[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by K. Molen

Here's a question, asked out of curiosity:

Would it be possible for a program like Calibre to simply leave the book files wherever they are upon import? Meaning, if a book is sitting on my desktop when I import it, the file is left there and the database points to it there. If the next book I import is sitting in My Documents, the same thing happens.

So, if you're not careful, you might have a database pointing to book files littered throughout the hard drive. But if you're careful, you could then have your own directory structure, with Calibre pointing to each book wherever you put it.

Even if this is possible, I completely understand that it's probably a decision that would've had to be made very early in the development cycle, and that it'd be a huge undertaking to change it now. I'm not suggesting such a change be made.

But what I'm wondering is, if this is possible, why was the decision made to handle files the way they are currently handled? Was it just to protect users who may not be aware of where they're storing their files? Or is there perhaps a more technical reason involving response times or something else?

Anything is possible some say

One potential problem is that if a user buys books from several sources/stores, the kindle books would be in the kindle directory, Sony in the Sony directory. Calibre could be happily pointing away at these books and the directory could be renamed for some reason. Or a drive added/removed could change the drive letter of one or more, then the user must track down the books and do whatever is required show calibre where they are.

Or if a user bought a new computer there could be multiple directories to copy and if on different drives, paths to be resolved.

I know there are probably programs that automatically handle these things, but it would add a lot more to the task. And even if calibre could copy/move all files as they were in their different little directories to a different computer, would I really want this? Doubtful in my case.

I like that the books are all in one large directory, the fact that they are all grouped under author>title, and for the most part I like that all files are individually useable. There have been the odd times I wish it was a little different, but these are very rare. (usually when I am backing up I curse the fact that there are so many small files, but this is more a Windows file copy slowness problem).

Probably not impossible to change, but maybe impossible to change in a way that would make everybody happy.

I imagine, perhaps wrongly, that if the file system was radically changed at this point there would be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth form the countless number of people like myself who are happy with the way things are now.

Helen