Why would anyone dislike Calibre....

[kovidgoyal]

@kacir: You can disable conversion of html to zip by disabling the html to zip plugin in preferences->advanced->plugins->file type plugins. As for why your conversions take so long, it is something specific to your system. The typical html or lit file converts in under two minutes for me on my 3 year old tablet pc.

And calibre's conversions do a LOT more (and handle a much larger set of input lit files) than convertlit.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Now the one question I have is that if Calibre is used to fix the missing metadata, does the filename then change to match?

Are we talking about the library? if so, yes. The path is built from the author and the title.

Are we talking about save to disc/device? Depends on the template.

[ficbot]

I have downloaded some books from Smashwords with awful metadata. I just change the info in the book properties and it loads on my Kindle just fine with my preferred title. Sometimes, books from here do not---it was explained to me that with PRC files it does not always process the changes but if I convert it to mobi, it will. So I have done that on the few PRC books and everything has been fine. I don't see why the OP would have problems if he just changes the info and (optionally) re-converts the book.

[ldolse]

.....

[Worldwalker]

Calibre doesn't destroy anything. Nothing. Not one thing.

Your files are still right exactly where they were, and you can still do everything right exactly they way you could with them. Those files also now exist as books, whose files are somewhere else, and none of your business (that is, in calibre's private library). You can set their metadata to whatever you like. You can export them with whatever metadata you like. You can do all sorts of fun things to them -- things you do them AS BOOKS, not as files.

This is why I wrote my somewhat notorious post, as referenced in my .sig. For convenience, you can find it...

here

If you want to reject the whole idea of treating books as books, with their metadata in, well, metadata, and instead treat them solely as files, with their metadata in the filesystem (and badly at that) that is, of course, entirely your prerogative. But if you choose to do so, insulting the people who developed calibre to manage books because they don't take a step backwards and make it manage files instead is not going to endear you to the members of MobileRead.

[DoctorOhh]

Your ignorance is vast and it must be hard to see out such a tiny button size hole. But I have a lull and I'm bored so here goes.

Originally Posted by jrustyw

I don't like Calibre for a specific reason - it destroys useful data in the process of importing books.

No, it doesn't. My true answers aren't consistent with forum policy so I'll try to keep them short and on point.

Originally Posted by jrustyw

I'm referring to the file name. Calibre will change your file names in a destructive manner.

The file names for your source files haven't changed at all, so how exactly did it destroy your file names?

Originally Posted by jrustyw

It's default behavior is to rename the file according to the metadata. That's fine if you have well behaved metadata - but if you don't you are going to get a bunch of files with garbage names and the Calibre database entries wont be any better.

True, garbage in garbage out. Now if there was just some way to extract the metadata from your perfectly formatted file names...

Originally Posted by jrustyw

If you notice this problem you can fix it (kind of) by changing the preferences to take the metadata information from the file name. Perfect right?

That's Great, problem solved!

Originally Posted by jrustyw

All your hours of effort to properly name files is preserved by having the file name imported as the title on the metadata. Except.... Calibre will still rename your files. And if you then pull the files out of Calibre you'll have to go look at the metadata to figure out what the file name is supposed to be.

Yuk! You put your fingers in calibre's database/library and pulled out files without using proper protection or the proper export features of Save to disk, Send to Device, or Connect to folder? How very unsanitary, if you do that you may lose all the metadata. Maybe someone should write a manual covering this stuff.

Originally Posted by jrustyw

As long as your file names are very short you wont notice this problem. But here's an example of what I'm talking about: I have two books with the filenames:
Pratchett, Terry - [Discworld 01] - The Colour of Magic [pdb].PDB
Pratchett, Terry - [Discworld 02] - The Light Fantastic Txt [pdb].PDB

After adding to Calibre they are:
Pratchett, Terry - [Discworld 01] - The - Unknown.pdb
Pratchett, Terry - [Discworld 02] - The - Unknown.pdb

It's fortunate that I have the series order in there or I would have no way to identify the books without the metatdata. But I've still lost the book title in the file name. Not good.

See that's what I'm talking about, short truncated file names reside in calibre's database/library, if you keep sticking your fingers in then there is no telling what you might be missing. For Petes sake MAN stay away from calibre's database/library and use the tools provided for export. You know what they say, it's all fun and games until somone loses an eye some words.

