help me see how calibre would be useful

[bounce]

Would Calibre have any advantages for me?

Background:
I've got about 250gb of ebooks, maybe of which are things I had scanned by a company from my old collection of paper books. I use Marvin mostly as an e-reader these days but also own a Kindle. On an external hard drive I have the books organized in nested folders and I connect this to a PC or Mac which I side load into my Kindle or Dropbox for Marvin. I'm fairly quick at navigating the current file structure for books.

I'm curious about how I'd go about using the "portable" calibre hosted on dropbox for a collection this size? There's no way I can dish out for that many gigs on dropbox, do you see any advantages to me even using calibre (Marvin plug-in certainly), but what's so much better than using a file structure that I'm quick navigating? Seems I'd have to split up my collection and host a smaller one on Dropbox? Please discuss

[theducks]

Originally Posted by bounce

Would Calibre have any advantages for me?

Background:
I've got about 250gb of ebooks, maybe of which are things I had scanned by a company from my old collection of paper books. I use Marvin mostly as an e-reader these days but also own a Kindle. On an external hard drive I have the books organized in nested folders and I connect this to a PC or Mac which I side load into my Kindle or Dropbox for Marvin. I'm fairly quick at navigating the current file structure for books.

I'm curious about how I'd go about using the "portable" calibre hosted on dropbox for a collection this size? There's no way I can dish out for that many gigs on dropbox, do you see any advantages to me even using calibre (Marvin plug-in certainly), but what's so much better than using a file structure that I'm quick navigating? Seems I'd have to split up my collection and host a smaller one on Dropbox? Please discuss

Why Portable?
Why Dropbox?
Calibre Content Server on a host PC that is accessible from any device that has a browser, will do the job.

[bounce]

Nice. I had no clue about the "content" server, so there's something. Now that that's covered, what else is great about Calibre over a file structure I already easily navigate quickly? I've use Calibre for years for conversions, just haven't fully seen the need of it yet and I want to.

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by bounce

...what else is great about Calibre over a file structure I already easily navigate quickly? I've use Calibre for years for conversions, just haven't fully seen the need of it yet and I want to.

My answer to your question is: How I Manage eBooks with calibre.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by bounce

Nice. I had no clue about the "content" server, so there's something. Now that that's covered, what else is great about Calibre over a file structure I already easily navigate quickly? I've use Calibre for years for conversions, just haven't fully seen the need of it yet and I want to.

Simple: A file structure locks you to only the structure for locating the book

A Tag based system allows selection by any (combination of) tags

Author:Jones
Tags:Plugs, Electronics
Publisher:Sams
Date:<1980

[Adoby]

Test the cover view with virtual libraries and you will be converted.

Slick!

[speakingtohe]

I understand that you probably don't want to duplicate your collection but 25 GB is nothing in terms of storage. So no reason you can't have both.

When I started using calibre I was in the same boat. I imported books converted them, saved them to 'my' structure and deleted them.

Unfortunately I found myself doing this time and time again. Decide I want the series first in the filename, do again. Decide, no that is not right, author first, do again. Metadata wrong, do again.

I bit the bullet and imported all of the books (extreme pain but I got it done)
Took me quite a while to update and check metadata and decide how I wanted my books to
appear on my ereaders. but this was actually easier as time went on.

Like you I could always find my books and the ways of calibre were not so apparently advantageous at first.

Now it is in my mind the only way to go.
I can find a book or a group of books in a second or two (I am sure I could do that with the other file structure in less than a minute as well, perhaps as fast even)

I can store my own information for each book in calibre using either predefined or custom columns.

I can send the books to my various ereaders in whatever manner I chose, put them instantaneously in shelves or collections with very little intervention and if I want my collections different it only takes a very short time to accomplish this. A minute for me and maybe 3 minutes for calibre to make the changes. I don't have to send the books again, just change the driver config.

While many deplore calibre's file structure, for my needs it is as good as any. I often chose books based on genre. Many authors write in several genres. Elmore Leonard writes mysteries and westerns for example. If I had genre as my top level folder, I would need a subfolder for each author in each genre. If I chose authors as the top level I could need a genre subfolder for each level. What to do? With calibre I just need to categorize the book in my genre column. If I wanted to have a genre collection and an author collection without picking each author/genre one at a time and adding them, I could do this easily. Of course if you do not categorize your books this would have no value.

Basically with calibre I have the information I want all in one spot. I don't want the opf files or the cover.jpg file, but I am not overly upset by them. I do like the original file option so all of my data is pretty well doubled, but that is a matter of choice.

Helen

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

Simple: A file structure locks you to only the structure for locating the book

That's not entirely true, you can use symbolic/soft links to create different access paths to the same data which can be distributed over multiple devices including server devices.

Of course its nowhere near as flexible as calibre, but in some scenarios it can be the only viable choice.

Originally Posted by Adoby

Test the cover view with virtual libraries and you will be converted.

They would not convert me - I don't use either of them, the plugins (especially those from kiwidude) and custom columns were what 'converted' me, without them I wouldn't be using the calibre GUI.


