Calibre: I do not get it

[barryem]

Originally Posted by Alpha o

I'm glad to see others in confusion over Calibre. No one has ever said, nor can I find an extension that will search your hard drive for books and list them and duplicates in one place. I'm a believer in backup, backup, and have too many.

Assuming you're using Windows the best tool for that is probably Windows Explorer. Open it on This PC if you're using a recent version of Windows and then do a search for *.epub, assuming you're using epub. Then when that's completed sort by filename and your duplicates will be fairly obvious as you read through the list. Books that are duplicated will appear twice in a row. You'll also see the file size so if they're different sizes you'll know they aren't exact duplicates.

If you have .mobo files or .azw or any other file type do the same with them.

Once you've pared away the duplicates you'll have an explorer window listing every ebook of that type on your computer. It's then a simple matter to copy them all to the same place.

if you have a fairly full hard drive this can take a while. Just let it run till it finishes and you have your list.

There are also programs that can find duplicate files for you. I always use Windows Explorer. It's a lot easier.

Another way to do this, if you prefer to have a listing of your books, is to click on Cortana, type CMD and in the window that pops up, type CD \. That'll take you to the top level of your hard drive. Then type dir /s /b *.epub > epublist.txt. And wait. That'll create a text file on your hard drive that lists every epub book in your computer with it's full path name and file name. If you aren't familiar with the command prompt this will seem strange to you but it's really very simple to do.

Barry

[barryem]

I just loaded Calibre on my system and it took about 5 or 6 seconds. The only books in it are the ones I haven't converted yet. I think it said 37 books. Once I convert them I remove them. Actually most of those are books that need some kind of work before I convert them, such as improving the table of contents.

I have all my ebooks on this computer and I can go right to any book in 5 seconds or less. And Windows Explorer is much simpler to deal with than Calibre.

I use Calibre for doing conversions and I also use it's reader as my default device for epubs and mobi files. I don't read on the laptop but I often want to take a look at a book.

Barry

[maddz]

I’ve got over 2000 books in Calibre and it takes around a minute to load, but I suspect it’s more to do with the age of the iMac than issues with Calibre. I’ll be loading it on my new toy and I’ll see how that works out. At one point I had the directory in iCloud drive but there are speed issues there. It’s been moved into the Shared drive on the iMac because himself also has a Calibre library.

[sjfan]

Originally Posted by maddz

I’ve got over 2000 books in Calibre and it takes around a minute to load, but I suspect it’s more to do with the age of the iMac than issues with Calibre. I’ll be loading it on my new toy and I’ll see how that works out. At one point I had the directory in iCloud drive but there are speed issues there. It’s been moved into the Shared drive on the iMac because himself also has a Calibre library.

FWIW I have about 3200 books and it takes 3.5 seconds to launch for me, so it's probably more about to the disk performance (I'm on an SSD) or OS-level stuff like the filesystem than the library per se.

I still often use the folder hierarchy rather than going through Calibre because it's quicker and easier for a lot of things, but I still keep everything in Calibre (which does the primary layout) and use a parallel tree of symlinks to structure things the way I like from the command-line.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by barryem

Assuming you're using Windows the best tool for that is probably Windows Explorer. Open it on This PC if you're using a recent version of Windows and then do a search for *.epub, assuming you're using epub. Then when that's completed sort by filename and your duplicates will be fairly obvious as you read through the list. Books that are duplicated will appear twice in a row. You'll also see the file size so if they're different sizes you'll know they aren't exact duplicates.

If you have .mobo files or .azw or any other file type do the same with them.

Once you've pared away the duplicates you'll have an explorer window listing every ebook of that type on your computer. It's then a simple matter to copy them all to the same place.

if you have a fairly full hard drive this can take a while. Just let it run till it finishes and you have your list.

There are also programs that can find duplicate files for you. I always use Windows Explorer. It's a lot easier.

Another way to do this, if you prefer to have a listing of your books, is to click on Cortana, type CMD and in the window that pops up, type CD \. That'll take you to the top level of your hard drive. Then type dir /s /b *.epub > epublist.txt. And wait. That'll create a text file on your hard drive that lists every epub book in your computer with it's full path name and file name. If you aren't familiar with the command prompt this will seem strange to you but it's really very simple to do.

Barry

The Find Duplicates plugin in Calibre is much, much faster. I have over ten thousand ebooks on my PC and Windows Explorer just freezes. I can search for a specific author or title, but even then it's simpler and faster to search in Calibre. Granted, most people probably have somewhat fewer books...

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by barryem

I just loaded Calibre on my system and it took about 5 or 6 seconds. The only books in it are the ones I haven't converted yet. I think it said 37 books. Once I convert them I remove them. Actually most of those are books that need some kind of work before I convert them, such as improving the table of contents.

I have all my ebooks on this computer and I can go right to any book in 5 seconds or less. And Windows Explorer is much simpler to deal with than Calibre.

I use Calibre for doing conversions and I also use it's reader as my default device for epubs and mobi files. I don't read on the laptop but I often want to take a look at a book.

Barry

Interesting. I just loaded calibre on my old laptop (Lenovo W530, I7, 32GB RAM, 1.5TB SSD purchased in Nov., 2010 so 7 years old). With my 8000 ebooks, it took less than 4 seconds to get to the user interface. Type in David Weber in the search bar, sort the results by series and there is the Crown of Slaves series. Total elapsed time ~11 seconds by my trusty digital timer and a few of those 11 seconds were deciding what author/series to look for.

