I have Calibre. It's a lovely thing. I have Dropout because Calibre doesn't search inside documents. I am NOT a programmer. I have been known to hire programmers (in fact I have two working for me now on other projects) and if I had the money I'd plunk it down instantement (as they say in Quebec) for someone to do the following:
Plug the Lucene search engine into Calibre as a core feature.
Imagine the sheer power of that for every student and scholar on the freakin' planet. Not only would they be able to assemble books by metadata (in Calibre) but they would be able to search INSIDE the documents themselves, enabling a query based research practice that would have mind blowing implications for the humanities.
Seriously. Dropout is free (as in beer) and is based on the Apache Lucene Search engine. You can DL it here:
https://dropout.codeplex.com/
What's super cool is not only does it index the contents of your books, it's TRANSPORTABLE, so you put all your books on a portable drive, index it and then carry it with you - you then have your own Personal Portable Research Library that you can use where ever you go.
And given how title centric Calibre is, imagine if you call up a title and search inside that specific title itself and find what you need...
Gates:
1. Lucene works on Linux and Windows. I don't know if it works on Mac, much less iOS or Android. (So it would have to be ported or run in a virtual machine - testing that would suck. A lot. yadda yadda)
2. It would require a significant rewrite of Calibre and Calibre's UI or some kind of a branch of Calibre. Branching software is a precarious journey, so it would be better if Calibre itself absorbed this functionality.
3. Portability - I don't know if Calibre is portable, even within a platform. (Yeah, I should know that, but Julian gave me another rum and Coke...)
Benefits:
THINK ABOUT IT for more than 5 seconds. *Mind. Blown.* There would be no reason to use any other ereading / indexing app ever, for anyone, anywhere. It would be a complete ereading solution. If I had the money, I'd pay someone tomorrow to build it. Seriously.
Possible Plan B:
1. A Lucene plug in? That could be ugly as home made sin, but it *could* work. It would not be as elegant or as useful as being built into Calibre itself.
Seriously folks : Imagine if Calibre indexed the contents of your books. If you don't care, I can assure you there are MILLIONS of students and scholars who would pee their pants (well, they would be "overjoyed") at such a thing.
I look forward to this conversation.
warm regards to you wonderful people!
Stuart Studebaker