Question about Calibre 0.7.1 and Kindle 2

[Bluesman7]

Downloaded the latest version of Calibre and so far it looks like a winner!
I really like the flexibility of the tags and user defined categories.

Quick question before I plug in my K2 to Calibre.

Since I upgraded the K2 from 2.3.3 to version 2.5, I have created about 15 or so folders (collections) in Kindle to house my books. (Literature, Mystery, Historical Fiction, etc).

The latest incarnation of Calibre won't (I hope) move any of my 300 plus books out of the folders I created on the Kindle will it? I'd hate to have done all that work for nothing. It is important to me to keep those folders intact.

Thanks in advance and apologies if this was addressed in another thread that I didn't catch.

[kovidgoyal]

0.7 doesn't, (as yet) know anything about collections on the kindle. When it does, the way it will work is that you will create tags in calibre and those tags will become collections on the Kindle.

[Bluesman7]

Kovid, thanks for your reply but I'm not sure what this means.

If I want to retain the fifteen or so folders (collections) I presently have on my Kindle without having the books moved out of those groupings, is there anything I can or need to do?

As much as I love Calibre, I prefer to just add a book to main memory (usually just one at a time) and then assign the book to one of my folders on the Kindle after I've ejected.

Please tell me that this is still possible and what I need to do to maintain this continuity.

Thank you again.

[kovidgoyal]

I doubt this will be possible. Why do you want to manage collections on your Kindle rather than in calibre? It's a lot easier to do that in calibre.

[Bluesman7]

I guess it's just because I spent a couple of hours organizing my books into fifteen or so categories that I felt defined most of the 300+ books presently in my Kindle's collection. (Many or most of these books had been transferred to Kindle's main memory from recent versions of Calibre.)

Now, I realize that many of the books have a tremendous number of tags within the Calibre's downloaded metadata.

I guess I'm trying to avoid having to recreate all those folders in Calibre (as tags or whatever) and then having to select all 300+ books again and assign them to the proper groups within Calibre in order to get them arranged (again) on the Kindle.

I'm probably misunderstanding something but I don't want to end up with groupings based upon tags I hadn't originally created. (For example, a book on the Civil War might have tags such as history, 1861-1865, Union, Confederacy, War Between The States, states rights etc. I just want to put the book into my simple folder.)

So, if this isn't an option, can you tell me what my Kindle will look like after I've connected to Calibre?

[kovidgoyal]

You can control what metadata in calibre gets turned into collections. As far as 0.7.1 is concerned, it won't turn anything into collections since it doesn't know about collections on the Kindle.

Once calibre gets support for collections on the Kindle, you can go to preferences->plugins->device interface plugins and customize the kindle plugin, telling it what metadata to turn into collections. You can ask it to create collections from tags/authors/series etc.

Eventually you will be able to ask it to create collections from custom columns as well.

[Bluesman7]

I hope someone who has already created folders/collections in version 2.5 will chime in and let me know if everything remained intact after sending a book to his Kindle with version 0.7.0 or later.

And I apologize if I am coming across as a Luddite. (It's not that I'm lazy, I just like the way I have things set up is all. )

EDITED TO ADD:

I guess if no other option is enabled or available the alternative will be to save the file to the desktop and load into Kindle's folder manually but I hope there will be a more elegant solution.

[eboyhan]

I just started a thread outlining one interaction I found between Calibre 0.7.1 and kindle 2.5.2

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86523

It appears that Amazon may be adding info to title metadata for collections management purposes. Going forward I would hope at a minimum on the Calibre side that it be able to keep track of collections membership when doing a Calibre add books. When sending to kindle, getting them into the proper collections may be problematical. I suspect that it is using the ASIN# added to the title to figure out what collections it belongs in when retrieving books from the Amazon archive. How non Amazon archive books and stuff coming from Calibre might be handled vis a vis collections membership, I haven't a clue.

[Bluesman7]

Looks like I may be using the "desktop" transfer for a while.

I love the fact that in Calibre I can look up any of my books by genre, author, read/unread etc but I also like the simple option of sending a book to Kindle's main memory without any other consequences. It allows me to put the book where I prefer rather than have the program decide (issues of organization).

Seems like there should be a way to accommodate this (at least at some juncture).

[Stinger]

Originally Posted by Stinger

I did the same thing myself until recently. I never really used the Tags in Calibre for my purposes, so I didn't really care what they were set to. I've since discovered you can use the download metadata feature of Calibre (for the description and cover picture), but can disable the download of tags and/or ratings. You'll find this setting if you go to the 'Metadata download plugin' section in the prefs->plugins.

Then, like I said above, you can wipe all the current tags in your Calibre library and apply the organization structure you devised within Calibre without fear of it getting re-organized on you.

So you can make Calibre work like you want it to (yay!), but it's gonna require you to essentially re-do in Calibre what you already did manually on the reader.

Just adding a copy of the post I made regarding this in another thread that we kind of hijacked :/ for reference

[Bluesman7]

Thanks. Your input was very helpful and it pretty much confirmed what I thought might be the case.

That said, I wonder if it's currently safe to allow the Kindle to sync with "this" version of Calibre since it doesn't support Kindle collections. If it allows me to continue to send to main memory without changing any of my folders/collections within Kindle, we are golden. (At least up until the version when Calibre will do so.)

[Stinger]

@Kovid:

When/if Calibre does support collections on the Kindle. Will there be a checkbox in the device interface to just disable any TAG->Collections mapping? (like there is now with the sub-directory checkbox)

[kovidgoyal]

You can already specify what metadata is turned into collections ona per device basis.

[Stinger]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You can already specify what metadata is turned into collections ona per device basis.

Right, but I'm asking if it will possible to disable this functionality altogether (disable any metadata->collection mapping).

For example, in the Sony interface, if I just removed the default 'series' and 'tags' from the textbox. This would disable collection creation right? Will it be the same case for the Kindle?

[kovidgoyal]

It's the same for all devices. No entires => no collections