|
Calibre does leave your files where they are. It just makes its own copies that it can have exclusive access to. Pretend those don't exist, if you like, and do whatever you like with your original files.
I spent about five years (yes, a lot of that prior to getting a dedicated ebook reader) using the filesystem to organize my books. It took me a bit to get used to calibre. The real breakthrough, as I've described it here, was understanding that calibre organizes books, not files.
In the time I've been on MobileRead, I think I've seen one person who actually did have a critical functionality problem with calibre's file organization -- he used some program for managing citations of scientific literature that had its own idea of how files of said papers/books ought to be organized. But for all the rest of us, it's a matter of habit. We're used to thinking of books as the computer files that represent them. But just as those files are really an abstraction of data really stored by track and sector, books in calibre are an abstraction of files. An abstraction of an abstraction.
Yes, there are occasionally things that someone needs to do to data on a physical level (say, if you're writing a disk defragging program). But most of us don't; we're fine with files. The same thing is true of calibre: there are some people, like the fellow with the citations and the attitude problem, who really do need a specific file organization. But most of us don't; we're fine with books.
Why do you need to access your ebook files directly?
(no, that's not a sarcastic question; if I know what you are doing, I might be able to explain how it can be done -- possibly more efficiently -- in calibre).
|