[Atarian]

Hi all; at my job we have been requested to investigate something that I thought calibre would be fantastic for, but we need a little help.

Some background first: there are a lot of users which have each a lot of manuals, procedures and other documents in different formats (doc, txt, rtf, pdf, etc), and we want to convert all that into ePub or pdf, so the documentation can then be easily read by them in mobility using tablets or even standard eReaders (this BYOD thing is running strong). We want to put a simple service in place to have users uploading all their stuff, having it converted in background by calibre running in CLI mode, then dumped in a folder so the user can then transfer to his device as sees fit. We're using an Ubuntu Linux box for this. We have run some test successfully but, since the conversion jobs are being queued and one user cannot have his own queue processed until the former one is done, we're afraid that if we run this for everybody what will happen is that the last users requesting the conversion will take ages until they get their files converted, so a better solution has to be devised.

So, here's (at last) the question: we thought that we could greatly improve the process by giving each user its own instance of calibre to run his conversion. This way we could have concurrent users running concurrent calibres thus making the conversion time a breeze (or at least will depend only on how much stuff an individual user has, not having to wait on others). We're not going to use calibre for managing the documents or anything, only to run the conversion, so we're not concerned about calibre's db integrity or anything.

Has anyone tried to do this somehow? Is it even possible?

Any hint will be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!