[Epsilon Rose]

Originally Posted by Quoth

No, that's not how Calibre works. The ebook files only exist as ebook files because it's not viable to import the actual ebook content into an SQL database, esp. SQLight, so the actual SQL database file has the ebook file information. You need to treat the ebooks imported to Calibre as if they are invisible, except for backups.


There is a Calibre "Save to Disk" and that should be used with the SD card for the Ereader if not connecting it via USB. I connect my phones, tablets, ereaders etc via USB direct to Calibre and manage them. I backup the Calibre "system" including the private ebook files with rsync when Calibre is not running.

Ok ... But those "invisible" files still take up disk space. They'll take up the same amount of disk space as the actual "read" copies of the files. That may not sound like much, but when you're dealing with graphic novels and manga that you want to be decently high quality, it starts to add up pretty quickly. I don't want to dedicate that much space to my library on my computer's built in drive, especially when I won't be doing most of my reading on said computer.

I'm also aware of the "Save to Disk" feature; it's what I was referencing when I mentioned the export feature. (Sorry for the mistake.) The problem with handling it this way is it, functionally, doubles the size of my library, which I'd rather not do for what I hope are obvious reasons.

With Save to Disk, you can use templates to have any filestructure you want. But any ereader App (Moonreader, KOReader) that only uses a file system interface is like 1960s computing and gets very awkward with more than a few hundred titles. I found KOReader nearly unusable with 6,500. Also file organisation can't do collections (files would have to be duplicated) or series or multiple author titles easily.

I feel like you have an unrealistic view of how computing worked in the 60s ... or how people used computers for most of the time since then.

The SD card has to have an export from the library, it's not the library, and you can use template to have the structure you want for Moonreader.

Unless the "library" can not have the files for the books, and just stores data about them, the SD card needs to have the library.

Originally Posted by Quoth

Yes, Moonreader isn't the best. Lithium and Pocketbook apps are far better (even free Pocketbook, uncheck 2nd box at install time). If the ebook needs tweaks, fix it in Calibre Editor. You can check an added ebook quickly with Calibre viewer and fix something faster than fiddling with over-ride settings in an ereader app.

Unless I'm looking at the wrong versions of Lithium and Pocketbook, both of those seem to have some very serious shortcomings.

Lithium seems to only read EPUBs or, at least, they don't bother to list compatibility with anything else. And, while Pocketbook does have compatibility with all of the file formats I need (epub, pdf, cbr, cbz, probably a few other random ones), it doesn't seem to have any meaningful tools for actually viewing your library. As far as I can tell, if you aren't viewing it by file structure, you're limited to filtering by file format, looking at manually created collections, or free-form text search. It can, apparently, sort by series, but you can't browse by series or see a list of series. I'm certainly not seeing any sort of tag filtering.