Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
You don't need to find those files with your computer's file manager. Calibre is there to do that for you -- or, rather, calibre is there to find your books for you. It will display your books, put them on your ebook reader, whatever you need, without you having to care about the actual computer files, only the books. If you actually do need one or more files -- perhaps you want to pack up all of the Harvard Classics to give to a friend -- calibre can collect them from its black box and put them wherever you want them -- and in whatever format you need to have them in.
The transition can be a bit hard. You're used to thinking of your ebooks as files and your filesystem as their metadata. Using calibre means thinking of them as books, abstracted from their computer representation, and with much more comprehensive metadata. It's a different way of looking at them, yes. But once you've made the jump, you won't want to go back.
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Thank you for this clarification, it does make sense. Maybe because I spend my working hours trying to convince people that they will get more of out of software if they work with it rather than against it
I'll give this a try. Grudgingly, because what I really want from Calibre is to convert my books, not to manage them. But since I don't have much of a choice (looks like Calibre won't convert my books unless I add them to the library first, or unless I use command line, which I won't), I might as well try and make some use of it.
I downloaded the latest version of Calibre and found that I can adjust the preferences so that it doesn't create too many files or folders when I use the "save to disk" function. I guess I can live with that. At least it will probably be a bit easier than deleting all my books from the library after converting them
Thanks again for the useful input
