[Epsilon Rose]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I used computers in the 60's. In the 70's I had my own home computers (4300 solder connections and you too could have your own personal computer). For me with a calibre library of ~16,000 ebooks, metadata search (title, series, author, etc.) is a necessity. Even when I had <500 books back in the 2010's, try to tailor a directory structure that made it easy to find books was a total pain. And yes, storing files in directory structures with no metadata is so 80s.

I never said I didn't want to use metadata. In fact, I was pretty explicit that it was an obviously useful way to handle things, provided you can actually make use of it.

Given that in my current computer collection, the smallest hard drive is my Raspberry Pi with a 256GB NVMe drive and my 16,000 books take 41GB of space, I see no issues with keeping my calibre library local.

Ok. I'm going to guess those are mostly text based books. If you want to read high quality comics, then storage space gets eaten up much more quickly than that. To use real world numbers, downloading a single instance of every comic in the Best of BOOM comic bundle takes up about 13GB. I have more than 10 graphic novel bundles, even before I get in to the actual books or TTRPGs. I don't want to dedicate over 100GB of storage to them on a device where I don't intend to read them very often, especially when I already have other things competing for that space.

As for your worries about two libraries, the calibre library would be attached to your main computer. The SD card would be inserted into the computer and any new ebooks could be copied to the SD card. No need to have two copies on your computer.

I didn't say two libraries on my computer. I said two libraries. The one on my computer is the one I don't want.

You could also look at KOReader since it can use the calibre metadata file to search. You could set up your SD card as an device using Preferences => Tweaks => search for folder. Add the path to your SD card folder that will be used (i.e. F:/mylibrary where the SD card is mounted as drive F: and you want to use the mylibrary folder for your books. Update the ebooks on the card and move it back to your Boox.

I've seen KOReader recommended before, but unless I'm missing something, it seems like the only way it allows you to browse your library is via the folder structure?