Alternative Method for Syncing Books Between Calibre and Marvin

[Faterson]

Via a PM, I got a question about how I sync my e-books between Calibre and Marvin, given that the associated plugin has apparently been misbehaving in recent years. I'm answering in this public post because I get this question periodically.

My solution is very simple: I store my Calibre library in a cloud account on my desktop machine. I have used Dropbox for that purpose, and also Google Drive. (Alternating them, not simultaneously.) Both work very well.

This means that all my e-books are automatically synced across all of my traditional computers as well as mobile devices. (I have a desktop machine, a laptop – both Windows –, 4 tablets and 2 mobile phones.)

So, for example, whenever I wish to load a book from Calibre on my iPad or iPhone, I simply open the Google Drive app on the iPad or iPhone, open the Calibre folder there (all authors are listed nicely alphabetically by Calibre in their respective folders), I find the book I want, I tap it, choose "Open in...", and I open the book in Marvin. (On Android, I open it in Moon+ Reader Pro.)

Of course, it might also work the other way round: if your e-reader supports accessing Dropbox or Google Drive, you can simply access the Calibre folder directly in your e-reader. In terms of Marvin, though, this is one of the ways it's become broken recently, in that although I can load the Calibre folder from Google Drive in Marvin, Marvin is unable to actually load books from it (it does work with Dropbox); it works the other way round from the Drive app to Marvin, however, which is good enough for me. I think Google Drive changed their protocols recently, and apparently Marvin hasn't been updated to handle the new protocol. Well, I don't care, as long as I can load books from the Drive app into Marvin. It amounts to much the same thing, to me. Whether I spend a few seconds tapping in the Drive app or in the Marvin app to locate a particular book from Calibre, makes no difference to me.

I'm no friend of storing my entire Calibre library (the actual EPUB files) on each and every computer and device I own. (Precisely because I have so many of them!) It's perfectly enough for me to have Calibre installed only on my desktop machine, while on my mobile devices, I only load the few dozen books or so into Marvin that I'm currently reading or intend to read soon. So, on my mobile devices, I only access Calibre books on an "on-demand", "as-needed" basis; I certainly don't wish to have the entire Calibre library downloaded onto my mobile devices; mobile storage is precious! And even if it weren't, it just makes no sense to me to replicate the full copies of my Calibre library on all of my computers and mobile devices. Nope, two copies of it seem perfectly enough – one on my Windows desktop machine, and the other in the cloud.

This may not be exactly what you yourself may desire in terms of cooperation between Calibre and Marvin, but I have never bothered with any Marvin plugins for Calibre, Calibre companions, etc., etc., precisely because they tend to get broken sooner or later if they're not properly maintained by the plugin developers (typically unpaid volunteers, so you can't really blame them).

But, simply storing your entire Calibre library in your private cloud account is a bulletproof method allowing you to have your entire Calibre library always at your fingertips – on any computer, any mobile device, and even when you're away from your computer where Calibre is installed. Thanks to the cloud, Calibre doesn't even need to be running, no plugins are needed and everything works fully automatically without you having to do anything in addition to using Calibre normally as you always would.

Hope this helps!