Pros & Cons of using the Calibre GUI

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Neither of us is wrong. If you look at Christopher Stasheff's web page and check under the books page, A Wizard in Absentia is listed as the first book in The Rogue Wizard series. If you check the store page and look under ebooks, it's listed as the first book in The Warlock's Heirs series.

Well, I guess I'll just continue to trust my automation. I'll take the author's word over the store's also.

Originally Posted by DNSB

Sending a book that already exists is inefficient and inefficiency offends me.

I guess when one is dealing with small amounts of data, you can make those choices. It seems a small thing to worry about, since, as you say, it doesn't really matter.

Originally Posted by DNSB

And extrapolating the load times, I still end up far less than the 15 minutes you stated. I either have to conclude that Windows is far faster than your operating system ( ) or your mass storage is on the slow side.

Well, tell you what. Why don't you do an *actual* real world test and find out? You are assuming Calibre's performance follows a linear curve. it doesn't. Try it for yourself. I did.

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Magnus is, after all, Rod and Gwen's oldest son and this book served as a written after the fact bridge between Magnus' as a young man on Gramayre and the character of Gar Pike in A Wizard in Bedlam.

Just because he was the oldest son doesn't make him the heir. He left the nest and last I read, had made the decision to not have children.

[yonkyunior]

Using GUI much better for long-term,
for bulk process... i think better adding per author, per series, per genre,
for search, running calibreserver much faster i think, or, load by COPS.

i like to add empty books with red column coloring.
add unpublished books as blue, and wishlist by green color.
Useful GUI..

for command-line, if i am using it frequently, i think i can be faster,
what if i dont remember the line or command.
that be different.

maybe someone created video about it..
i found something... this video search using list command
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeoVsC4U_0A

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

Well, I guess I'll just continue to trust my automation. I'll take the author's word over the store's also.

Well, consider who's website it was (the christopherstasheff in the name might be a gentle hint)? As for Stasheff's own words in the 2017 introduction to the reissue, he considered A Wizard in Absentia to be a bridge joining the two series. Actually, I found the 2017 introduction to be rather humourous. Bloody readers noticing throwaway lines...

Originally Posted by sealbeater

Well, tell you what. Why don't you do an *actual* real world test and find out? You are assuming Calibre's performance follows a linear curve. it doesn't. Try it for yourself. I did.

Having nothing better to do, I generated a library by exporting my 172,000 book library, renaming all the books in the export, re-importing them, rinse and repeat 5 times. This gave me a library with over 1 million books. Restart calibre in debug mode and calibre was up and running in 44 seconds. Hey, it gave me something to do while keeping an eye on the monitoring software (which is about a thrilling as watching paint dry 99.9% of the time). Am I to conclude that doubling that library size will result in the startup time increasing by 2100%? Hockey sticks anyone? Or simply that my hardware is so much better than yours?

I will also say that is my last post in this thread. Given some of your posts here and elsewhere, there are better uses for my time.

"To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.” Thomas Paine

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Having nothing better to do, I generated a library by exporting my 172,000 book library, renaming all the books in the export, re-importing them, rinse and repeat 5 times. This gave me a library with over 1 million books.

So, you mean to tell me you imported a million books in....less than 5 hours? Ok sport, whatever you say.

[sealbeater]

So, it's come to my attention that others with similar sized libraries reported the same speed as DNSB reported so either my memory is bad or my hardware at the time was screwed. So, I retract my previous statements about the decrease in speed of loading until such time as I can demonstrate it exists. Apologies to all for some but not all, of the cuts from my tongue.

[sealbeater]

However, I do stand by my statement that Calibre really isn't meant for massive book organization.

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

However, I do stand by my statement that Calibre really isn't meant for massive book organization.

What do you mean with massive book organization? To get a pack with a million of books an purge it in a bit? Or to manage an increasing number of books? Massive book organization can have a lot of meanings.

[BetterRed]

@sealbeater - template based custom columns can make startup times slow, in particular templates that necessitate access beyond the metadata database - i.e. to the file system or network.

My biggest library, of a ~140,000 books, located on a Toshiba 2TB Sata III drive, does not have any non-metadata based template based custom columns. Starting calibre with that library in the All Books VL takes 7-10 seconds. That's on a 16GB i7 with a 256GB NVme system drive running Windows 10 Pro.

BR

[un_pogaz]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

However, I do stand by my statement that Calibre really isn't meant for massive book organization.

Wut

I say exactly the opposite.
The management of Author names, serial names and their numbering (via Serie Managere), Tags, Publishers, Duplicate (via Find Duplicate) in mass, with dedicated modules, is very easy .

Is also capable of importing Metadata online (Metadata Source Plugins) it may be slower than a fully automatic script, but is here.

You wanted to send books not present on the e-reader => Virtual library with "ondevice:false", Ctrl+A, D send on the devices.
The Virtual library is one of the most powerful tools of Calibre, there are so many possibilities.

Not to mention the custom columns, gold mine and ultimate customization and filing tool.

And all this in a very complete and pleasant graphical interface, make all options, even the most advanced, accessible for the neophyte.
Don't forget that the main purpose of a software like Calibre is to make life easier for the uninitiated.