Originally Posted by jrustyw

I've submitted a bug report to the Calibre guys asking them to change this to retain the original file name - but they flat refused the request. They don't have any interest in making it easy for you to get your books back out of Calibre in a useful format.

Son, I ... I .. say Son, have you not been paying attention? The only bug in the works spoke of above is you! You gotta keep your fingers outta the pie.

Originally Posted by jrustyw

That's too bad. The program has some pretty neat features. I was ready to punch that Paypal button about ten minutes after loading the program

Now that is too bad. I only hope wallowing in all that ignorance doesn't lead you down the wrong path. The Darwin Awards are chalk full of ignorant folks.

Originally Posted by jrustyw

until I realized that it was destroying data

By now you must realize no data has been destroyed.

Originally Posted by jrustyw

couldn't be fixed by the user

Except by using the export tools already built into the program.

Originally Posted by jrustyw

the developers had no interest in addressing the problem.

Boy oh Boy! You must be three shades of red by now. Don't worry ignorance isn't a disease you can over come it. After all, the other 1 million plus users of calibre have managed to overcome their ignorance.

Originally Posted by jrustyw

it prevents Calibre from being useful to me.

I think we all know what prevents calibre from being useful to you.

Originally Posted by jrustyw

I'm not going to commit to a platform that holds my data hostage.

Calibre is holding your data hostage??? How, by making it extremely easy to export your data exactly in the format you want. Damn those pesky developers, having solutions to all your needs. If only you had thought to ask up front.


Update: it was marginally entertaining while it lasted, so I wish to thank you for this fun.

Time to go back to work.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Ok, everyone behave themselves or I'm turning this forum around and we're going back home!

All seriousness aside, one of the hardest things for most new users to calibre to understand is calibre does NOT organize your books in the folder/filename tree structure we are all used to. It uses meta data (tags) to allow more flexible and complex organization. When you first add a book to calibre, it copies your book to its own folder (referred to as a library); your original file is untouched. This library is for calibre's use only. When you want to access your book, you do so from within calibre. If you want to look at the contents of a book, you use calibre to open it. If you want to put a book in a device, such as an e-book reader or a card, calibre will do it for you. Calibre is not a mere database; it is a book management program.

I can understand a new user's paranoia about allowing calibre to take complete charge of your books. What if you decide down the road that another program better meets your needs? The way calibre stores books would make it difficult to access your books if you went directly to its library. However, by using calibre's Save to Disk feature, you can put your books into a folder (or multiple folders) using whatever filename structure you specify. Or you can do like I am and just keep your original files in your own for "just in case" (remember, calibre doesn't do anything to the original file, it just copies it for its own use). I know I don't need to but with old age comes paranoia. Besides, I still have lots of disk space.

Because it is so tempting to go poking around inside calibre's folders, once I create a library, I hide the folder so it can't be seen. That keeps me or anyone else from accidentally (or otherwise) mucking about in there (out of sight, out of mind). Calibre is still able to find it just fine.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by kacir

2. One of very few formats my device does not read is lit. Excellent! I will use fantastic conversion abilities Calibre packs. Ha! On half of the files the Calibre chokes (doesn't finish conversion in more than 45 minutes per file) the rest of the files take many minutes (per file) to process.

This seems like a list of real questions that need to be addressed. Throwing these questions into this thread was bad judgment. If I were you I would do two things.

First, I would uninstall calibre, reboot, then reinstall calibre from binaries according to these instructions.

Second, Any questions I had left after I did the above I would ask in a new thread. Make sure to include Calibre version and OS version.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Manichean

You're trying to access the library directly, too, am I right? When you save to disk or send to device, Calibre should (and does, for me) give you the HTML from the zip.

I know enough not to try to mess with the Calibre Library files directly ;-)
I was trying to use Save To Disk feature.

[Trickery]

I don't see the point of this post.

Couldn't he just use "Preferences > Input/Export > Adding Books > Configure Metadata from Filename" to get everything imported from his original library into Calibre completely intact?

If you do any sort of file management work, metadata is where it is, not elaborate file names. Just like in managing your .MP3s, metadata makes storing tons of information easy as hell in a very clean manner.

You can then use the "Send to Disk" feature to save the files w/ any filename and folder structure you want. For example, when I'm backing up my collection onto DVD every so often, my file structure looks like this:

{author_sort}/{series} Series/{series_index} {title}/({series} {series_index}) {title} - {authors}

So it looks like this:

Child, Lee/Jack Reacher Series/01 Title/(01 Jack Reacher) Title - Lee Child.mobi

You can do what you want using the program, you just have to learn how to use it to your advantage.

