tend to forget about using the Content Server, and for more mobile people that is an excellent reason to just use one library. Also Content Server and Catalog generation were one reason I started to put most of my tags all in the default tags column at several months into calibre use.

Originally Posted by travger

One reason why I started cleanup library. …Kiwidude advised to find your best format and only add that one in. I like to see at a glance what I have for the book.
So my Calibre shows 'formats' in book detail and just one look tells me what I did. If there's only mobi, it means I dl-d it and have no gripes (not happened yet). Mobi/prc + txt = some gripes (maybe not worth the cleaning, maybe some other comments). Pdf/epub + prc + ace + txt = converted and cleaned up, details in txt, materials for mobi creator in ace.
One click on format opens it - mobi in mobireader, pdf in acrobat, epub in Calibre reader...
When I've read it, then I delete all other instances of the book from my HD (exept Calibre backup of course)….

Like nearly everything else, seems there are pros and cons for strategies, approaches, methods, practices. Primary thing I didn't like about using 2 or more libraries was not having all books in one place when looking for how I named that series or other metadata for that author after adding a new book to clean-up library. While not having all of the formats for the same book in one place didn't bother me at all.

[unboggling]

Oops, I missed the last 3 posts.

@travger, regarding your strategy of entering the metadata from download site right away. Problem is when the download site has little or poor metadata, so I also use ISFDB or other sites for that.

I like the idea of doing as much as possible of that as "feasible" at download time.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by travger

Oh, you must be rather forgiving. I was thoroughly irritated with the lack of italics (don't remember the book, not very long one). Couldn't understand when character just thought or actually said an opinion.

My library was started in the 80's. Typewriters don't do italics, handwritten manuscripts don't have italics, and many of my .txt format books were designed to be read without italics.

The bottom line is that I was unwilling to restrict my library to only the books I'd reviewed - I want access to them all. I knew I would never finish the job of reviewing them all. My library is for reading, and I never know how my reading interests will turn. As far as I'm concerned, two libraries is equivalent to one library with a subset of the books tagged and I find it easy to tag my books once they've been processed.

It's not unusual for me to read far enough into a book in my library to decide I hate it, and rate it accordingly, or to decide I like it, which triggers me to clean it up (and usually most of the other books in that series or by that author). Sometimes I find that one format is bad, but I have another format that is fine.

I'd love to have all my books "perfect," but I find that my definition of perfection changes over time, so even my processed books sometimes have to be reprocessed.

[travger]

Originally Posted by unboggling

@travger, regarding your strategy of entering the metadata from download site right away. Problem is when the download site has little or poor metadata, so I also use ISFDB or other sites for that.

I like the idea of doing as much as possible of that as "feasible" at download time.

I used to just mark the source in filename, but now I can add blurbs also.
Yes, dl site may have little metadata, but I don't care at that stage.
Even series - if I know or if dl site mentions, then I enter it, otherwise it has no importance until I want to read it and go looking for the reading order. Anyway, I try to avoid starting unfinished series (main culprit - The Game of Thrones).

I imagine that sometimes when I feel like it I'll do some cleaning and those books will be then on top of the TBR.

Also I can experiment more boldly with bulk download of metadata when I know that everything will get one-by one inspection before transfer to main library.

[unboggling]

@travger, thanks for the clarification. The main reason I usually didn't take much information off the download site was the lack of standards for metadata across all the various sites - I'd rather have metadata that's more standard and consistent. So why spend time getting it from download site if I'm just going to change it later?

@all. The main reason I liked using a separate library for metadata and format clean-up was the potential to set the books into a relatively static state when they transferred to the "real" library, leaving the unstatic ones behind. But as I said before, more than one library had disadvantages too. That also applies to the method of leaving books out in the operating system rather than a separate library.

I'll try just one library for awhile, and I'll probably stick to using just one library for overall KISS purposes, at least until calibre can have more than one library open simultaneously. I'll try using Goodread's metadata for awhile, and may end up continuing that, or switching to Fantastic Fiction or somewhere else that has tags, in conjunction with Amazon or Barnes & Noble for other metadata, or just go back to creating my own tags in conjunction with format evaluation.

It's difficult to find the grain in the chaff, when so many people do things so many different ways, and each way has pros and cons, and each person has particular needs, and each person - including myself - posting about their particular way has some investment in it so defends it, and (let's say) I am a beginning new user who doesn't fully understand my own eBook needs yet, or the options and potentials in calibre yet, or that there may be golden nuggets of info floating around in the Mobile Read or even wider ocean of noise, but there are also some nuggets floating around that aren't so golden and I'm not an experienced enough farmer or fisherman or miner to know which is which (/let's say).

Sorry about mixed metaphors.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by unboggling

It's difficult to find the grain in the chaff, when so many people do things so many different ways

I'd suggest following your own advice - keep it simple and stick to the basics. Let each user become familiar with Calibre's options and eventually they'll find what works best for them.

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by Starson17

I'd suggest following your own advice - keep it simple and stick to the basics. Let each user become familiar with Calibre's options and eventually they'll find what works best for them.

I love that advice

Harder to practice it than preach it.

Sorry about the mini-rant.

[travger]

@unboggling - (So why spend time getting it from download site if I'm just going to change it later?)
If nothing else, then at least edition and/or version info. For example, if book came out in 1960 and had ~15 editions, metadata download gives 3 options... May be nitpicking, but I like to have right pubdate.
And while I'm at it, I'll grab other stuff also.

Of course I have to try it for several months to see how it works out and if I keep it up.

[user_none]

@unboggling,

I recommend you make the "Newer version at post #" at the top of your first draft include a link to the post. Preferably make the #154 a link to post #154. All of the post numbers are links to themselves. This makes it much easier to find and read you're latest revision. Otherwise someone (me) has to spend time jumping around trying to figure out what page the post is on to read it.

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by user_none

@unboggling,

I recommend you make the "Newer version at post #" at the top of your first draft include a link to the post. Preferably make the #154 a link to post #154. All of the post numbers are links to themselves. This makes it much easier to find and read you're latest revision. Otherwise someone (me) has to spend time jumping around trying to figure out what page the post is on to read it.

... or just edit the first post and keep that one current at all times. Good idea.

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by travger

@unboggling - (So why spend time getting it from download site if I'm just going to change it later?)
If nothing else, then at least edition and/or version info. For example, if book came out in 1960 and had ~15 editions, metadata download gives 3 options... May be nitpicking, but I like to have right pubdate.
And while I'm at it, I'll grab other stuff also.

Ah. I'll start doing that too and add it to KISS post. My apologies for my being so dense about that earlier. Thanks.

Originally Posted by user_none

@unboggling,

I recommend you make the "Newer version at post #" at the top of your first draft include a link to the post. Preferably make the #154 a link to post #154. All of the post numbers are links to themselves. This makes it much easier to find and read you're latest revision. Otherwise someone (me) has to spend time jumping around trying to figure out what page the post is on to read it.

Done. Sorry about the jumping around, I should've done that much sooner. Thanks.

Originally Posted by Manichean

... or just edit the first post and keep that one current at all times. Good idea.

That's possible too. Let's talk about it a little.

Is there a way to insert a new first post I could keep updated before the original post, in order to preserve thread continuity and documentation in case anyone wants to spend time slogging through all of the thread?

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by unboggling

Is there a way to insert a new first post I could keep updated before the original post, in order to preserve thread continuity and documentation in case anyone wants to spend time slogging through all of the thread?

Not that I know of.