MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Can Calibre Index books stored locally and remotely?

leecreighton · 11-26-2018, 12:19 AM

Hi all,

New poster here, who assures you that he's searched the forums, read the FAQ, and discovered that the link to the intro tutorial in the Sticky Post is dead.

My situation:
I have about 5000 PDF books (with the odd epub or mobi book) stored on DropBox, as well as a hundred or so on pCloud, a DropBox competitor that can be accessed over WebDAV. I also have about 2000 Kindle ebooks that are not generally stored anywhere I have access to. They live with Amazon and are downloaded as needed.

I'd like to use Calibre as the master indexer, the librarian, if you will. What I can't figure out is whether calibre will be happy leaving the books where they are. None of my computers, especially my daily-use MacBook Pro, has enough space to store all my books. And as you can guess, I have a hell of a time remembering if I own a book, and where it is.

Calibre seems to be the best solution as long as it doesn't require local copies of the books. I assume initially I just add the respective folders to calibre and it will augment its index as needed. I'd appreciate any advice on how to keep calibre updated as I add files to my various places.

Addtional questions, if they're answerable, otherwise I'l just have to try:
How large do you think a book index of that size will be?
I also own over a thousand physical books. Should I let calibre manage them as well?

11-26-2018, 12:19 AM	#1
leecreighton Junior Member Posts: 3 Karma: 10 Join Date: Nov 2018 Device: iPad	Can Calibre Index books stored locally and remotely? Hi all, New poster here, who assures you that he's searched the forums, read the FAQ, and discovered that the link to the intro tutorial in the Sticky Post is dead. My situation: I have about 5000 PDF books (with the odd epub or mobi book) stored on DropBox, as well as a hundred or so on pCloud, a DropBox competitor that can be accessed over WebDAV. I also have about 2000 Kindle ebooks that are not generally stored anywhere I have access to. They live with Amazon and are downloaded as needed. I'd like to use Calibre as the master indexer, the librarian, if you will. What I can't figure out is whether calibre will be happy leaving the books where they are. None of my computers, especially my daily-use MacBook Pro, has enough space to store all my books. And as you can guess, I have a hell of a time remembering if I own a book, and where it is. Calibre seems to be the best solution as long as it doesn't require local copies of the books. I assume initially I just add the respective folders to calibre and it will augment its index as needed. I'd appreciate any advice on how to keep calibre updated as I add files to my various places. Addtional questions, if they're answerable, otherwise I'l just have to try: How large do you think a book index of that size will be? I also own over a thousand physical books. Should I let calibre manage them as well?