[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

That's likely for speed. I remember seeing stats for CC and some people had 50,000 books there. On Android, a JSON with that many books is likely going to be insupportable.

My complete Calibre library is in that range. But only a small subset exists on mobile devices. For instance, I don't normally try to read PDFs on a device, as they tend to be created assuming larger screen sizes than a mobile device will have. By preference, I don't get PDFs unless no other format is available.

On the device I'm currently wrestling with, there are about 1,700 volumes. That's a supportable amount.

And I prefer ePub, and convert other formats to ePub when possible. It's a better for devices, and a better underlying storage format. (I got Calibre in the first place for conversion - I had a Palm OS device that handled Mobi via the first Mobipocket viewer to be made, because Palm devices were Mobi's first target. It didn't handle ePub because that format did not then exist. Using Calibre, I could convert ePub to Mobi and read it on that device.)

Yep, none exist.

As I discovered.

Not really mystifying. I'm guessing most who use Calibre and Android just use Calibre Companion rather than USB. Either that or they just browse the books via their preferred reading app without need for a third-party listing/browsing app.

That may be the case. I've explained my practice above.

That said, why do you wish to avoid using your ebook viewer in order to view books stored on device? Does it take a really long time to load or something?

I use FBReader. I began using it in the days it was written in C. It ran on Windows and Linux, and could display eBooks in supported formats on my desktop. It handled ePub, Mobi, FB2 and an assortment of other things, and not having to care what format a book used and have to use more than one viewer was a huge win.

It also supported the Plucker format, used by the Plucker offline HTML viewer for Palm OS devices. The Plucker desktop could convert HTML to a format that could be displayed by the Plucker viewer on the Palm device. Plucker supported hyperlinks, embedded illustrations, text attributes, color (on color devices) and custom fonts (on OS5 devices.)

The first target was documentation for stuff I dealt with as a sysadmin, much of which was in HTML. I could carry a documentation library in my pocket.

It was a hop, skip, and jump to converting things like Project Gutenberg files. I wound up with 4,000+ converted Plucker files, and I could use FBReader on the desktop to view them. Some stuff I only had as converted Plucker files because the original HTML got lost. (I've subsequently discovered Calibre handles Palm PDB files as an input format, and happily converted some stuff I only had a Plucker files. To my delight, the conversion produced working ePub ToCs with no intervention required by me.)

But while I could read just about anything on the PDA, I needed to have half a dozen different viewers, and remember which book was in which format viewed by what program. That was just nuts.

When I began swimming in the Android pool, FBReader for Android, written in Java, was the obvious choice for eBook viewer, because I again didn't have to care what format a book was in. It handles it native, or via a plugin. It doesn't handle DRM, but I don't get books with DRM and don't care.

It comes up fast enough, thank you.

The issue with using FBReader to see what's on device is the way it displays things. The Library view divides into sub-folders:
Favorites
Recent
By Author
By Title
By Series
By Tag
File tree

And By Title further sub-divides by first letter of Title name (but it ignores things like A or The if it's the first word in a Title). (It's a feature request outstanding for a while that FBReader use the same practice for By Author, with the first letter of the Author's last name the selector.)

What it doesn't offer is an All Books display, and that's what I'm specifically trying to get. It has a Search function I can use to drill down and find things, assuming I recall the correct title or author, but that's not the problem I'm trying to solve.

Ultimately, it's about "What's the fastest way to do this?", where "this" is scroll though a list of books on device to see what's there.

That question is also why I use a USB cable or plug an external SDcard in an adapter plugged into a USB port where it shows as a drive, and use Connect/share Connect to Folder in Calibre to add books. It's simply faster than Wifi. If I didn't keep as many books on device, or want to add/remove the number that I often do in a session, CC would be fine. Given the size of my library, the number of files I keep in devices, and the amount I transfer in a session, CC simply isn't a good fit for me. It's a splendid piece of work, but I'm not the kind of user it's aimed at.
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Dennis