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Old 06-01-2010, 09:39 PM   #6
Worldwalker
Curmudgeon
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Posts: 3,085
Karma: 722357
Join Date: Feb 2010
Device: PRS-505
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anarel View Post
But the problem would still be that the listing in the Calibre library would be the original, not the converted wouldn't it?
Calibre organizes books, not files.

The "book" you see in calibre can actually consist of any number of files, each of them in a different format. For instance, I recently bought a bunch of books from O'Reilly, and downloaded both the pdf and epub (where available) formats. Why both? Because pdf is a terrible format for a 6" ebook reader, but it's great for the computer; the ebook reader (a Sony PRS-505) does much better with the epub. So if I want to read it on the computer, I use "view specific format" (alt-V) and pick PDF; if I transfer it to my 505, calibre automatically sends the epub instead, as Stinger explained a bit ago. There's just one listing for the book in calibre, and it uses whichever file what I'm doing actually needs. If I had a Kindle, too, and had prc/mobi books for it, then if I was loading a book on the Kindle, calibre would automatically pick mobi instead of epub or pdf (unless pdf was all that was available).

That's why I keep hammering on the idea that calibre is managing books, and the files don't matter. You don't need to worry about the files your ebooks represent any more than you worry about the tracks and sectors those files represent. Calibre knows what kind of files your device prefers (and you can set the priority yourself) and tends to all the details for you, just like the operating system knows which track and sector to fetch and takes care of that for you.

It takes a bit of getting used to, and it feels kind of weird at first -- after all, you've spent all this time dealing with files, not books -- but it's so much easier to use, once you've made that cognitive jump.
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