A few questions/feature requests

[cartman]

Hello, I am a new user of your incredible program, and I would like to ask some questions:

1)Can Calibre read book information from the Sony reader? I am especially interested in a feature that would mark as read everything i have read to the end, and possibly archiving it under a special tag.

By the way, how do you manage stuff you have read?

2)Sync option. When i select all my books and send them to my device, Calibre ignores the fact that 99% of them are already there and it sends another copy, needlessly taking space. Am I doing something wrong?

3)Sony reader crashes/restarts when opening some lrf files created from news sites(never had any problems with lrf created from normal books, pdf files etc. I also can send the files to anyone interested). As I have read that large lrf files can cause reboots due to the limited ram of the sony reader, maybe Calibre could have an option to automatically format as epub everything that would likely cause reboots as an lrf?

4)Unicode support. Maybe this is a sony problem, but even after flashing the device with unicode fonts, greek letters with an accent do not show up correctly in the device menus. Also calibre sends files with greek characters in their name as ______,________._-_______292.pdf to the reader, even if they are saved correctly in the library.

I am very thankful for your tremendous job creating this program, so i am willing to help with testing etc.

[kovidgoyal]

1) There's no reliable way to know when you have "completely read" a book on the SONY

2) Resending books to the device overwrites exisiting copies, so it doesn't take extra space

3) Read the FAQ

4) This is definitely a sony problem. As for the filenames, different OSes have problems with different sets of unicode characters in filenames, so to be safe, calibre strips them all.

[cartman]

First of all, thank you for your prompt answers.

1)My opinion is that a "mark e-book as read" functionality in calibre would be very useful to many people, especially to those that like to read small articles or comics on their devices. I currently do that by removing all tags from an ebook and then tagging it as "read", but i don't think this method is perfect, as they still show up when browsing by author or title.

[kovidgoyal]

Since the sony reader has no way of displaying the read status of a book, there's not much I can do about it.

[ldolse]

I'm not neccessarily advocating this feature, just sounds interesting so here's a thought. Typically when one has finished reading a book the state of the book is on page 'final_page of final_page', and the reader saves the last read page of the book. If Calibre could check that current page and saw it was the last one it might be able to change the tag to 'read'.

Without the reader properly supporting the idea of a book being read I'm not sure it's a really worthwhile option. I wouldn't want Calibre mucking with my books that way, but I can see if I was constantly transferring small articles it might be a useful way to have Calibre automatically delete the read ones. Not sure if there would be a way to do it just for things transferred via the news recipes, or for specific tags.

[cartman]

I dont even care so much about a calibre-device cooperation about this, even a simple menu option in calibre that would mark books as read is sufficient for me.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by cartman

I dont even care so much about a calibre-device cooperation about this, even a simple menu option in calibre that would mark books as read is sufficient for me.

How is this different from just adding a Read tag?

[cartman]

I was thinking of something like a column regarding the read status of each book, like the system email programs use. And then a menu option where a user could select if he wanted read books to remain on the device or not, to be tagged with a selectable tag, or maybe archived to a folder and deleted from calibre. If some devices sometime support tagging a book as read by themselves, then this functionality would benefit from that.

[kovidgoyal]

Why would a separate column be useful to you? And if you want to delete all read books from calibre just enter tag:read in the search field, press Ctrl+A and delete.

[Sabardeyn]

There are, in my opinion, a couple of related issues here that are of importance but are not being specifically mentioned. Noting these might help to clarify the larger issues which adversely affect the initial request.

Calibre, as platform independent library management software, is not meant to be an ereader. It is meant to organize and transfer ebooks, providing automation for some of these tasks. Being platform independent, calibre is not reliant on any computer operating system, or ereader software. Hardware, in the form of the computer calibre runs on or the ereader itself, is also ignored as much as possible - making exceptions only where accessing the files in storage are concerned. Effectively calibre performs regardless of the hardware or software with which it must interact.

With this in mind, re-examining the request for the ability to mark a book as "Read? Y/N" or with a "Date Last Read" (or some equivalent functionality) exceeds the design philosophy of calibre. [Please note, both terms in quotes are my attempt to reduce the requests to the simplest form.]

The initial request was to interact with the Sony Reader. It would require altering the Sony software to add a feature that is not currently available. Trying to implement something like this would be nearly impossible (for a 3rd party programmer), might be illegal and would most definitely void any warranty users' have on their expensive ereader equipment. Trying to implement this feature for all ereaders would be a massive programming and hardware testing effort. The result would move calibre into "bloatware".

Most calibre users are people who will read, and re-read, their ebooks frequently. This makes a field dedicated to a "Read? Y/N" status of little value. Particularly as Kovid has mentioned, you can generate the equivalent affect through tagging and searching.

Date fields fall under a similar issue because they become ambiguous. "Date Last Read" would be great - as long as you remember to update the field. At which point you could simply tag the book as "Read". Which puts you right back in the previous paragraph's example.

If the focus is with the news rather than books, I thought - and I could be mistaken here as I don't use this feature - that calibre emailed news to users and then automatically deleted those news items. Assuming for the moment calibre retains a copy, a search and manual deletion should be fairly straight forward.

[user_none]

Originally Posted by Sabardeyn

If the focus is with the news rather than books, I thought - and I could be mistaken here as I don't use this feature - that calibre emailed news to users and then automatically deleted those news items. Assuming for the moment calibre retains a copy, a search and manual deletion should be fairly straight forward.

There is an option to delete once it's been emailed or transferred. There is another option in the scheduling window that allows you to specify a time limit. EG. Delete after X days. This way you won't have to worry about deleting old news if you don't want it deleted when transferred. Useful for multi device households.