Magazine Download - Alternative to Calibre?

[skdutta]

Is there any software similar to Calibre available that will allow me to download online magazines in pdf or epub format in the background. I like calibre but I am asking this because I want to create a windows task to download these magazines at might in a folder. I read most of the magazines on the computer and want to sync it between my home and office computer.

I was thinking about some rss reader, but I also need the mags in the pdf/epub format.

Calibre needs to run to download the scheduled magazines, I want to read magazines in Adobe Digital Edition, now I have to start calibre, wait for sometime till the magazines are downloaded, then read them in ADE (kind of headache!)

[GRiker]

Click the small down arrow to the right of 'Fetch news', select 'Schedule news download', set your preferred download times, and leave calibre running during the time that you've scheduled.

G

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by GRiker

Click the small down arrow to the right of 'Fetch news', select 'Schedule news download', set your preferred download times, and leave calibre running during the time that you've scheduled.

I do as G recommends. However ....

If you don't want to leave your computer running, you can set up a task to run whenever you want. Tasks can be set to wake your computer. The task can be a batch file that runs ebook-convert, which will run any recipe and create the book wherever you want. Its independent of Calibre's GUI and database. It just does the download and makes the book. You can have the task add the ebook to calibre, or not, as you prefer.

[skdutta]

Originally Posted by Starson17

I do as G recommends. However ....

If you don't want to leave your computer running, you can set up a task to run whenever you want. Tasks can be set to wake your computer. The task can be a batch file that runs ebook-convert, which will run any recipe and create the book wherever you want. Its independent of Calibre's GUI and database. It just does the download and makes the book. You can have the task add the ebook to calibre, or not, as you prefer.

Yes this is exactly what I need. This will need Calibre to run from command line. Is this possible?

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by skdutta

Yes this is exactly what I need. This will need Calibre to run from command line. Is this possible?

Calibre is modular. The ebook-convert command runs from the command line. Read here.

[skdutta]

Originally Posted by Starson17

Calibre is modular. The ebook-convert command runs from the command line. Read here.

Thanks for the pointer, I do not think that is the command I am looking for. Maybe I will try with the calibre-server command and see if it does the job for me!

[skdutta]

I tried creating a scheduled job inside Calibre, Closed the Calibre and ran calibre-server --daemonize

The job did not run at the determined time! I still had to run calibre to run the pending jobs.

It would be nice to be able to run the scheduled jobs using this command, or maybe I am doing something wrong!

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by skdutta

I tried creating a scheduled job inside Calibre, Closed the Calibre and ran calibre-server --daemonize

I'm not sure how or what calibre-server does but if you want to run a scheduled task from the command line to download magazines or rss feeds via built-in or custom recipes then I would think ebook-convert will do the job as Starson17 indicated.

[skdutta]

ok got it done by using calibre-server -g command and then killing it after 20 minutes or so (using the task scheduler)

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by skdutta

ok got it done by using calibre-server -g command and then killing it after 20 minutes or so (using the task scheduler)

Excellent! Is twenty minutes going to be enough time?

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by skdutta

Thanks for the pointer, I do not think that is the command I am looking for. Maybe I will try with the calibre-server command and see if it does the job for me!

If you want to download ("fetch") news with recipes, i.e., make ebooks, you need ebook-convert. Calibre-server turns on the content server so you can download previously created loaded ebooks from Calibre to another device.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by skdutta

ok got it done by using calibre-server -g command and then killing it after 20 minutes or so (using the task scheduler)

I don't even see a -g option for calibre-server. Are you sure you're not using calibre-debug -g? That would work if you had the recipes scheduled in the GUI, but it's not as clean as using ebook-convert to do the job. ebook-convert will end when the recipe is fetched. I'm not sure how you would force the GUI to end at the right time, since you won't know when the news has finished fetching.

[skdutta]

Sorry my mistake calibre-debug -g.

On the help page of ebook-convert I did not see anywhere that it can download scheduled downloads for the magazines. Although I did not try! I was not sure what to put for arguments!

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by skdutta

On the help page of ebook-convert I did not see anywhere that it can download scheduled downloads for the magazines. Although I did not try! I was not sure what to put for arguments!

You don't tell ebook-convert to download scheduled recipes. Scheduling is a GUI function. You tell ebook-convert to download a recipe (based on a recipe file) and then you tell it to put it into either a folder (as an html) or into an EPUB.

All of this is independent of the GUI. If you want to use scheduling, then why not just leave the GUI running in the toolbar? It doesn't do much unless it's downloading, and you control that by the schedule.

[skdutta]

Is there any example on how to use ebook-convert to download magazines that I see in calibre? I will be interested to learn.

Scheduling helps because it runs in the background and optimizes system resources. I somehow do not want to keep some application software running (when I do not need them) all the time.