Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterT
@alikayn: If you were using a program (say Outlook) to organize Contacts,
Calibre is no different; it is designed to allow you to access material from within it, via it's interfaces.
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Peter T. IMO that is an invalid comparison.
Outlook keeps its all data (content & indices) in personal & offline storage table's (pst & ost files), there is one file for each mail account - arguably the equivalent of a library. These files can only be 'made sense of' with Outlook itself or a program using the relevant API libraries. On Vista/Win7 the default location for the files is "C:\Users\<myuserid>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlo ok" which is not a location users normally browse with their file manager. If a user wants the pst/ost files to be stored in a different location then he/she will have to get Outlook move them - but they I will still have to use Outlook or a program that uses the relevant APIs to access them in any meaningful way.
By contrast Calibre keeps its content (the books) as well known files types in a vanilla folder structure (i.e. no special attributes or permissions) with meaningful folder and file names, its indices are kept in the same folder structure as a sqllite databases - metadata.db. On Vista/Win7 the default location for Calibre's data is C:\Users\<myuserid>\Documents - which is definitely a location users browse with their file managers. given that it's often 'aliased' to Possessive Personal Pronoun Documents i.e.
My Documents
IMO its not unreasonable to assume that if an application puts thousands of folders and files, with meaningful & familiar names, into a users My Documents directory, which can be read and written by many off the shelf programs then the user is going to start poking around and wanting more control.
If Calibre defaulted to keeping all its data in Appdata, or even in the users home directory (as it does for linux and os/x) then the author and book folders would not be
as visible to the user and the number of 'complaints' on this issue would probably be a lot fewer.
Yes I know the user can relocate the Calibre libraries to a somewhere more obscure. But that is also the opposite of Outlook, which defaults to an obscure location.
To use an analogy - If you don't want your child to eat candy/sweets/lollies then you don't put a bowl of them under your child's nose :lol:
BR