Also I don't see the point of other folks responses besides Lady Fitz. You guys all act like the original poster slapped your mother in the face. Either educate the guy or don't bother posting.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Trickery

I don't see the point of this post.

Couldn't he just use "Preferences > Input/Export > Adding Books > Configure Metadata from Filename" to get everything imported from his original library into Calibre completely intact?

Thank you for the post.
You have restored my faith in the high level of culture I have come to expect on Mobileread.

It is also worth noting, that if the original poster has consistent naming scheme, he could go to the Preferences, Import/Export, Adding books, and craft the regular expression for automatic harvesting of metadata from the filename.
This regular expression is not well documented, but you can go to the Preferences, Import/Export, Saving books to disk and see here what kind of variables you can use.

Crafting Regular expression for the import can take a while, but even a couple of days of experimenting here is much more elegant than trying to reenter metadata for many thousands of books manually.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Trickery

Couldn't he just use "Preferences > Input/Export > Adding Books > Configure Metadata from Filename" to get everything imported from his original library into Calibre completely intact?

He did that and did it well since he wasn't complaining about not being able to get the filenames read correctly. He was complaining because calibre stores files in it's databaste with a limited amount of characters for the filename, so when he used explorer to grab those files "His filenames were destroyed".

Originally Posted by Trickery

Also I don't see the point of other folks responses besides Lady Fitz. You guys all act like the original poster slapped your mother in the face. Either educate the guy or don't bother posting.

Way to rise above it. If he had wanted to be educated he would have been educated. Did you read his post? He wanted to lecture us about his superiority when it comes to understanding all things data.

BTW if you read my post to him you would have understood that he imported his metadata from file names and despite my sideways attitude I educated him on the the same thing you educated him on and even linked to the manual so he could educate hilmself.

Originally Posted by kacir

Thank you for the post.
You have restored my faith in the high level of culture I have come to expect on Mobileread.

I respond directly to your pity session post and get ignored. I guess you really wanted the help.

Originally Posted by kacir

It is also worth noting, that if the original poster has consistent naming scheme, he could go to the Preferences, Import/Export, Adding books, and craft the regular expression for automatic harvesting of metadata from the filename.

Again I find it odd that folks can't understand that he did this step and apparently very well, because he was complaining about how calibre truncates its filenames inside the database after he successfully imported them using the Metadata from Filename.

[jrustyw]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

He did that and did it well since he wasn't complaining about not being able to get the filenames read correctly. He was complaining because calibre stores files in it's databaste with a limited amount of characters for the filename, so when he used explorer to grab those files "His filenames were destroyed".

Yes, thank you for noticing... Goodness, I got more attention that I expected. My thanks to those who were polite. My intent wasn't to be superior - it was to bitch about a specific annoyance about the program that may nail new users of the program who walk in with similar expectations to my own. And, no, I didn't RTM before starting to muck around with the program....

I grabbed a handful of ebooks and slammed them into Calibre and started playing around. My actual motivation was to get them into my Kindle as quickly as possible after discovering that Amazon's conversion service was making a hash of some of them. Thus, I imported and converted them to mobi in Calibre and zapped them off to my Kindle. I was then quite annoyed because they came through with useless titles because of bad metadata.

I went back to the PC and said, "Hmm. Looks like Calibre is really a flat file database and the mobi files are actually in the folder structure. I'll just grab them so I don't have to reconvert, zap the Calibre database and start over. There must be a graceful way to deal with this..." Horrors! I grabbed all the mobi's and discovered that they didn't match my original filenames and, worse, that the files originally imported had been changed too. So now I had a database full of crap metadata and a bunch of files with crap file names. Arrgh! So I deleted the whole mess and went back to the copy of my original files I started from. See? I kept a backup of the original data. That's because I'm an IT professional. How many folks do you think just might have assumed all was well and dumped the original files somewhere in this process?

In other words - if you aren't paranoid about the data it is real easy to permanently destroy data using Calibre in what seems like a perfectly normal way to use the program. This is my big complaint and it remains my big complaint despite various posters' (sometimes rude) efforts to point out how much of an ignoramus I am...

