Managing my ebooks

[pwalker8]

Right now I manage my ebooks using Calibre. I have been using for several years and it works well. The problem is what I really want is Calibre on the iPad, for those times where I'm deciding what to read next. Yes, the category feature for iBooks is a huge improvement and it's not bad, but it doesn't quite do what I want.

I ran across an app called Book Crawler today. So far it looks pretty good. I managed to export my Calibre catalogue out and import it into Book Crawler. It claims to be able to link to iBooks but I haven't been able to get that to work yet.

Has anyone else tried this app? If I can get Calibre, Book Crawler and iBooks to work together, then that would be perfect.

[pwalker8]

Ah well, Book Crawler doesn't actually pull up a specific book in iBook or Kindle. Apparently neither the iBook app, not Kindle app support external linking. You can put in a URL to goodreader, but it's a manual process and doesn't seem to be very useful. The author apparently does plan to pursue syncing with Calibre though, which will be good.

Book Crawler does have some good features. I can sort by series and genres, which is nice when trying to figure out what to read next. Perhaps over time, the iBook or Kindle apps will support the openURL call.

[ivers]

What I do is use the superhero team of Calibre, Calibre OPDS, Dropbox (a 2gb free account is generally roomy enough for a thousand or so ebooks), and Stanza. Search around the forum and you'll find directions for putting your Calibre library "in the cloud" using those tools, and then you can browse your entire collection while away from your computer and download whichever book suits your whim. (You can also browse the html book catalog Calibre OPDS generates from Safari etc). Not sure what sort of iBooks integration can be done (maybe using the Dropbox app will let you import the epubs to iBooks rather than Stanza?) because I don't really bother with iBooks.

Here are the instructions I used
http://dearauthor.com/ebooks/create-...-opds-dropbox/

Hope this helps you get something sorted out

obligatory dropbox referral link: if you signup using a referral, you and the referrer each get an extra 250mb of storage. yay!
http://db.tt/nUEULf8

[slayda]

Originally Posted by ivers

What I do is use the superhero team of Calibre, Calibre OPDS, Dropbox (a 2gb free account is generally roomy enough for a thousand or so ebooks), and Stanza. Search around the forum and you'll find directions for putting your Calibre library "in the cloud" using those tools, and then you can browse your entire collection while away from your computer and download whichever book suits your whim. (You can also browse the html book catalog Calibre OPDS generates from Safari etc). Not sure what sort of iBooks integration can be done (maybe using the Dropbox app will let you import the epubs to iBooks rather than Stanza?) because I don't really bother with iBooks.

Here are the instructions I used
http://dearauthor.com/ebooks/create-...-opds-dropbox/

Hope this helps you get something sorted out

obligatory dropbox referral link: if you signup using a referral, you and the referrer each get an extra 250mb of storage. yay!
http://db.tt/nUEULf8

Yes, this works pretty well but I agree with OP. I'd like to see Calibre on my iPad too.

[JMikeD]

Originally Posted by slayda

I'd like to see Calibre on my iPad too.

It's not going to happen, according to the author.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by JMikeD

It's not going to happen, according to the author.

Yea, I would be real surprised if it was going to happen, given the language that Calibre was written in. On the other hand, I could definitely see him providing some sort of sync mechanism.

[gwynevans]

If you're WiFi-ing on your local network, you can have Calibre run as a server and connect to it over HTTP from the iPad