By way of comparison, I opened Windows Explorer from the task bar icon and it took ~15 seconds for me to get from clicking on the icon, clicking on "this PC", clicking on D:, clicking on Calibre Library Backup, opening the Calibre_Library directory, typing a W to move to the authors whose last name starts with W, scroll down a screen to locate Weber, click on Weber, David & Flint, Eric. Hmmm... now which of the files is the 2nd book in the Crown of Slaves series? Well, eliminate 1633 and 1634: The Baltic War. Eliminate Crown of Slaves leaving Torch of Freedom and Cauldron of Ghosts.

Since I now have calibre open, eliminate the time to open calibre and search is pretty damn fast. 2 seconds to locate the In Death series and sort by series, sort by series again to reverse order and there is #39. Windows Explorer? Back out to the Calibre_Library directory, type R, scroll down 2 screens, click on Robb, J. D_ and there we have the series. Sadly, no indication as to which one is #39 in the series.

Once the Windows Explorer method would have been a bit faster. I used to have a link to the library on my desktop and I don't add series info or much of anything to the directory structure. I gave up my fancy directory structure with series info added to names, links in secondary author directories, etc. when I got fully into using calibre. Calibre was just so much less work for me. Add book, update metadata and cover images, series info (if the metadata update didn't do that) and that's all folks. No fiddling with file names, no adding links to allow secondary authors or even primary authors for series such as the 1632 series where quite a few of the books were not authored/co-authored by Eric Flint. Let the computer do the grunt work.

[John F]

More curiosity...

For those that use folders, do you set up your context menus so you can open an editor (say Sigil), a metadata editor, a converter, a send to short cut, ...

And another thing I like about Calibre is that I can do a "convert" to get the book to look like I like it: paragraph indent, paragraph spacing, ...

[PeterT]

My time to start using calibre is 0; I leave it running at all times.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by barryem

Another way to do this, if you prefer to have a listing of your books, is to click on Cortana, type CMD and in the window that pops up, type CD \. That'll take you to the top level of your hard drive. Then type dir /s /b *.epub > epublist.txt. And wait. That'll create a text file on your hard drive that lists every epub book in your computer with it's full path name and file name. If you aren't familiar with the command prompt this will seem strange to you but it's really very simple to do.

And rather useless since the discussion was about locating duplicate files. Sorting is rather useless when two copies of the same (or same name) file will have a different path. Not to mention the links I used to use for secondary authors would not show in the list but would break horribly if the file linked to was removed.

You could try forfiles /m *.epub /s >>epub.txt to save a listing of all epub filenames from the starting directory down to the text file epub.txt in the current directory -- the double quotes around each filename are easy enough to remove. Running in the root of a drive will give some access denied errors unless run as administrator.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by John F

More curiosity...

For those that use folders, do you set up your context menus so you can open an editor (say Sigil), a metadata editor, a converter, a send to short cut, ...

And another thing I like about Calibre is that I can do a "convert" to get the book to look like I like it: paragraph indent, paragraph spacing, ...

The only one of your list that I have in a context menu is Sigil under the Open With for epubs. Otherwise, I do the conversion, metadata editor, etc. from inside calibre. I do still use the Open With plugin to open Sigil from calibre though there are other ways to have the same functionality (one less click may/may not be something that many will worry about).

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Alpha o

I don't buy from Kobo or Amazon although I will snitch one of the other half's books and convert it. I also will NOT use Google. BAM, BAEN, Smashwords and a few others that deal with EPUB work.

What do you have against Baen? DRM isn't an issue since Baen does not DRM their books. Content might be an issue if you aren't interested in their books. Baen also has their free library (Baen Free Library though not what it used to be before they had to remove quite a few books due to their contractual obligations when their ebooks were made available though other vendors though quite a few have been re-added as "second editions" were made available for sale.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by DNSB

One thing you might want to do is to take a backup copy of the activation.xml file from inside the .adobe-digital-editions directory in the root of your Kobo ereader. You can restore the file after a factory restore or even copy it to another Kobo ereader to activate it without having to plead with Adobe for more activations.

Originally Posted by wandalynn

David, I posted before I saw your reply. Will try this.

I'm not sure how/if this would work on anything other than a Kobo ereader.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by DNSB

What do you have against Baen? DRM isn't an issue since Baen does not DRM their books. Content might be an issue if you aren't interested in their books. Baen also has their free library (Baen Free Library though not what it used to be before they had to remove quite a few books due to their contractual obligations when their ebooks were made available though other vendors though quite a few have been re-added as "second editions" were made available for sale.

He said he uses BAEN. Or that is way I read his post.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by maddz

I’ve got over 2000 books in Calibre and it takes around a minute to load, but I suspect it’s more to do with the age of the iMac than issues with Calibre. ...

Either you have a number of custom calculated columns or your machine is having issues.

My Win10 tablet (Dell Venue8 Pro) is rather "slow" by my definition and takes around 12-15 seconds to launch and load my default library of just shy of 1900 books (most are in at least 2 formats). Calibre and my library are both on the even slower microSD card that serves as a second storage drive, D:\. The same calibre and library load in just 2-4 seconds on my big i7 w/ HardDrive based Win10 desktop. I don't have much in my library on my iMac (27" i7 retina, 32gb RAM, SSD) but it launches roughly 2 seconds.

[sjfan]

Originally Posted by John F

More curiosity...

For those that use folders, do you set up your context menus so you can open an editor (say Sigil), a metadata editor, a converter, a send to short cut, ...

I use the command line (not a GUI file explorer) for navigating the filesystem. No need to configure menus, I can just run whatever program I want on the epubs.