I then slowed down and took a closer look and figured out how to force Calibre to ignore my bad metadata and use the file name as the metadata on the original import. Swell, I thought, problem all solved. Had I not been in a big hurry it might have occurred to me to see what was happening with the file names at this point, but I missed that step and went ahead and sucked everything back into Calibre and converted to mobi again.

Believe it or not - I do understand the idea that Calibre is a database and you shouldn't just reach in and grab stuff. But having noticed that I could - I did it anyway because it was convenient to my needs to do so. Sue me for trying to take a shortcut... I then stumbled again as I discovered quickly that I had duplicate file names because Calibre still wasn't really doing what I thought I told it to do - it was merrily truncating those suckers. Parenthetically, this whole issue would go away if there were simple configuration options to use the original file name at the book title and to not truncate file names. Just saying.

At this point I opened the support ticket and got back an answer that seemed to me to totally miss the point of what I was complaining about - that Calibre was changing information that could easily lead to permanent data loss if the user was insufficiently paranoid and not paying fairly close attention. I do still feel that it is ridiculous to change the file names in this way and that the developer should just use the proper file name from the beginning. I also think there should be a bit more warning in the import process that something like the above could happen.

So, feeling ignored and abused and having perused a number of threads on this forum that didn't seem to quite address the point that was annoying me - I made the original forum post.

Ironically, I figured out about ten minutes after sending it how to dump the books back out of Calibre with file names matching the (now fixed) metadata, which solved my original problem and allowed me to happily upload a bunch of readable mobi's to my Kindle. Yay! I thought about deleting the forum post or posting a followup, but left it alone because it took me three or four hours to work through this process that I felt (and feel) was needlessly complicated by a couple of poor choices on the developer's part.

I didn't think any more about this issue till I received the email this morning letting me know I had a bunch of replies. After some reflection - I still think my complaint is legitimate. The points on metadata are fair enough - and I understand them. However, the fact of the matter is that most people coming to Calibre as new users wont have been managing their collections based on metadata - they'll have been using plain old file and folder names. Maybe their metadata is good and maybe it isn't. Out of a sample of about twenty books that I was working with - maybe 4-5 of them had solid metadata. The rest were a complete mess.

Well, some of you say, it's your own damn fault for being a dirty ebook pirate - so you deserve it! I'll fess up to pulling these ebooks from where ever I could find them. I didn't pay for them. But I do have every single one of them on my book shelf as an actual book - two or three times over in some cases. I'm not buying an e-version of books I already own. But it is a royal pain to read them and keep them in good condition with my lifestyle - so I'm trying to make the jump to Kindle and I'm looking for e-versions of everything I think I might want to re-read. So do please kindly stand down and holster that smug sense of moral superiority.

In any case and wrapping this up, the problem was and is a problem because not all ebooks (whatever their source) come with nice, fluffy metadata and Calibre makes some assumptions about the data that can quite easily result in data loss, does not offer a very intuitive method of addressing that problem, and makes no effort at all to alert the user to the possibility of data loss.

I haven't made up my mind about Calibre yet. I still have my complaint, but now that I've fully worked through the issue, I know how to successfully deal with it. The term 'hostage' might be a little over the top - but not by much. That's still the default program behavior and I think the average user who sucks in a bunch of books and later changes his mind is potentially looking at a lot of work getting away from Calibre.

[Agama]

Originally Posted by jrustyw

In any case and wrapping this up, the problem was and is a problem because not all ebooks (whatever their source) come with nice, fluffy metadata and Calibre makes some assumptions about the data that can quite easily result in data loss, does not offer a very intuitive method of addressing that problem

As pointed out already in some of the replies, calibre does not result in data loss and as far as "no intuitive method", what about the large button in calibre marked "Edit metadata"? Seems quite intuitive to me!

As for the average user being a 'hostage' to calibre, you're way off the mark. Because calibre does not touch your original files it is simplicity itself to uninstall calibre and revert to your tried and trusted folder/file structure.

However, I would encourage you to stay with calibre for a while as I think that you will find it has many useful features and a very helpful support forum. You get the software for free and you can make suggestions for its development which may well get implemented.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Agama

calibre does not touch your original files

There has been a proposal to provide an option to send the original filename(s) into the comments so that whatever data is stored there is retained. I haven't seen much demand for that feature, but it shouldn't be hard to write. The problem is that very few new users are sophisticated enough to hunt up an obscure feature like that before adding all their books. Most users don't want it, so it would probably be off by default. After books are added, it's too late to turn it on.