But one of the big things that Calibre makes very easy is the uniformity of the metadata.
And when you've tasted this (I tell you, I've experienced it), Calibre becomes irreplaceable.

Calibre is thus on the contrary, overpowerfull and he succeeds more than his role.

Your judgment of Calibre's abilities may come from the fact that you had used for a very long time a homemade/personal creation method that worked very well.
Learning a new tool is never easy at first, but if you do it right, you don't even realize you're using it every day anymore, and it's proof that it's done well.

If you would prefer search your books by their file name, chek the Calibre template language.
And nothing prevents you from always using your scripts before sending them in Calibre.


Following text even no more valid, because argument retracted

Spoiler:

By the way, I laugh. You wanted to discuss the drawbacks of the GUI, but what was the only one you had raised: that the initiation time is long?
You say 15 min (I hope you exaggerated), but you seem to be the only one in this case

You are not running Windows, so I can't say XP/ME/Vista. Only possibilities :
1) Your PC is made of cardboard
2) Your Library has settings that slow it down
3) Remote access to your Library is slow
4) You are impatient
In any case, it doesn't come directly from Calibre, but probaly from your side.
Talked of inconvenience is therefore a bit inappropriate and exaggerating for my taste.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

Find and move books to my reader in a tenth of the time it would take calibre to load.

I doubt this to be true. You can use the Reading List plugin to put books on your Reader as soon as you plug it in. You cannot do this without Calibre. Also, finding and organizing is much easier.

Organize and tag my books from work without the bosses knowing.

If you have to hide what you are doing from your bosses, then you should not be doing this at work. Do it at home. As for tagging and organizing better/faster without Calibre, not possible. For one thing if you wanted to organize your eBooks in collections on the devices you have that collections are compatible with Calibre, then you cannot do it better/faster manually. Even if you cannot manage collections with Calibre on your current device, you can present your eBooks to you in many different ways like by title, author, or series. How you do so is up to you. Once you setup your directories by hand, you are stuck with that way only.

Have full control over how I present my own internal library.

This one is correct.

[stumped]

i am still missing the explanation of how sealbeater will ever manage to actually read that two million book collection

maybe he reads VERY VERY fast, or maybe he has a severe case of undiagnosed kleptomania. my money is on the latter.

I used to have a well paid job also, but paying for 2 million books at say $5 per book is ten million dollars. not something your average very well paid job can fund.

so I allege piracy, also.

and a final debunk - from post 9- "10k books is not a even a 1/3rd of what is on my e-reader". Seriously? what mass produced e-reader handles 30k books. Is this one he built in his spare time, while not reading his 2 million books ?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by stumped

i am still missing the explanation of how sealbeater will ever manage to actually read that two million book collection

maybe he reads VERY VERY fast, or maybe he has a severe case of undiagnosed kleptomania. my money is on the latter.

I used to have a well paid job also, but paying for 2 million books at say $5 per book is ten million dollars. not something your average very well paid job can fund.

so I allege piracy, also.

and a final debunk - from post 9- "10k books is not a even a 1/3rd of what is on my e-reader". Seriously? what mass produced e-reader handles 30k books. Is this one he built in his spare time, while not reading his 2 million books ?

Since, these books are 'at home' and hidden from the boss, I will assume they are not a work related Library (my old company HAD a real, technical library for the use by the engineering staff). I can't imagine a 'private individual' needing to deal with that many BOOKS (I believe at least 1 of our members, catalogs papers. those can be small, short reads.)

Calibre can't deal with IMPORTING massive amounts of books in a single go. That's it. Feed it batches and it will chomp them down with ease.
The big task, is hammering the lousy metadata into something of beauty , that take TLC and time per book. (When I first got Calibre, I imported all the books (single format) on the Baen CD's. That took a bit of time. It took DAYS Weeks to properly Tag the series and metadata.

While I have never seen startup times as low as reported (numerous systems. nothin higher than a core duo ), from the time I double click the icon on the desktop, to full user control of the GUI, is under a minute. No fancy SSD needed.
I also tend to leave Calibre running in background, so the OS discovering the USB device, is the more time consuming part of the transfer process. So the startup time argument is

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by theducks

While I have never seen startup times as low as reported (numerous systems. nothing higher than a core duo ), from the time I double click the icon on the desktop, to full user control of the GUI, is under a minute. No fancy SSD needed.

Startup times reported were from my newest toy. Windows 10 Pro on a i7-8650U vPro quad core 1.9GHz (4.2GHz turbo boost), 32GB DDR4 RAM, 2 TB of NVMe storage. CrystalDiskMark reports ~3500MB/s read/2300MB/s write with ATTO giving much the same results.

Definitely a bit faster than the average machine and a great system for running VMWare Workstation Pro. The only annoyance is that with 5 VMs open, the fan sounds like it is getting ready for takeoff.

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

What do you mean with massive book organization? To get a pack with a million of books an purge it in a bit? Or to manage an increasing number of books? Massive book organization can have a lot of meanings.

To manage a large amount of books. When I ran it, I had .5 mill books and it managed but took a long time to open. This may have changed, this may have been an effect of the machine at the time, we'll see. I'm adding books now so I'll report if I have an issue.


As for doing other things like deduplication, it's best to use the OS tools rather than calibre.