[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by prd0

Yes. But I don't want 2 exact copies on my hard drive.

Then you can't use Calibre.

Is there any way to alleviate that?

Nope.

And finding a single book within 500 folders jungle is very hard. And it is not 500 folders, more like 1000 folders for 500 books. Folders are made to make search easier, categorize, and divide files. Not to make finding specific file more difficult. If you put a file in a folders in a filing cabinet, would you arrange it so that you can make it harder to search than piling it on top of your table?

But the whole point of the database is you use CALIBRE to find that book, not searching yourself on the disk. Just load up Calibre and type in the book you're looking for, boom, it's there. If you want to see the actual files on disk, select the entry in Calibre and hit 'o' to open the containing folder.

I have tried to replace authors with VOY/TNG/JADE or something resembling the series, but that would erase the author information, permanently.

It's hard to know what you did wrong since you were presumably trying to reorganize the files on disk. Again, as I said, change the authors as you want, and then do SAVE TO DISK and save a copy elsewhere, or SEND TO DEVICE if you want to have the book on your ereader. You may also CONVERT the files to a different format. All of these will contain the updated metadata except in certain cases.

If it really needs to arrange the book that way, can't it make a smaller shortcut? It utilize SqlLite, can't it store its information on SQL instead of rearranging and duplicating my books?

The rearrangement and duplication of your books is so Calibre still has the data to work with no matter how you mangle your copies.

I can't send to device with calibre. It didn't recognize an iphone. The only way to get my books are using bonjour or according to manual, http://ipaddr.local:8080/stanza. And both are not working. The server locked up my computer, and I am forced to kill it. Besides, when I browse the server using my iphone to get the book, it always shows none.

Can't really help you there; someone else who has used Calibre with iphone will have to chime in. You might try posting a new thread specifically with that problem.

I also don't want to edit any info on my books, I only need to convert to ePub. Sadly, the only one I've found that can read .lit and convert to epub correctly is only calibre. I don't want cataloguing, I have my way to organize them, and I don't want anything to mess with it. I only need the converter so I can read them on epub. But Calibre converter is also buggy. I couldn't batch convert everything at once. It always shows some error every 4-5 files on batch converts, or some taking too long i.e 1 hour or so, and I am on i7. 1 hour only to convert 1 book on i7 is definitely not normal, so I need to convert one by one manually.

If you run into an error, you should report what that is; it's probably file-specific and you won't be able to convert that file. 1 hour doesn't necessarily mean it's taking too long, though; some books do take that long.

Saving to another place would make it duplicate, and I want to avoid that.

If you only want Calibre to convert, then I suggest that you drag the LIT book into Calibre, edit the metadta, do the convert to EPUB, wait for the conversion to finish, do a "Save to Disk" of the EPUB file somewhere else on your drive where you want it, and then hit the delete key to remove that book's entry from Calibre. Then Calibre will no longer serve as a database for your books nor will it retain a copy.