[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

I have put a little over 2500 books, which is only part of the contents of my hard drive and everything went down with a bang.

I have 2500+ books and I don't seem to have this problem.

Admittedly I'm not trying to run calibre on a netbook. I'm not trying to run Photoshop CS5, either, which someone else used for a comparison. Calibre doesn't make a very good ebook reader.

Which leads to another issue - for every tiny patch there is quite a file to be loaded. I'm sure at least the icon themes would not be that interesting to download over and over again. I believe that is a side effect of not having to pay for the actual bandwidth.

You're not required to patch calibre. If you don't want to get a patch ... don't! As for what you believe, I can believe that the moon is made of green cheese, but that doesn't make it so.

They are quite good for having as book readers, as with my netbook, yet they could not possibly run an unoptimised mammoth like Calibre.

I believe you owe Kovid and the other devs an apology for your unwarranted assumptions and random insults.

Again, calibre is not meant to be a book reader to be put on a netbook. That's not what it's good at. It doesn't run on Linux-based readers, either. It's not for your ebook reader, any more than Photoshop is for your digital pictureframe.

Although we're not talking about an internal database (say the bookmarks in Firefox), but a DB based on the filesystem it would be safe to assume that some changes are going to be made.

I knew I was going to get to say this sooner or later: read my .sig.

I don't use any of them as I am missing the point - they are bulky, they have clunky interfaces, most of them give power to the firm that made them and not me, and, for the sake of turning an alleged 8000 pages I have to pay at least what I have paid for my netbook only to have less memory, more to fiddle and almost no other functionalty besides justify and an mp3 player. But that is another issue.

I have a netbook and an ebook reader. Of the two, the netbook is much bulkier. I love them both, for their own reasons, but I'd never mistake the netbook for the small, light, slim ebook reader. The ebook reader isn't bulky, it has a very streamlined, easy-to-use interface, the firm that made it has never interacted with it, it cost about half the price of the netbook (and I was a moderately early adopter), I don't care how much memory it has because my ebooks fit just fine, it has absolutely nothing to fiddle, and I don't want it to have any other functions, I want it to read ebooks, so I'm happy with it reading ebooks. If your problem is that your netbook isn't a full-scale laptop and isn't an ebook reader, I would propose the problem is not calibre; it's your choice of computers. Netbooks are wonderful and I wouldn't give mine up for the world, but I'm not going to mistake it for my laptop, or my desktop, any time soon. Or my ebook reader, for that matter.

My problem is that I can't unload those plugins. And others. What kind of a plugin is that that won't unload?

One that never loaded in the first place.

Getting metadata from the servers seems to work well, only that you have to close the book you are reading. It was very uncomfortable to do that as books that don't show up in major lists have to be entered by hand.

Or collected from the file name, which generally works moderately well.

Probably the author has assumed either that there are no books in the world that are not on amazon.com or that you should print each time you want to edit something.

His name is Kovid. It's on the calibre main screen, so you know it. He's reading this thread. You have just insulted him to his face. He was nice enough to write the free software you're using, and you're thanking him by insulting him. Nice.

And by the way, your insults, in addition to being rude, are also wrong. I get most of my metadata that isn't already in the book from places other than Amazon, and I've never printed anything from calibre in my life.

You can't do two things with the interface. So first you have to open the book. Than you have to enter the data in the meta editor. Than you have to kill the book reader. And only after that you can save the metadata.

I'm not sure what you're doing, or trying to do, but that's not the way other people edit their metadata. Most of us just ... y'know ... edit it. A lot of it in bulk. No opening and closing books, no printing, etc., involved.

My conclusion: too good to be true.

Imagining that you can run a full-featured desktop application on a netbook and have it behave exactly as it does on a desktop ... yeah, that's too good to be true. It's too good to be true of calibre, it's too good to be true of Photoshop, it's too good to be true of Dreamweaver, it's too good to be true of Age of Conan ... shall I go on? This may come as a bitter disappointment to you, but not every program in the world is written to run on your netbook.

For what it's meant for, calibre is wonderful.

For an ebook reader for your netbook, get something else. Calibre isn't it.

And the continuous list of supported news services which I hope they bring a good source of revenue to the author who could be able to make something of Calibre by the time it reaches version 1.0

You should be thankful that Kovid is a much nicer person than I am, because if I had mod powers here, you'd be out.

The news service recipes were created primarily by calibre users, the people who need to use them. Nobody gets any revenue whatsoever for them. In fact, the only thing Kovid gets from calibre is the occasional donation from its users. Did you donate? Or are you whining that a free program isn't exactly what you need?

And "make something of calibre"? You're apparently missing the million or so people who are quite happy with calibre exactly the way it is. They're probably not trying to run it on netbooks already hampered by XP. But, of course, you're ignoring all those people in your quest for bigger and better insults. You're really getting on my nerves now. If you want changes in calibre, you could always open a ticket and request them. Slinging insults at the developers will get you neither changes nor sympathy.

You owe Kovid Goyal an apology.