Should I delete all my Mobi files?

[Solo1959]

Sorry if I'm late to the discussion as well, but..

It there a way to select a whole bunch of books and delete the mobi format from all of them at one time? I am doing this but I have to go through each book one at a time.

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by Solo1959

Sorry if I'm late to the discussion as well, but..

It there a way to select a whole bunch of books and delete the mobi format from all of them at one time? I am doing this but I have to go through each book one at a time.

If you are using Calibre I guess this would do it...

[Solo1959]

Originally Posted by Karellen

If you are using Calibre I guess this would do it...

First of all THANK YOU! for your very fast reply. I appreciate your help.

Your picture is what I was looking for, but I don't get that option with my Ubuntu 22.4 and Calibre 6.9. I can't get that menu to pop-up.

But I did play with it a bit. Here is a way I found to do it:


Highlight the books in question

right click

Remove books

Remove files of a specific format from selected books

Click on mobi

... and like magic, all the mobis are deleted.

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by Solo1959

First of all THANK YOU! for your very fast reply. I appreciate your help.

Your picture is what I was looking for, but I don't get that option with my Ubuntu 22.4 and Calibre 6.9. I can't get that menu to pop-up.

You are welcome.

Right clicking on the Mobi entry in the left panel does not bring up the context menu? Strange.

But your method seems to acheive the same, but from a different starting point.

[Solo1959]

Originally Posted by Karellen

You are welcome.

Right clicking on the Mobi entry in the left panel does not bring up the context menu? Strange.

But your method seems to acheive the same, but from a different starting point.

On closer examination I see what you did and yes, it does work. I keep my "Formats" on the left panel compressed so I didn't even realize it was there. Yes, that way works as well. Honestly, they are both pretty easy. Thank you again for your help.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by Loosheesh

This is no longer an issue for me; thanks, though.

I remain amazed how different people's usage of these tools is: a natural consequence of them being such huge sprawling multifeatured monsters I suppose. My only usage of Calibre, modulo very occasional ebook conversions from epub, is (automated) grabbing of periodicals I'm a subscriber to and immediate email out to the Kindle... conveniently I read many of the same periodicals as Calibre's author, so when the recipes break they are always fixed by Kovid almost at once what can I say, the results of Kovid's recipes are miles nicer to read than the periodicals' phone apps and phone screens are painful to read on compared to a Kindle anyway.

[JSWolf]

For those thinking of deleting all of their source Mobi, are you low on disk space? Would you have a problem if you kept them? Have you read all of them (in whatever format)? If you've not read them, you may want to keep them in case you find a problem with the format you converted to and you need to go back and have a look at the source Mobi.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

For those thinking of deleting all of their source Mobi, are you low on disk space? Would you have a problem if you kept them?

Too much clutter. And I wouldn't use the mobi anyway, as I can't edit it. So why keep it? If I found a problem, I'd fix it in the editor, I wouldn't need the mobi for this.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Too much clutter. And I wouldn't use the mobi anyway, as I can't edit it. So why keep it? If I found a problem, I'd fix it in the editor, I wouldn't need the mobi for this.

That depends on what the problem is. It's possible you do need the Mobi to see what's supposed to be going on.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

That depends on what the problem is. It's possible you do need the Mobi to see what's supposed to be going on.

Never needed to see a mobi in 11 years. Well, I did edit mobis when there was no Calibre editor (I didn't know about Sigil then). Not since then.

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by NullNix

I remain amazed how different people's usage of these tools is: a natural consequence of them being such huge sprawling multifeatured monsters I suppose. My only usage of Calibre, modulo very occasional ebook conversions from epub, is (automated) grabbing of periodicals I'm a subscriber to and immediate email out to the Kindle... conveniently I read many of the same periodicals as Calibre's author, so when the recipes break they are always fixed by Kovid almost at once what can I say, the results of Kovid's recipes are miles nicer to read than the periodicals' phone apps and phone screens are painful to read on compared to a Kindle anyway.

