Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Calibre duplicates the files and stores them in its own folder structure. If you want to make use of calibre's excellent metadata management, you will have to find space to allow calibre to make a copy of all your books. And then let calibre manage the book files.
Feel free to keep your original folders untouched. Calibre won't pay them any attention. But I think you'll find that allowing calibre to manage files while you worry about the metadata is a much better way to invest your time in your ebook library.
Storage is cheap. 30GB isn't a lot now.
If you ever do need your books in a particular format in a particular folder structure, you can export a copy from calibre, with all the books updated with the latest metadata.
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I will see if I can edit the OP. It was supposed to say 300gb. I guess I left off a zero though it is actually ~327gb of ebooks and PDFs currently and it is constantly growing. Audiobooks and comics are separate.
I cannot afford to double the amount of space my ebooks take up. My 160tb(raw) media server is almost full, I've only got 4 bays left in my chasis, and HDDs aren't cheap especially when every bit of it has to be duplicated offsite and I have to have room for parity disks, etc.
I also cannot have the original files changed. Calibre going in and altering all of my ebook files would create a whole host of problems both with my backups and with the other programs that are currently using the files the way they are now. If there is no way around having duplicate copies taking up double the disk space then I will just have to find an alternative as they are all being used by another program and it would take days to manually go through and relocate every single file again assuming the MD5 isn't altered in the process.
I don't really care about the metadata management. Everything has been tagged and edited already. I just want a ebook manager where I can scroll through, or search, my collections, select something, and have it open in a native reader similar to my music manager (mediamonkey), comic manager(YAC), and video manager(Emby with a Kodi front-end)
Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
The short answer is No.
I'm not sure I understand what your second paragraph is trying to suggest - what do you mean by a 'hardlink copy' of the 'original database' - what is a hardlink copy, apart from just another inode to the same data stream, and what is an 'original database'.
Have you considered any of the Digital Asset Management (DAM) applications, some of them work more like the way you'd prefer. Most come from an image management perspective, so they don't and are never likely to have the e-book specific features of calibre such a integration with ebook readers, ebook specific format shifting, ebook editing. Some of them have limited support for PDF formats. Wikipedia had a page that summarised the major DAM applications - but it's disappeared.
BR
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Well, what I am trying to avoid here is having my ebook collection take up twice the disk space while keeping all of my original files as they are. I thought if Calibre renamed the files and I made hardlinks, or symlinks, of the original files I could point Calibre to the duplicate directory and let it rename those without changing the original files or doubling its size.
I have not considered a DAM application. What I like about Yac for comics is that is preserves my easily navigable file and naming structure making it super easy to find exactly what I want while also having a nice UI and reader built in similar to how Emby+Kodi does my video files.
I would like something that does the same and with an ebook reader integrated as well. I put off Calibre for a long time because I really wasn't a fan when I tried it years ago but after searching periodically during that time I haven't found any better alternatives. I don't need to edit or convert anything.
I will check my offline backups of Wikipedia and see if the DAM application list is in one of them.
Thanks.