|
There are, in my opinion, a couple of related issues here that are of importance but are not being specifically mentioned. Noting these might help to clarify the larger issues which adversely affect the initial request.
Calibre, as platform independent library management software, is not meant to be an ereader. It is meant to organize and transfer ebooks, providing automation for some of these tasks. Being platform independent, calibre is not reliant on any computer operating system, or ereader software. Hardware, in the form of the computer calibre runs on or the ereader itself, is also ignored as much as possible - making exceptions only where accessing the files in storage are concerned. Effectively calibre performs regardless of the hardware or software with which it must interact.
With this in mind, re-examining the request for the ability to mark a book as "Read? Y/N" or with a "Date Last Read" (or some equivalent functionality) exceeds the design philosophy of calibre. [Please note, both terms in quotes are my attempt to reduce the requests to the simplest form.]
The initial request was to interact with the Sony Reader. It would require altering the Sony software to add a feature that is not currently available. Trying to implement something like this would be nearly impossible (for a 3rd party programmer), might be illegal and would most definitely void any warranty users' have on their expensive ereader equipment. Trying to implement this feature for all ereaders would be a massive programming and hardware testing effort. The result would move calibre into "bloatware".
Most calibre users are people who will read, and re-read, their ebooks frequently. This makes a field dedicated to a "Read? Y/N" status of little value. Particularly as Kovid has mentioned, you can generate the equivalent affect through tagging and searching.
Date fields fall under a similar issue because they become ambiguous. "Date Last Read" would be great - as long as you remember to update the field. At which point you could simply tag the book as "Read". Which puts you right back in the previous paragraph's example.
If the focus is with the news rather than books, I thought - and I could be mistaken here as I don't use this feature - that calibre emailed news to users and then automatically deleted those news items. Assuming for the moment calibre retains a copy, a search and manual deletion should be fairly straight forward.
|