It's not a matter of appearance; I've stopped using Calibre recipes entirely. Around the same this email issue started, I got my invite to Readwise's Reader app beta. It has a feed reader which suits my overall needs a lot better than the recipes.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

For those thinking of deleting all of their source Mobi, are you low on disk space? Would you have a problem if you kept them? Have you read all of them (in whatever format)? If you've not read them, you may want to keep them in case you find a problem with the format you converted to and you need to go back and have a look at the source Mobi.

It's not a matter of space. Similar to Sirtel, it's a matter of too much clutter. I can hoard like the best of them and can happily live with an item forever, but as soon as I perceive there's no longer any need for it, it becomes clutter and I want it out of my sight. And that mindset carries over to digital files as well; I don't care if they're only bits and bytes and there's more than enough space to store them, I just want them gone. This radical cutting away is well known at home. When my husband cannot find something, anything, the conversation usually starts like this: "Did you throw away the ...?" ()

As for keeping original formats in case something needs fixing later, that's not likely to be an issue for me. Since the start of my ebooks journey (2010) to now, I've only had cause to edit two books, one with particularly nasty and hard-to-ignore formatting and the other where the TOC and chapter headings were not structured properly, and I was doing a buddy read with a chapter-based discussion schedule. I've come across many books where the formatting etc was not ideal but also not bothersome enough for me to play around with fixing it. Once it's not distracting me from what I'm reading, I really don't care.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by Loosheesh

It's not a matter of appearance; I've stopped using Calibre recipes entirely. Around the same this email issue started, I got my invite to Readwise's Reader app beta. It has a feed reader which suits my overall needs a lot better than the recipes.

Hm... it's app-based so I'd be using a phone. Not for me. (My workaround for the blacklisting madness was to send calibre mails via my gmail account, which works fine and is more or less sure to always work fine. Mind you, Amazon unblacklisted me once I got SPF and DMARC working so I could just switch back to that. Nice of them to not say at all what they were looking for...)

Originally Posted by Loosheesh

It's not a matter of space. Similar to Sirtel, it's a matter of too much clutter. I can hoard like the best of them and can happily live with an item forever, but as soon as I perceive there's no longer any need for it, it becomes clutter and I want it out of my sight. And that mindset carries over to digital files as well; I don't care if they're only bits and bytes and there's more than enough space to store them, I just want them gone.

I'm like that in the real world because it reduces visual clutter and that really affects me, but I'm a digital hoarder. All carefully filed away in subdirs so there isn't any visual clutter in directory listings, but I have literally terabytes of stuff accumulated which I might possibly need in future in case my Internet connection goes down for, oh, weeks. Cloud? Who needs it (well, OK, without the net I can't get my work done and I disappear and my boss starts wondering where I am... but that's a *detail*.)

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by NullNix

I'm like that in the real world because it reduces visual clutter and that really affects me, but I'm a digital hoarder. All carefully filed away in subdirs so there isn't any visual clutter in directory listings, but I have literally terabytes of stuff accumulated which I might possibly need in future in case my Internet connection goes down for, oh, weeks. Cloud? Who needs it (well, OK, without the net I can't get my work done and I disappear and my boss starts wondering where I am... but that's a *detail*.)

I'm also a digital hoarder and have terabytes of stuff like you. My ebook collection not being the least of that stuff. I do use Dropbox, but I also back everything up on external drives.

Still, I don't hoard the stuff I'm sure I won't ever need.

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Would you have a problem if you kept them?

Yes I would. Main problem being that they won't match my epub version anymore.

My workflow is:

1. Purchase or acquire an ebook
2. Look at the coding. 4 out of 5 times it is a dogs breakfast
3. Check the quality of text. Formatted correctly? Spelling mistakes? combined paragraphs, split paragraphs, etc
4. I add new cover, new title page, character summaries etc
5. I then read the ebup version and fix all the problems as I am reading (one of the reasons I like reading at my PC as stated in another thread).
6. Now my epub is pretty close to perfect, so I don't need to keep the other junk versions

[hobnail]

I don't understand the clutter issue. Are you guys looking in the calibre library directory? I have a Formats column in calibre and that's mainly the only time I see both formats.