Quote:
Originally Posted by icallaci
And I care about how the book is named inside the OS's file structure because duplicate filenames cause problems when I try to move those files to the iPad. No OS (as far as I know) can differentiate between two files with the same name, so when adding files to the iPad, the first file is overwritten when the second file is added, unless I change one of the file names.
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Well, if you're on OSX, new Mavericks (coming out soon) now has tags built into Finder. I think it might obviate the need for calibre's book management for me (it won't replace it for all the metadata fetching and conversion of course).
I think there's something to be said about the simplicity of using Finder/ (Windows Explorer if it's still called that?) to do basic file management.
The biggest missing feature of calibre, to me anyway, is full-text search. Searching metadata is mediocre at best when it comes to my workflow (I'm a grad student) and I use Spotlight (OSX's built-in full text search) to find books about 99% of the time. And Spotlight can find text in PDF's, epubs, mobis etc. And when I do find a book, I can just use QuickLook to preview it and copy text out of it or read a section. It's so fast and makes me productive and calibre just doesn't support a workflow like that (it can't even do QuickLook right now… you have to open PDF files).
Anyway, there are options and you don't have to use calibre for everything. Calibre is a superb piece of software but its cross-platform nature and non-native widgets and weird user interface idiosyncrasies that sometimes make little or no sense are not its strengths. Metadata fetching and conversion are must-haves and irreplaceable features right now.
I understand why Kovid is truncating filenames but that doesn't mean that the file structure of calibre is not important. It clearly is because if it was that critical to have bullet-proof file names, Kovid would have used hashes as filenames which would make it more robust on any FS (always 256bits long and filename's characters would be compatible with any FS). But that would raise even more ire since people would complain even more.