[chaley]

Originally Posted by kaufman

Its possible, but the issue for me is that I went through calibre and removed all of the custom columns except for one called bookshelf. It is used for organizing books on my Kobo. I got rid of the other ones, because calibre is iffy about storing custom column information in ePubs.

Huh? I haven't seen a case in ages where custom column data was not stored in a non-DRMed epub that was exported from calibre using send to device, save to disk, or the content server.

That means that if my database ever gets corrupted, I will lose any information from the custom column.

Again, huh? The standard and custom column data are stored in the file system of calibre's library in the metadata.opf file. Calibre uses that file to rebuild the database. Rebuilding a database never looks into the ebooks. However, if you restore the db by creating an empty library and then adding books, then you might get different behavior.

So instead, I just have a tag called "Read Recently" to track which books I have read recently. I wouldn't mind being able to add that tag to a book from within CC. I'm not sure tagging them as read from the device is important enough to change my current method for.

If you can't get rid of the dropdown, what's the program going to do for people who don't set up a column for it? You might get a lot of support emails from confused people.

We have many customers who have asked for tracking read status of books on CC but don't care about syncing. These people tend to put a lot of books on their device infrequently or to use the content server connection almost exclusively. CC's indicator is stored in CC's db and is persistent, so a no-sync model satisfies them.

Would it be possible to have two nearly identical book details screens, and show the one with the read drop down if they have set that up and the one without it otherwise.

I am considering this from the viewpoint that if I am in for a penny I might as well be in for a pound. Adding yet another option to remove the read stuff from the interface isn't hard, but I still need to convince myself that doing so is worth the inevitable questions we will get asking for "why would I do that?" and "where did the read stuff go?" (The latter happens when someone changes the option then forgets that they did it, something that happens rather more frequently than we would like.)