[Knocka]

Originally Posted by shighfield

Knocka: On my iMac here's what I do. The directory that I add books from is: /volumes/8gb/books/ As you can tell that is a portable USB drive where I store all the books as downloaded.

I then Add them to calibre. Calibre copies the book to my Calibre folder which is ~/dropbox/1-Calibre

This way I can access my library from any of my computers by installing calibre and telling it that is where my library is. No save to disk needed.

I think all you need to do is place the books you want to add in a different directory that calibre doesn't use internally and add them.

Let me know,

I am doing that. The books I am testing this with are in html format. They are in the /Desktop/Test folder. The Calibre folder is /Documents/eBooks.
(1) I add them to Calibre using Add Books.
(2) Calibre creates a subfolder of /Documents/eBooks based on what it perceives to be the author (based, I assume, on the filename). It creates a file in this new subfolder with a .zip extension.
(3) I then change and correct the Author, Title information, and tried adding a Series name and Book # in those Metadata fields.
(4) I then used Convert to create a .Mobi file.
(5) I can see the .mobi file created in the same subfolder that has the .zip extension.
I did this with about 5 such files as a test.
But, when I closed and re-opened Calibre, the Library was empty, although all the new sub-folders and files and a Metadata.db file were all present in the Calibre folder specified in #2 above.
Also, Remove Book caused the entire new sub-folder to be deleted.

So, all I am trying to accomplish is what I said above, and have the new Metdata retained and the Library retained when I close and re-open Calibre.