[HailCardassia]

Originally Posted by dwig

Man, nor AI or computer program, can be a slave to two masters.

You say you want something to manage your library but at the same time say that you've managed it and don't want it altered. The is a contradiction that needs to be very very clearly resolved before you continue your search of a "solution".

Question #1 is "exactly what do you want the new management app to actually do?"

I don't see it as a contradiction at all. I want it to do the same thing my other media managers do.

Yac puts all my comics up into an easy to browse and navigate interface and allows me to view my comics, keep up with what I have read, etc.

Emby+Kodi puts all my films and television series into an easily navigable interface, allows me to play my content, and keeps up with what I have and haven't watched.

MediaMonkey takes all my audio files and allows me to access, play, and keep up with all of my audio easily.

None of those applications need to duplicate my files, rename my files, alter my files, or mess with my file structure in any way. I install the programs, point it to the files, and I'm ready to go.

I just want something similar for e-books. Something that will put all my ebooks into a easy to navigate interface, select a book, and read it instead of going ebooks>fiction>author>series>title and then opening the book with a separate reader. I mean, its easy enough with my file structure to find what I want but I would like to have it all in an interface similar to Yac, Kodi, Mediamonkey, etc.

Sadly it seems Calibre is the only decent option out there but it seems to require either having my files moved and changed or creating duplicates taking up twice the space. Neither of which are an option for me as I don't have the disk space to spare for duplicates for something like this and the files are being used by another program and can't feasibly be moved or have its MD5 changed.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Of course, calibre is open source, so you could look into modifying it to do what you want - when importing a book, only make a link to the original book, and to never modify the original book.

I'll have to look into this a bit more and see how difficult it would be. There doesn't seem to be many other options out there as far as ebook managers.

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Calibre's not going to do any of that for you, but you could do in manually. I did an experiment using Win10 1703, out of the box calibre portable, the xplorer² file manager, and Hermann Shinagl's LSE gadget.

I chose Mary Wollestenecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" deliberately, because I knew it would introduce the issue of calibre's truncation rules.

First up I used the Add empty book tool to create a book record and an empty epub, here you see the book list and the book folder:

Attachment 161666

Then I went to where I had the original epub and right button dragged it into the book folder and selected LSE's Create Symbolic Link Here option

Attachment 161667

Here you see the result

Attachment 161668

Next I copied the calibre truncated name of the empty epub to the clipboard, and then deleted the empty epub, then I renamed the symlink to the calibre truncated name - here's the result

Attachment 161669

And here the book is loaded into the viewer via the symlink.

Attachment 161670

I was also able to use the tool in Metadata edit to extract the cover image from the epub into the book folder. When I tried to edit the book the editor crashed. That's all I tried - which is barely scratching calibre's surface

So what you want can be done, after a fashion, but you will have to do it and sort out any problems when something doesn't work or when a symlink is invalidated because the target was moved or renamed etc etc.

BR

I'll have to give this a shot. Once set up none of the files would ever be moved or renamed. It will be a chore doing that for all 300gb worth of ebooks individually but at least its a solution and I could work on it a little bit at a time. Thanks.