Quote:
Originally Posted by Sylver
I am not sure I understand this: so now you have two copies of the same book, and the one in the calibre library (if modified with new tags, etc) will be totally out of sync with the original one you kept in your other n-folder deep hierarchy; are you copying back the calibre version over to the original (overwriting) ?
I honestly mainly use Calibre for conversions or editing tags (or sometimes even adding a new custom cover image, etc) to make the book consistent of all my other books, and I am guessing I am not even using 1/10th of what Calibre is offering. Although obviously not the primary usage the app's creator had in mind, but I do wish there is a Calibre Lite just for conversion/editing purpose directly on the ebook file that won't try to mess with the library structure (importing, etc), as it does seem quite some users are using Calibre this way. However, I understand this is not the intended usage and certainly not a priority or even to the interest of most users and of its creators/developers, so for now, I am good with an extra step to manually copy (export) it over when the conversion/edits is done in Calibre. As much as I love Calibre, I do see in some of the recent threads a tendency among Calibre fans to discourage legit complaints from less experienced or more casual users. I don't know the whole story, but I miss the old days when even the most stupid questions of mine were received in a much more positive and encouraging way. I hope that kind of amiable atmosphere of the forum can be retained as the app becomes more and more matured and sophisticated.
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I started with Calibre (had the same problems as Eowyn with Calibre then), just to convert books. Command line only, actually. As I only used one reader at the time, it was easy to sync my folders with it. But then I got a new reader and now had two. Still, shouldn't be much of a problem, except the fact that they each needed a different format. Then things got a bit more out of hand. Copying format A to this reader and format B to that reader. Which meant I not only had my "source" folder (with the original HTML source) and a single format folder (containing my original Mobi format), I now also had a second format format folder (containing epubs). I then decided, I didn't like the epub reader, and started transforming my source HTML into PDF (formatted for a 5" device). So, now I had 3 format folders. And this became increasingly awkward to manage. Especially, as I now had 4 devices to keep in sync.
Luckily, by this time, the custom column had made its first appearance. That was the final thing I needed to make Calibre working for me. My Mini doesn't understand tags or categories, but has a folder structure. So, I wanted a folder structure there. With the custom columns, I could format the folder structure exactly like I wanted (which is rather extensive! I need about 4 or 5 custom columns to even simply make the folder structure!) From that point onwards, I started to make use of Calibre as library and syncing software.
Conversions I still do using the command line though... And updated to books I still do in my source files which are NOT in Calibre. I'll create my three formats (mobi, epub and pdf) and overwrite (or add) them in Calibre.