@bounce I have no idea whether following would would work with OS/X alias files, and I'm not sure than Linux has the equivalent of shortcut files - I've never noticed them. If you don't use Windows then the rest of this is probably irrelevant.

In Windows 7-SP1 I can pass a shortcut file to calibre (via Windows Send To) and it will create a book record with the shortcut file. I can open the book and download metadata and use the basic features of calibre - but I can't do conversions, send to or save etc.

It could be a way to dip your toe in the water to explore the flexibility offered by calibre's database, custom columns etc without creating actual copies of the book files, which to many of us is an anathema. Once calibre has the shortcut file you can trash the one you sent with impunity The name of the shortcut file does not have to be same as the target, you can change it to one that calibre can easily ingest - eg 'author - title'.

If you run the DLT service (which is enabled by default) then Windows will take care of shortcut target renames and moves. Its a lot better at doing that in more recent editions of Windows than it was in XP and 2000.

I have not done much with this 'discovery' other than what I already indicated, for instance whether one can create books from shortcut files by any of the Add Books methods - I've only tried adding a shortcut file via Send To and dropping them into the Library list.

BR

[At_Libitum]

pfffew, I wouldn't even begin to start thinking of managing my library manually trying to keep the metadata up-to-date or trying to find which book again it was I got reminded of by reading another...especially not the way my memory is failing

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@bounce I have no idea whether following would would work with OS/X alias files, and I'm not sure than Linux has the equivalent of shortcut files - I've never noticed them. If you don't use Windows then the rest of this is probably irrelevant.

Linux has something much better - symlinks. It IS the file as far as the filesystem is concerned.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Linux has something much better - symlinks. It IS the file as far as the filesystem is concerned.

That's not actually true, a symlink in linux is just a plain text file containing the path to the actual file, with a flag in its metadata to indicate it is a symlink.

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/symlink.7.html

You can read its contents, as opposed to the contents of the file it points to, with the readlink() function

http://linux.die.net/man/2/readlink

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

That's not actually true, a symlink in linux is just a plain text file containing the path to the actual file, with a flag in its metadata to indicate it is a symlink.

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/symlink.7.html

You can read its contents, as opposed to the contents of the file it points to, with the readlink() function

http://linux.die.net/man/2/readlink

Okay, well, the actual PROGRAMMING behind it... but in terms of usability, that's what it is. The filesystem will cleverly pretend in most cases, that it IS the file.

[kovidgoyal]

It's not the filesystem that pretends it's a file, it's most of the userland programs in linux, like cp, mv, find and so on. Every application (that does anything beyond simple reading and writing of files) written to work on linux has to be specifically aware of symlinks and deal with them.

For example, something as simple as renaming a file, if the file is a symlink, what should happen? Should the symlink be renamed or the file it points to? If the symlink contains a relative path, should it be updated?

Or consider enumerating all files in a directory tree, using symlinks to directories, you can easily create an infinite loop, so every bit of code that does this has to special case the possibility of infinite loops.

Then, there is no efficient way to get a list of all symlinks to a file, so it is not possible to rename files and preserve symlinks to them.

Symlinks can undoubtedly be handy, but they are a horrible hack, designed to try to workaround the limitations of the filesystem as datastore. It's a pity that we are stuck with the filesystem -- a datastore that was designed when computers were limited to a few kilobytes of RAM.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Linux has something much better - symlinks. It IS the file as far as the filesystem is concerned.

If you are implying that a Windows shortcut is a poor man's symbolic link then you should read this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link.

[NTFS] Symbolic links... were introduced with the modifications made to the NTFS file system with Windows Vista, but available through filter drivers[1] for Windows XP.

A pedant would say that Vista 'exposed' them in a Windows API, but they'd been there since NTFS 3.1 and could be accessed via was once called a 'shim' - now branded as a 'filter driver' Ψ

An NTFS symbolic link is not the same as a Windows shortcut file, which is a regular file. The latter may be created on any filesystem (such as the earlier FAT32), may contain metadata (such as an icon to display when the shortcut is viewed in Windows Explorer), and is not transparent to applications.

My emphasis.

Why did MS keep them under wraps 'til Vista - Cairo/Longhorn/WinFS and all that .... Ψ^2

BR

[bounce]

@speakingtohe Thanks for the detailed response and you've convinced me to give it ago with some of my collection. I think you misread where I wrote it's 250 gb not 25 gb though

@betterred kiwidude plug-ins I'll look into those

@unbogling that is a massive post, bookmarked and I'll dig into it later for sure.

I guess my situation is that I have a large list (48pages) in simplenote of books prioritized by what I want to read next and if it's not high priority it's sorted by subject. From here, I just use "everything" to quickly search that next book on Win or spotlight on Mac, so it hardly matters I have a sorted file system or proprietary software. I know there are times when an author pens under different genres like Iain Banks, but I don't know that use case is gonna come up much for me. I basically know what I want to read and already spend practically no time just going to the next book in my list which I prefer over situation where i'm herding. I know Calibre is far more than this though and curious to see what I can do with it, so I will try it out!

One thing I'd like other than my sequential list is someway to inject some serendipity into what I read next and maybe I can figure out a way to do that with Calibre or a plug-in. Thanks for the opinions so far