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Originally Posted by bounce
Would Calibre have any advantages for me?
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On an external hard drive I have the books organized in nested folders and I connect this to a PC or Mac which I side load into my Kindle or Dropbox for Marvin. I'm fairly quick at navigating the current file structure for books.
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I'm curious about how I'd go about using the "portable" calibre hosted on dropbox for a collection this size?
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Previous posters pointed out many advantages, I will add some more.
If you have a neat and well named structure of nested directories with books and can write a script or two in your preferred environment, then you can import books to Calibre in bulk, not just one-by-one manually. I did this by writing a script to "collapse" the path, so that the filename contained all the info that was originally stored in the path system (such as series and author or genere info) and set up Calibre to parse the filename to get the info. For this there is beautiful support of Regular Expressions in Calibre "Adding books" setting. Use the "quick preferences" plugin to choose between your crafted regular expressions when importing files named using various systems.
When you add the books, you can normalize metadata - use unified author and series names, and so on as previous posters pointed out. Calibre has *very* powerful tools to help you with this, including filters, bulk rename (again with Regular Expression support), and absolutely wonderful plugin for locating duplicates.
You can ask Calibre to download from Internet (or extract from book files) covers and metadata, including series, publication date, description... . Again, everything is highly configurable.
Calibre has its own content server, so your collection can be used from any device that has browser and can open linked file, if you can access the IP where your main PC with your monster collection is residing.
Also look up opds file:
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Calibre2opds can generate OPDS and HTML catalogs from the metadata of the Calibre e-book library manager. These catalogs can then be used both to browse your e-book library online and also to download books on demand.
http://calibre2opds.com/about/
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One of my numerous personal favorite features, that haven't been mentioned yet, is "create catalog". I have some metadata where I indicate how high on my "to be read" list the book is. So I can select a [large] group of books, export them to directory (or device or wherever) and then I create a catalog of those books. A catalog is a nice e-book (or cvs file, everything is configurable) with hyperlinked authors, series, book titles, covers, lists by author, lists by series, lists by genere that covers the books you have on device or in a given directory. Then, when you want to select a book to read, you can browse this nice document instead of searching through subdirectories.