Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
You know you can launch a book in the Calibre viewer directly from the file manager, without opening Calibre itself, do you?
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Yes, I do that with mobi and azw3 books, for which I do not have another viewer capable of opening (as far as I know). It's the clunkiest and most sluggish viewer of all the ones I use, but it does work for those formats (which I rarely have to resort to anyway - I have much more epub and pdf, and those open with FBReader and Document Viewer by default).
Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
@Doranwen - You can also put a links to files in a long text column, but if you move the file the link will not be repaired - see attached screen shots.
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Ah, I see. I rarely move them, but it's not an impossibility, and if I did, a whole chunk of files would move at once. But eh, at this point I've given up on trying to put my digital books in a library since the current OS lets me find individual books by title or author or subject fairly well (I really haven't had much trouble *finding* any books I want to find, in general), and everything else would require tons of work at this point. (I'd have had to start nearly two decades ago if I wanted to keep on top of it, and I'd have had a major problem when I changed OSes from Windows to Linux anyway.) If I want to create a custom library and I don't mind adding them one by one, GCStar definitely looks like the best option, as it has launching capability and excellent fields for organizing, lots of ways to sort and find. (I've tried using it for my digital films, but other projects captured my attention before I had a chance to finish adding them.)
I did find a solution to the issue of being able to search multiple books for words (the task that was the final prompt for this entire post, as my searching had indicated it
might be possible to search within books using Calibre), after extensive searching and tweaking of search parameters online to pull up the right sort of thing (I kept getting results of pages full of terminal commands to find strings within multiple files via command-line).
While I have to make sure all the books I want to search are in specific folders (with no other books in those folders that I *don't* want searched), the program
Recoll does an excellent job of showing multiple search results within any books that are in the folders I tell it to index, and it'll show user-customizable sizes of strings (synthetic abstract context words, they call it) before and after the word in question. If I searched Hamlet for the word "question", for instance, with 3 words for context, I would get a result something like "…that is the
question. Whether 'tis nobler…" So it's not a custom library but at least it's possible to search specific folders of books and display multiple results that match the desired string, and it's able to search within all the needed file types.
While I don't think I will be using Calibre for anything more than converting and displaying the odd mobi/azw3, I do appreciate all the information, as it's helped me decide what will and won't work for my rather unique situation. (I don't know of anyone who organizes their files or uses their computer quite the way I do mine..) I'll leave this as a definite recommendation for anyone who wants an excellent "search within books in folders" program to try out
Recoll - it's apparently available on Windows and Mac as well as Linux. Might be overkill for most, but for the few who need that sort of search capability, it's fantastic. I'm relieved to have found it.