KISS for New calibre Users

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

re timing of deletion.

@Kiwidude, re deleting source folder format timing, that makes sense to me at the level of doing it per author for all books by that author outside of calibre when the titles are in calibre and cleaned. Yeah, I started discriminating Raw Books as Raw Books/Pending and Raw Books/Calibre'd but tend to forget to move them from pending after Adding.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by unboggling

@kacir, so you use just one library for everything?, do a pass (requiring months maybe?) to work by author from A to Z, meanwhile adding whatever you download, then start over with A-Z iteratively forever? Or do you eventually move the "clear" ones to a Clear Library?

I have one library. Well, there are a few others, but they have been used mainly to import some books in bulk and then dump the books to the main library.

So. I have one library. Every day I sit down and clean up some books, going by authors. So I select some book with the "Clean" column set to No , press Alt+A to see what I have from this author. Then I do a search for just author surname. I inspect the books, check metadata, download missing metadata. (I use the automatic download of metadata and/or covers a lot.) Then I set the "Clean" column to Yes.
When I am adding some new books (that happens quite rarely nowadays, I am too busy organising what I already have ;-) It took me years and years of hoarding to create my "Kitchen sink" mess ;-) ) I just have a look at the author and see if I already have a book. So for every newly added book I check metadata and do a general cleanup / merge, so that I do not have to go through it again. Even so, the number of clean books is growing steadily.

I have PocketBook reader that can read many e-book file formats, even if they are not formatted well. PocketBook replaces most of the formatting with my pre-set values. I am also quite tolerant. I am not going to spend hours reformatting the book just to read it once - I have been reading ebooks for more than 10 years and at the beginning there were very few well formatted books available. I mean bold, italics, header styles ...
So I am usually not very keen on spending considerable time cleaning particular book/file.

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by kacir

I have one library. Well, there are a few others, but they have been used mainly to import some books in bulk and then dump the books to the main library.

So. I have one library. Every day I sit down and clean up some books, going by authors. ... I am also quite tolerant. I am not going to spend hours reformatting the book just to read it once - I have been reading ebooks for more than 10 years and at the beginning there were very few well formatted books available. I mean bold, italics, header styles ...
So I am usually not very keen on spending considerable time cleaning particular book/file.

I'm not very keen on it either. My limit is 5 minutes cleaning per if necessary, more than that it's too much work for the purpose of reading a book. I guess I'm relatively tolerant too for various format problems, beyond even being given that I'm new to eBooks this year and don't understand conversion pipeline or format evaluation nuances.

[theducks]

I tend to clean up the Metadata right away, then clean the book later. I Have a column 'Last Edited' (date) that I update any time I manually (conversion does not count) touch the contents of a book. I also use a 3 state column Passed Flightcrew. Yes, No, (not checked)

[kacir]

By the way, how can I configure Calibre to search for Author the following way:
I position cursor on a book Craphound by Cory Doctorow and press Alt+A (or other shortcut) and the Calibre would search for
author:"Doctorow"
instead of default
author:"=Cory Doctorow"

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by theducks

I tend to clean up the Metadata right away, then clean the book later. I Have a column 'Last Edited' (date) that I update any time I manually (conversion does not count) touch the contents of a book. I also use a 3 state column Passed Flightcrew. Yes, No, (not checked)

Does calibre use Flightcrew to validate an ePub? Does Sigil?
Too tired to search documentations right now.

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by kacir

By the way, how can I configure Calibre to search for Author the following way:
I position cursor on a book Craphound by Cory Doctorow and press Alt+A (or other shortcut) and the Calibre would search for
author:"Doctorow"
instead of default
author:"=Cory Doctorow"

Good question. I'd like to know too. Because right now, all that comes to mind is using a regex to get the last name element somehow into the search process, but I don't know exactly how to do that. Otherwise, I thought maybe bulk seach/replace regexing the author LN element into a Tag or a new LN column, then using the tag or column template in the search box.

Edit: Search dialog (binoculars) allows menu choice for regex across the metadata - so that's closer.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by unboggling

Does calibre use Flightcrew to validate an ePub? Does Sigil?
Too tired to search documentations right now.

Flightcrew is also part of Sigil, but only called by the user action (you can edit and never run FC)
BTW the feature of FC insideSigil is that it takes you to the error section on a double-click.

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by theducks

I tend to clean up the Metadata right away, then clean the book later. I Have a column 'Last Edited' (date) that I update any time I manually (conversion does not count) touch the contents of a book. I also use a 3 state column Passed Flightcrew. Yes, No, (not checked)

Off topic, but, in using BBcodes or HTML tags, do people tend to prefer using convention of [UPPERCASE] or [lowercase]?

Edit: On topic, what good does validating the ePub do? If it's validated, do more various device readers not choke on it or something? If it's not valid and full of errors, does it matter?

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by theducks

Flightcrew is also part of Sigil, but only called by the user action (you can edit and never run FC)
BTW the feature of FC insideSigil is that it takes you to the error section on a double-click.

Ah. That makes sense. I just DL'd Flightcrew (binary GUI version which the doc said uses QT, as opposed to source command line v) and ran it on a Baen CD ePub. it didn't validate. Flightcrew does give a pretty list of errors by line. Being HTML ignorant I've no idea what to do about those errors though.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by unboggling

Ah. That makes sense. I just DL'd Flightcrew (binary GUI version which the doc said uses QT, as opposed to source command line v) and ran it on a Baen CD ePub. it didn't validate. Flightcrew does give a pretty list of errors by line. Being HTML ignorant I've no idea what to do about those errors though.

Once you have seen (and fixed) a few, you will notice the same ones crop up all the time.
new book in Sigil: Hit F8 Enter (fixes missing Language declaration)

Naked text/tags: Surround with <div> or <p>
undeclared variable : clear=.., vlink=.., link=.. I remove them completely

Broken links, anchors can be fun to locate and fix

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by theducks

Once you have seen (and fixed) a few, you will notice the same ones crop up all the time.
new book in Sigil: Hit F8 Enter (fixes missing Language declaration)

Naked text/tags: Surround with <div> or <p>
undeclared variable : clear=.., vlink=.., link=.. I remove them completely

Broken links, anchors can be fun to locate and fix

Thanks.

Fun. I like fun. That's a motivator.

Edit: Time, I think, for me to read the Sigil documentation and start some serious playing with it.

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by kacir

By the way, how can I configure Calibre to search for Author the following way:
I position cursor on a book Craphound by Cory Doctorow and press Alt+A (or other shortcut) and the Calibre would search for
author:"Doctorow"
instead of default
author:"=Cory Doctorow"

I wonder if there's a way to assign a keyboard shortcut to a saved advanced search?

[kacir]

Originally Posted by kacir

By the way, how can I configure Calibre to search for Author the following way:
I position cursor on a book Craphound by Cory Doctorow and press Alt+A (or other shortcut) and the Calibre would search for
author:"Doctorow"
instead of default
author:"=Cory Doctorow"

OK.
I finally got motivated enough to roll up my sleeves and create my personal version of Calibre with the desired functionality.

I have installed development version of Calibre.
I have found the source for "Find similar books" functionality and I added another option - find similar books where the author has same surname as selected book.

I should have done that much sooner.
It will speed up the process of my cleaning up

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by kacir

OK.
I finally got motivated enough to roll up my sleeves and create my personal version of Calibre with the desired functionality.

I have installed development version of Calibre.
I have found the source for "Find similar books" functionality and I added another option - find similar books where the author has same surname as selected book.

I should have done that much sooner.
It will speed up the process of my cleaning up

Cool. Was that difficult to do? I've never installed calibre from source before.