Hello,
This is my first post. I came to the site because I just recently received my Kindle 3 and I've been looking for tools to help me get my existing ebook collection converted for use on the Kindle. Calibre seemed like just the ticket, but, sadly, I wont be using it any time soon...
From another thread:
Quote:
Originally Posted by GJN
Why would anyone dislike calibre? It's a terrific piece of software that makes eBook readers without decent database capabilities useable, integrates various format conversion tools, and lets us correct sloppy eBook metadata.
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I don't like Calibre for a specific reason - it destroys useful data in the process of importing books. I'm referring to the file name. Calibre will change your file names in a destructive manner. 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.
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? 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.
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.
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.
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 - until I realized that it was destroying data, couldn't be fixed by the user and the developers had no interest in addressing the problem. This is a completely unreasonable way to handle data and it prevents Calibre from being useful to me. I'm not going to commit to a platform that holds my data hostage.
TTFN