calibre: most desired feature, pony up for Kovid

[kovidgoyal]

Actually as far as the OPs problem is concerned, I think a better solution is to have bookit deliver the web pages directly to the reader. Since most content is not meant for long term archival anyway.


@beowulf
This can be done easily using the prs500 command.

[jotheman]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

The problem is that there isn't a reliable enough mechanism on the PRS500 to achieve true syncing. This is primarily because the 500 has no internal clock and times drift. So there's no reliable way of knowing when something is newer.

Well, as I can't manipulate files on the Reader anyway, why not just always sync the newest info from Calibre? Maybe queqe the file for syncing if the reader isn't connected and sync it directly, if it is.

It would make a lot of sense to me, if there was a folder system in Calibre. One could select the folders to sync with the Reader (deletions should also be synced), since some files might just be archived books that don't need to be on the device.

I still don't get why Sony won't allow me to delete files on the Reader. Isn't there some way to make this possible? Would make file management a lot easier.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by jotheman

Well, as I can't manipulate files on the Reader anyway, why not just always sync the newest info from Calibre? Maybe queqe the file for syncing if the reader isn't connected and sync it directly, if it is.

It would make a lot of sense to me, if there was a folder system in Calibre. One could select the folders to sync with the Reader (deletions should also be synced), since some files might just be archived books that don't need to be on the device.

I still don't get why Sony won't allow me to delete files on the Reader. Isn't there some way to make this possible? Would make file management a lot easier.

On a 500 you can't, but on a 505 you can manipulate files on the reader outside calibre. Actually even on a 500, you can use the commandline utilities to manipulate data on the device. I know that for the 500 there was a hack that allowed file deletion. Look for it on these forums.

As for a folder structure, that's what tags are for. Folders are just hierarchical tags, but there isn't sufficient depth of information in a book database to justify hierarchical tags. You can just use the search and the view sorting features to find books you want far more easily than navigating through a folder structure.

Also I dont really see the point of a sync feature. Apart form deleteing, do you really change information about books in the database after the initial import and metadata editing?

[jotheman]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Also I dont really see the point of a sync feature. Apart form deleteing, do you really change information about books in the database after the initial import and metadata editing?

Well, I have done so a few times (add tags, create series etc), mostly because I learned about the "series/tags = collections" fact a little late.

I searched the forums extensively but I couldn't find a hack that enebles me to delete files right on the reader (without it being connected to a Mac/PC, just to be clear). EDIT: kacir finally showed me this. I always thought it was just a developer thread, so I didn't check it. Forums can get a bit confusing, can't they?

For those "read-and-delete" files, I also created a new ticket with a feature request. Hope you don't mind me being such a pest

[jotheman]

I just checked the ticket and - it's already closed and implemented?

Man, Kovid, judging by the speed of your coding you must have six hands!

[kovidgoyal]

Just required 10 lines of code

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by jotheman

I just checked the ticket an - it's already closed and implemented?

Man, Kovid, judging by the speed of your coding you must have six hands!

Which feature are we talking about?

BOb

[jotheman]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Which feature are we talking about?

BOb

Check the ticket.

[edembowski]

Very nice, I just saw this. How do you change the default?

[Jelis]

Received my prs505 yesterday and today started sending books from calibre to the device, but too many books gives an error message and tried with smaller numbers: 15 books or so at the time. First batch worked, second did not, same number of books.

Anyone knows whether it has to be only 1 book at the time may be?
Thanks

Jelis

[Jelis]

Sorry for intruding on this thread, still find this forum a bit confusing.

I decided to try and upload the books one by one and everything worked fine until number 6, same error message, number 7 idem and from then on everything went fine.

The 2 titles are from the Upload section here and I will contact the author after trying this out some more.

Jelis

[kovidgoyal]

As far as I know batch uploads should work fine, though I typically never upload more than 3-4 books at a time.

[Jelis]

You are right, Kovid, about batch uploads, played around with it a bit this morning but as I said above I seem to have 2 bad apples in the batch and they throw everything off!

The other thing I noticed or imagined is that individual uploads are faster than the batches, so clicking away it is...

Thanks once again
Jelis

[FizzyWater]

I'm afraid my "wishlist" is fairly unexciting compared to some of the others listed. Personally, I'd like to see a GUI command to not force full justification on my paragraphs. (I believe this is possible through a command line, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do the command line stuff with Calibre. If some kind soul were to write a "how-to" along the same lines as the one available for working with igorsk's scripts, I for one would be truly grateful!)

I'd also like to see a feature like the one in the ETI software for creating IMPs, where you are able to display the author name as "Jane Doe" but sort the author name as "Doe Jane". (I tried using the "author sort" field for that, but it must have a different function than I'd assumed).

[jotheman]

Dear Kovid,

I am still struggling a bit with creating custom news recipies. I can't even get the redirect to print versions working, so I just settled for a little "extra content" and create un-tweaked recipies.

However, I noticed that at the beginning of each article, there is a "skip to main content" link, obviously created by calibre. It doesn't seem to skip exactly to the main content, but it is still great, for I don't have to flip through, like, 10 pages to get to the article, in most cases the article will be on the next page after the link-jump. But I have to wonder: as calibre can detect the main content, how can I automatically exclude everything before that?

Also, I wonder if it is possible to have the number of articles included in each feed of a fetched news recipe shown between it's title (on the first page of the document, the one with the section list).

I won't annoy you extensively with the problems I have regarding the chinese content of my feeds, but how do I set the encoding of both, the content of the original RSS feed and the main article? I now have the problem that I get garbled text for the section menus, but correctly encoded text in the main articles...

Cheers,



jo