[chaley]

Some quick comments:

Originally Posted by DavidTC

You surely know the users of CC better than I do. I myself have trouble conceiving of why anyone wouldn't want their entire library on their device. (Except for the sole exception of not enough space.) But from the way you're talking, it seems like *most* people don't put their entire library on their device.

Fully 25% of CC's users run the demo version, limited to 20 books. Of the people running the full version, using a very unreliable sample it seems that at least half have less than 50 books on their device. That means that either their libraries are quite small or they are transferring a subset.

So yes, given what we know today, a large majority of people do not send their entire library to CC. I will know somewhat more once V5 is out, noting that the V5 statistics do not attempt to record the calibre library size.

Auto-connection is triggered by a broadcast. There isn't an activity involved. I don't have a problem with exposing the broadcast receiver in CC V5 (in fact I just changed the manifest), but I don't know if "Tasker" can send broadcast events. The receiver name is com.multipie.cclibrary.ConnectionAlarmReceiver. It takes no extras.

[...]

I am not sure if you mean you have to expose it via some method and haven't done it yet, but just in case, I tried it now and it doesn't do anything currently. (Or I'm doing it wrong.)

The change is in CC's code. You won't see it until you are running a CC V5 later than V5.0.1.6.

So the idea I was going to suggest was: Have Calibre put a specific metadata tag on sending the book to a device, a date saying 'This is the right metadata as of {date}'. A tag that *isn't* allowed on books in the library (As in, Calibre strips it from content.odf during 'Add book'.), and is also unlikely to be found on books in the wild.

The UUID element can serve that purpose.

CC extracts what metadata it can from epubs. It then constructs a metadata packet and sends that to calibre. If that packet contains a UUID then calibre will use it to match the book to a book in calibre's library. If there isn't a UUID or if the UUID is not in calibre's library then calibre goes through a process of "book matching", comparing the title and author of the book to books in calibre's library. Matching works if a close-to-exact match is found. This process very often matches nothing or the wrong book. The user must clean up any remaining mess.

Ugh. That's way more work spent on matching books than I would have bothered with, both on CC's end and Calibre's end. I would have just said 'If this doesn't have a Calibre UUID, it ain't a Calibre book and I'm not going to try to match it to one.'.

I actually think this situation is why I started off a bit confused...I find it very strange that someone would try using CC without all books they are trying to manage going through Calibre. That's almost incomprehensible to me that anyone would think that would work at all. (I just wanted my books to take the *long* way around.)

I am not sure that you have internalized that books in libraries synchronized by a cloud provider are almost certainly not "calibre books". Their internal metadata is not updated. Also note that calibre must deal with devices that present themselves as simple disk drives. The CC wireless device driver goes to some trouble to make itself look like a disk.

I find it even odder that they'd have the book on their ereader *and* in Calibre but the book on the ereader somehow didn't go through Calibre! Huh

Happens with some frequency. The usual path is something like a book store where one is strongly encouraged to download books directly to the device and separately to calibre. Another case arises when people use their reader app to download books. A related case happens when people reset their device or clear app data because of some problem. And finally, and as I said above, books sync'ed to the device directly from the calibre library (no "send to device") usually don't contain (correct) calibre metadata.

It is also worth noting that many (most?) pirated book collections are generated using calibre. Sometimes the books *do* contain calibre metadata, but it is metadata for the pirate's library not the user's library. I can't get on my high horse and tell these putative pirates to pound sand because there is at least one legitimate reason (I am not saying "legal") for grabbing pirated ebooks: fair use, where the user owns a paper copy. In that case getting the ebook is arguably a format shift, not dissimilar to ripping an album on cassette to mp3.