Quote:
Originally Posted by ownedbycats
You don't need anything custom.
Included in the zip file is a 0-byte dummy.paperbook file that I add to every physical book in my library.
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I know you can do this and it would work perfectly fine. In practice though its a 1 book at the time. Add the book and then manually create all the information of the book. name, author, comment, image etc.. if your lucky it has an isbn you can put in and calibre will add all that. My library that would work for 98 percent of all the fiction and about 85% of the non fiction, then there are the ones that have isbns but wont correctly pull the data with the given isbn. at over 10,000 books one by one.. i would be growing old by the time I got it finished.
its horrible enough doing the batches of 20 or 30 books at the time and validating them. They have to be entered into the database perfectly. You can do a computer scan of a the physical books to find one that some of the info is wrong like author or title etc.. at least in calibre you've got filename, title and author fields, crazy amount of tags etc.. even if it imports wrong and isn't sorted correctly a quick search by keywords will pull even most of those books that didn't import totally correct up. I don't worry supper hard about everything importing correctly in calibre and have days were i go back and correct stuff. In calibre the database and the actual books are almost one and the same. You search and see some books that don't look right at all. you open file and see what it actual is and make an edit.
contrast a physical library... you would have to go through the library one by one and do a complete physical inventory book by book. But that doesn't tell you if books are missing and you didn't find them. That would require you to do a second full inventory and look books up in the software and comparing if its on the shelf. Maybe it is and is out of order? digital books are so much easier than physical even when they have messed up metadata. The messed up metadata is still attached to the book file which you can double click on and open up and go.. "hey thats not the right book."
my head hurts.
at the end of the day scale and design philosophy makes calibre hard to use for physical books and reader ware hard to use for digital.