New to Calibre: having problems

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by gweminence

lol...too rich.

Tell you what. Give me your longest, worst conversion file. If it takes my computer as long as you say, I'll publicly eat crow. If not...not.

Because here's a simple fact: conversions are a function of processing power, at their most basic level, it's a matter of how many cpu cycles it takes to make said conversion. It isn't a matter of what kind of file it is. It's a matter of what kind of muscle you bring to bear on it, and the algorithms used by calibre.

So. Tell me how you'd like me to acquire your worst nightmare-file. I'll even post the job results so you won't cry foul.

Deal?

I'm trying to restrain myself from becoming very impolite and uncivil in my answer.
If you haven't run across any conversions that take more than a few minutes, consider yourself lucky or having access to better source material than I have. The two ebooks I was thinking about are reference books that accompanied the paper book on a CD. They consist of about 20.000 HTML files each, every file encrusted with relatively pointless Javascript and other nasty stuff. I even removed the scripts from the files to get plain HTML before zipping them up and adding them to Calibre. The conversion, on a 2 GHz CPU with 1 GB RAM, took, as I stated, about 24 hours for each book. They still finished successfully.
Of course you're right, conversion time is a function of processing power. Still, if there is much to do, the conversion will take a long time. If you are too ignorant to see that, I suggest you go look for another topic that you can constructively participate in, unlike this one.

The books in question are by Bronstein and Stöcker. I would love to attach them and request a photo of your face when they're not still done after about 5 minutes, but for obvious copyright reasons, I cannot.

One last thing: If all you do, after someone states a fact, is ridiculing that fact, you may want to look for another forum. Around here, we try to help people who have problems using Calibre, not mock someone. Oh, and the 286 is actually the only model of the x86 variants up to Pentium 1 I didn't own, not that it matters.

[rsraman123]

Hi All,

Thanks for the responses. I let the file convert and it ended at around 45 mins. The resulting file though was 220MB (from an iput file of 3MB!!!) That is just too big. But I am moderately happy with the conversion process. I will also tweak around the input parameters and check to see if I can somehow reduce this. Thank you
RSR

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

Yes there is a reason, my library is kept in Dropbox and the space is limited.

What a great idea. Automatic backup and syncs. Thanks for the suggestion!

[jphphotography]

Just curious, did you try emailing it to your Kindle's @free.kindle.com address with "Convert" in the subject line? If you haven't it's worth a shot and won't cost you anything

[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by Manichean

I'm trying to restrain myself from becoming very impolite and uncivil in my answer.
If you haven't run across any conversions that take more than a few minutes, consider yourself lucky or having access to better source material than I have. The two ebooks I was thinking about are reference books that accompanied the paper book on a CD. They consist of about 20.000 HTML files each, every file encrusted with relatively pointless Javascript and other nasty stuff. I even removed the scripts from the files to get plain HTML before zipping them up and adding them to Calibre. The conversion, on a 2 GHz CPU with 1 GB RAM, took, as I stated, about 24 hours for each book. They still finished successfully.

I had a book like this. I had left it running for a few hours on my laptop with no progress so I gave up.

I moved it to my desktop - a custom-built, dual core Phenom 550 Black Edition, unlocked to quad core and overclocked to 3.6ghz w/ 6GB DDR2 800 - it took 6-12 hours (not sure how long since I left the computer running when I went to work at night).

It was the CSS that took a long time to crunch, like others have said. I'm sure this same process would have took a day or more on my laptop (A Turion x2 tablet convertible).

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by GreenMonkey

I had a book like this. I had left it running for a few hours on my laptop with no progress so I gave up.

I moved it to my desktop - a custom-built, dual core Phenom 550 Black Edition, unlocked to quad core and overclocked to 3.6ghz w/ 6GB DDR2 800 - it took 6-12 hours (not sure how long since I left the computer running when I went to work at night).

It was the CSS that took a long time to crunch, like others have said. I'm sure this same process would have took a day or more on my laptop (A Turion x2 tablet convertible).

Just as a side note: The multi-core isn't going to do squat for you while converting. The worker processes, from what I know, operate in one single thread each, thus, each worker process ( = each conversion) runs on one single core.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Manichean

Just as a side note: The multi-core isn't going to do squat for you while converting. The worker processes, from what I know, operate in one single thread each, thus, each worker process ( = each conversion) runs on one single core.

That was my read on it too. Multiple cores means you can run multiple conversions at once. That won't speed up the 1 book that is chock full of junk.

[DMB]

I am converting a 51-Mb PDF file to mobi at the moment. So far it has taken 43 minutes. I thought I'd try this one first. If it ever finishes I have two more volumes that add to 100+ Mb.

If it takes too long, I'll try Amazon.

[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by Manichean

Just as a side note: The multi-core isn't going to do squat for you while converting. The worker processes, from what I know, operate in one single thread each, thus, each worker process ( = each conversion) runs on one single core.

Ugh. Well I guess the raw CPU power was the main boost here.

Point is, we're not using 286 computers

[DMB]

Originally Posted by DMB

I am converting a 51-Mb PDF file to mobi at the moment. So far it has taken 43 minutes. I thought I'd try this one first. If it ever finishes I have two more volumes that add to 100+ Mb.

If it takes too long, I'll try Amazon.

Just to say, it took several hours and the final result was 1300+ Mb.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by DMB

Just to say, it took several hours and the final result was 1300+ Mb.

You both seem to have books that are made up of images. When calibre converts these files it must resize the images and increase dpi? This would explain why the books increased in size.

It seems that often when converting image scans calibre loses the images, I guess you are the lucky ones. If you both had regular text based books the resultant epubs would have been smaller than the original file.

Good Luck.