Quote:
Originally Posted by cd2013
There are ways to use Calibre Companion offline, but the first question is: what exactly are you trying to achieve? Also, how big is your Calibre library, as in how many MBs / GBs?
Do you want your entire library accessible from your phone or tablet?
Or do you just want to browse the titles on the phone, eg browsing by tags etc, but don’t need the actual books accessible on the phone?
In Calibre Companion, ‘local library’ is one of the options for cloud collection. Wrong choice of words, if you ask me – ‘local library’ should have been an option other than cloud, but anyway. What this mean is that Calibre Companion can access a local library stored on your phone. You may store just the database file (to browse only, without opening the books), or the entire library (database + books).
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It looks like my entire calibre library (which is practically all the digital books I own, but not comics) is just 3.15 GB, so it's really not that bad. It'd be easy to fit on my phone's SD card. Though honestly, just being able to browse the database on my phone would be good enough (as I tend to sideload books in infrequent large groupings to my ereader) and I'd probably rather keep my entire library on my ereader anyway (since the new one will have plenty of space to do so).
So, let me make sure I understand this: I can put my calibre database only on my phone, and with calibre companion I can browse it to make my new book selection. Then I could search my ereader directly for the most recent book I chose? Does Calibre Companion contain *all* the metadata I'd have in Calibre... like book covers (which do actually have quite an effect on me) and book descriptions and the various tags, and even my custom category for collections? (I've been using that custom category to populate collections on my jailbroken PW1 which I then nest [when necessary for new collections] on the device itself.) And I can do all of that offline (assuming I regularly sideload/synchronize my calibre database to my phone through a USB cable or something like that)?
And finally, if all that (above) is the case, then on Calibre Companion can I search within a single category (for example tags, or custom category like my kindle collections ones) and view it as a bookshelf (i.e. covers) such that I can browse through the covers similar to on my device and when I click on a certain book I get more book details (like book description, etc.)?
Because if all of that is the case, then I really think you've got me sold on that. Browsing would certainly be more convenient that way, but my library would always be available on my device for actual reading (no matter which book I decide to select). That honestly sounds like a great compromise! And even better in some ways, considering I could browse covers in color on my phone and of course each page of "bookshelf view" on the app would obviously go much faster than the refresh rate on my e-ink ereader.
Anyway, I hope I understand you right because now I'm very excited about that possibility! Thanks for what you've shared so far!