Quote:
Originally Posted by Epsilon Rose
I find it strikingly strange that the idea of storing a library on an SD card, moving it between devices, and using an app to interface with it on Android is seen as such an impossible use case. Especially because, at the end of the day, all it really requires is an app that can interact with a library in the same way Calibre does or just reference the files Calibre already generates to do the same thing. The fact that Calibre already comes in a portable version means that someone already recognized that this is something users might want to do. It's just that the current implementation is limited to PCs, for some reason.
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That virtually all the ePub renderers I've looked at show many signs that the developers' suffered from NIH (not invented here) and insisted on doing everything their way. IMNSHO, Moon+ is a terrible product since it has little if any respect for publisher CSS even if you manage to find the toggle to enable publisher CSS never mind worrying about interoperability with other renders. But then I have the same opinion about many of the Android and iOS ePub renderers.
That no one has managed to create an Android version of calibre might be an indication that it's not as trivial a task as you seem to believe. Some of the >2200 forks of calibre were attempts to port to other operating systems including Android. None of the ones I looked at got to a gamma version much less code stable enough to release. The old saw that "Every programming task is easy to a non-programmer" comes to mind.
The portable version of calibre differs from the non-portable version more in the number of Windows variables set by it's startup bootstrap before launching the calibre executable than anything else. For Linux and MacOS, it is much easier to install and run calibre from a random location.