Can I "Visit" Calibre On One Computer From Calibre On Another Computer?

[tanteoma]

I have one main computer sitting in my study that's on 24x7 and many laptops scattered around the house on the same wifi network. There are 30000ish books on the main computer, I would like to read a tiny fraction of them on the laptops without having to taking up too much of their puny little computing power and without losing my way in a giant database. So the calibre on the laptops usually only holds 20-30 books I'm interested in reading. Plus, I just recently discovered the little beauty, calibre's own ebook viewer, and started to really like reading on it after tweaking the stylesheet a bit.

In order to get books from the main computer when I'm working on laptops, I either visit the calibre content server via a browser on the laptop or I remote control the main computer and use the "save to disk" function from there.

But I'm wondering, question 1, is there a way to do it from inside Calibre? Like with Stanza? That way, I don't need to re-import books into the Calibre on my laptops.

Question 2, is there a way to synchronize the bookmarks or where I am in a book so I can move from laptop to laptop while reading the same book?

Both are long shots, I know. I'm pretty happy with the calibre functions I discovered already and it's not really any hardship to re-import a few books or to remember the page/percentage number.

[whichgrep]

I haven't tried it, but I do remember skipping over this :

http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/server.html

Looks like you'll need a tame nerd to set it up, though

Or you could share the directory or disk from your main computer onto your home network, and have calibre on the laptops map that drive to a folder...

[tanteoma]

You're right, I'll have to capture a nerd to understand what's written on that link. I wonder where their natural habitat is around here and whether they respond to carrots.

Mmmh, my directories are all already shared but I never thought about accessing the calibre libraries on the main computer that way. I wonder whether it'll be very, very slow, but that's definitely worth a try! Thank you!

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by tanteoma

You're right, I'll have to capture a nerd to understand what's written on that link. I wonder where their natural habitat is around here and whether they respond to carrots.

Mmmh, my directories are all already shared but I never thought about accessing the calibre libraries on the main computer that way. I wonder whether it'll be very, very slow, but that's definitely worth a try! Thank you!

Don't bother. It's just a way to integrate the Calibre content server into an existing web server. As you're already using the CS directly, it doesn't give you anything you don't already have.

Sharing your main Calibre library directory over the net and pointing your local Calibre at that directory will work, but you'll have to make sure that there is no other copy of Calibre active when you do, or Bad Things will happen.

A client-server Calibre setup (which is what you want) is on the roadmap for after the Great Database Backend Rewrite, Kovid said when someone else asked for this functionality recently.

[tanteoma]

Thank you for the info. I feel really bad to demand more features of poor little Calibre when it already does so much more than I thought I wanted.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by mbovenka

Sharing your main Calibre library directory over the net and pointing your local Calibre at that directory will work, but you'll have to make sure that there is no other copy of Calibre active when you do, or Bad Things will happen.

Just a small caveat, it's okay to run the calibre server (from the command line app) simultaneously with actual calibre, so for example you can keep a server up 24/7 for mobile clients using OPDS or for remote access via the web while still running one instance of calibre on a PC.