07-27-2014, 12:21 PM | #31 | |
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If your collection is nog gargantuan, three 32GB USB3 Sticks will do to get triple redundancy. Over here, they cost around €12 a piece. To give you an idea, my Calibre library is 4.6GB, containing 739 books, in both EPUB and AZW3 format. So, that is +/- 2.3GB for the EPUB's only, or roughly, 3.2 MB per book. I would be able to stash over 10.000 books onto one 32GB USB stick. Please note that my library contains 56 Delphi Classic Collections, which are omnibuses, sometimes containing 25 or more books, with large illustrations. They can be over 100MB a piece, which greatly increases the average size of my books. Normally, an EPUB is easily smaller than 1MB (maybe 2MB if it has a large cover and maps, in case of fantasy and sci-fi), so you can count on being able to stash 20-30K books onto one stick. In short, you'll probably be long dead before you stand a chance of filling up that USB stick as long as you don't put audio books and graphic novels on them. If so, get three 2.5 inch hard drives of 500GB. (Over here, they cost €38 a piece.) Last edited by Katsunami; 07-27-2014 at 12:27 PM. |
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07-27-2014, 12:24 PM | #32 | |
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07-28-2014, 01:56 AM | #33 |
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07-28-2014, 02:01 AM | #34 |
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True, but .mobi files are binaries. Epubs are just zip files with a plain-text format inside (HTML).
I'd go for epub as well. Simply because its base is something you can open with a very simple text editor. Or, you could be like me, and use the HTML sources itself as backup. |
07-28-2014, 08:00 AM | #35 |
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One of the hats I wear in the real workd is a network administrator and I would like to say from purely an IT perspective it makes little difference which format is used to store an ebook in. I recommend that the originator of this thread look at the ebook in .epub format then in .mobi format in Windows Explorer, in the old days this was called the file manager, and turn on the details by right clicking in the windows explorer, click view, then details. Then look at the size of both formats and store which ever is smaller.
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07-28-2014, 09:25 AM | #36 |
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There is no best format. If calibre can read it right now, calibre can read it in 150 years from now -- it's open source, so you can always build it yourself even after Kovid dies of old age and Windows/Linux/OSX don't exist anymore . The only long-term storage problems are going to be preserving the actual file (good backups in safe places) and having some program that can read it. DRM is the only cause of digital obsolescence, because any program that can read a file is not going to disappear. (MSWord is an excellent example of a program that is protected by DRM, hence it has obsolescence.)
calibre can easily convert between any format you have right now. There is no need to convert all your .mobis to EPUB just to keep them readable, because you can always convert them later. The fact that it is binary is completely irrelevant -- it doesn't stop the free open source programs from reading (and converting) it. Keep the original format, since it has all the base information in it, and everything else can be derived from it as needed. Unless you have converted to EPUB for editing, in which case the EPUB obviously has more of what you need in it. Last edited by eschwartz; 07-28-2014 at 09:27 AM. |
07-28-2014, 10:38 AM | #37 |
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As I said before, if the source is not ePub or PDF, convert to ePub and keep both formats. If the source is ePub, keep that. If the source is PDF, keep that.
Problem solved! |
07-28-2014, 11:07 AM | #38 | |
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Just for storing it, there is no need to convert to EPUB for the sake of the archive. |
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07-28-2014, 11:14 AM | #39 |
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07-28-2014, 11:50 AM | #40 | |
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I connected the reader, started Calibre and ... nothing happened. I found out Kovid dropped support for the old PRS-500 a few years ago. It took me a *long* time to get the old version of Calibre running. And that was not after 150 years, but after two. Calibre has many, many dependencies. Just have a look at dependencies here: http://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux |
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07-28-2014, 12:00 PM | #41 | |
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Any old version should still work out-of-the-box, as it is distributed as a standalone binary with bundled dependencies??? The only outside dependency is glibc >= 2.10 In 150 years, I could hear that no current binaries would run outside emulators -- who knows what the world may look like then . But I see you got it working anyway which goes to prove my point. Shouldn't you be able to connect to folder anyway, though? |
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07-28-2014, 12:52 PM | #42 |
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In Linux everything takes a long time or might actually be impossible if you're outside the official repositories.IMHO, that's THE big stickler for many people used to Windows, where you can (often) easily have an OS from 2001, running 2013 software, or a 2013 OS running software from 1995. That's a fair bit more difficult under Linux. That's also another topic, however.
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07-28-2014, 01:00 PM | #43 | |
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Of course, if you can get it from the repo that is better. Because then you can use system dependencies and it all works. |
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07-28-2014, 02:44 PM | #44 | |
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Ah well... that's another topic. Maybe I should post about it in the rant thread. Last edited by Katsunami; 07-28-2014 at 03:42 PM. |
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07-28-2014, 03:18 PM | #45 | |
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I cannot say what's going to happen in the future, but I do think ePub has the best chance of being able to get the book out of the container it's in. |
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