[cmarshall]

I have been using Calibre on my desktop for several weeks now -- no problem!

But here's what I want to do that is proving more complicated. I want to be able to access my library on my netbook too. But I want to put my Calibre library on the portable USB hard drive I just bought and make that the ONE library that I access from both my desktop and my netbook. The goal is to just be able to plug my portable USB hard drive into whichever computer I'm using and have that computer read from the library folder on the portable hard drive. That way I won't have to screw around with syncing or transferring files back and forth (I annotate my documents as I read them and don't want to lose annotations).

That's my theory but so far I haven't been able to get my netbook to read the library off the portable hard drive. I first copied the Calibre library folder (containing 9 gig of files and growing) onto the portable hard drive. Then I plugged the portable hard drive into the netbook and tried to point Calibre at the folder on the portable hard drive. But no luck.

First it failed and said something about failing to write to a read only database. So I checked the property of the Calibre library folder on the portable hard drive and it was read only. I think I was getting off on the wrong track but for the hell of it I unchecked the radio button that made the Calibre library folder read only and made it and all of its contents not read only.

But that didn't help. The I uninstalled the Calibre that was already on my netbook and reinstalled and tried to get it to start using the library on the portable hard drive from the get go -- but that failed too.

Is there a way to do this?