Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
calibre does not compress files, it does not store all books in one file, it is perfectly possible to do differential backups with calibre's library (I do it all the time). You can change where calibre stores its books, in fact you can have multiple libraries at different locations. You can run calibre entirely off a USB key if you want to.
The OP really should ask about things before making assumptions and then complaining.
And I defy anyone to give me a single use case where having calibre support their pet folder structure is better.
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Calibre making a copy of my files, and then not even keeping those files current until I "save them out" is the #1 reason I don't use the GUI portion of the program at all. (#2 is the terrible performance, but that's not Calibre's fault, it's the fault of the UI libraries it uses)
The way I maintain my books is that I have a "source" directory structure with all my source ebooks. When I get a new book, I add it to the source folder and then run a script to generate the LRF and Kindle versions. My LRF and Kindle directories are synchronised the the other PCs I use and the other PCs in my household. If there is a metadata issue, I edit it directly in the source file and regenerate the terminal formats. Same for fixing book content (I'm amazed at the errors publishers will tolerate in their ebooks).
I do most of my ebook management from the command line and I often will edit a book and format shift it to epub for permanent storage (well, I _was_ doing that when Calibre used ePub as it's "internal" format, but now I may have to go for OEB of some sort. Kovid, is there a format I can use which will result in minimal processing on the input plugin? Preferably one that Calibre can output as a single file.)
There is just no way using the Calibre GUI would work for my use case. I rely on the specific directory structure I created too much. With the Sony software, I just rescan the LRF directory, and it updates the changed files, which is still worse than I'd prefer, but I learned a long time ago that I'm not an "apple" person. (iTunes is possibly the worst designed piece of crap I've ever had the misfortune of being forced to use IMO, and I hate that all these other "media management" programs try to ape it's behaviours)
I don't see any reason why Calibre's copy-til-you-drop philosophy is better than the Sony software's usage of full filepaths, and a lot of reasons, in my case, at least, why it's a lot worse.
Quote:
Originally Posted by corroonb
Thanks for explaining that.
Would a stripped down version of calibre which could only convert to one format (chosen at installation) be less resource intensive? Could this be done with some sort of plug-in system (just for more advanced users)?
I have very little programming experience so apologies if these questions are stupid.
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No, what would improve the speed and resource usage of Calibre would be writing it in a language other than Python. I doubt that will happen. (I've got nothing against Python and QT, but they certainly can't be called zippy compared to native.)