[chaley]

Originally Posted by kaufman

I wasn't trying to imply that. I'm all about just adding the books in a way so that they get in the CC database in some usable way and that it is trivial to fix the missing metadata on the next wireless connect. That's why I started with just the epub and then moved to the epub plus opf and so on.

Browsing the cloud from inside CC implies understanding calibre's db. Of course, one could offer very limited browsing capability which would reduce the amount of the db that CC needs to be understand, but a) that would invite very negative comparisons with the current content server and CC functionality, and b) once NxM tables like tags and authors are "understood", the remaining tables are easy.

What I was trying with my last post was to find a way to avoid having a second copy of all of the books on the device. I don't mind the overheard of the opf/covers which adds about 20% to the size on the device. What I don't want to do is to have to have two copies of all of the epubs which would add a lot more space.

The "entire calibre library" option would not require two copies of anything. There would only be the calibre library. There wouldn't be a CC library.

So, if your storage format was the same as Calibre's, then you could store the two files together and the only thing you would have to process would be the opf's of new books.

Unfortunately CC does not control the file paths for the books, calibre does. In addition, for several reasons it is very difficult to come up with a template that duplicates calibre's folder naming algorithms (many people have tried and failed, including me). Thus, to duplicate calibre's structure I would have to do fairly significant damage to calibre's device driver system to import calibre's internal names, something I am not willing to do.

For people like me who keep their entire libraries on the device, there are really only two use cases for all this stuff:

1) I have added a new book to my library, and I forgot or wasn't able to sync it to my device before I moved away from my computer. This has happened to me occasionally, but since I always have my phone with me, it doesn't happen very often.

2) I get a book from some location while on the road (email, web, etc) and I want to add to to CC, in preparation to moving it from CC to Calibre. This is somewhat more common, but given your mistrust of the metadata in bare ePubs, is probably not going to addressed. Which is not that big a deal, because it doesn't happen that often, and because I can still read the books on the device, I just can't put them in CC.

There is a sort of third use case of

3) I want my books to automagically show up in CC after I add them to Calibre, but I think that that is a huge amount of work for you, and probably not worth your trouble.

This third use case is what the "entire library on the device" would do, assuming that the library is synced through the cloud.

For people who don't keep their all their books on their devices, there is also the use case of:

4) I am disconnected, and I want help in getting a new book into CC. But the problem with what you are proposing is that people who don't keep all their books on their device are the last group who is going to want to keep a copy of their Calibre library on their device.

I don't follow. First, I assume that the new book is in calibre. There are already two ways to get the new book, content server and wireless device, and the "cloud sync" (the point of this thread) would be a third. The "entire library" is a fourth option.