Calibre: I do not get it

[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.

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

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

I suspect I misread the '.' after Google as ','. So Google, BAM, BAEN, etc. My bad.

[maddz]

Originally Posted by dwig

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.

Only My Shelves from when I used a Kobo Touch. I should probably get rid of it. I was having hard drive problems a couple of months back but the drive’s been replaced. It may be a Mac security thing as Calibre is a direct download not from the App Store (or Sophos not liking it).

[barryem]

Originally Posted by sjfan

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.

My laptop has a Core I7 and a very fast SSD and with just a few books it takes about 5 seconds to load. My old laptop with a Core I3 and a 5400 RPM hard drive took close to a minute to load, also with very few books. I think it was on this or my previous laptop that I made the decision not to use Calibre as a librarian. Although I have to admit I really prefer doing it myself anyway.

If I hit the link to run Chrome it's on the screen instantly ready to go. Open Office, a very slow loading program, loads quite a bit faster than Calibre. This thing can reboot in 11 seconds.

This is nothing against Calibre. I use it for conversions and I depend on it and I often recommend it. But it's not a fast loading program.

Barry

[sjfan]

Originally Posted by barryem

My laptop has a Core I7 and a very fast SSD and with just a few books it takes about 5 seconds to load. My old laptop with a Core I3 and a 5400 RPM hard drive took close to a minute to load, also with very few books. I think it was on this or my previous laptop that I made the decision not to use Calibre as a librarian. Although I have to admit I really prefer doing it myself anyway.

If I hit the link to run Chrome it's on the screen instantly ready to go. Open Office, a very slow loading program, loads quite a bit faster than Calibre. This thing can reboot in 11 seconds.

This is nothing against Calibre. I use it for conversions and I depend on it and I often recommend it. But it's not a fast loading program.

It's mostly the disk and filesystem speed, not the CPU speed that matters.

Like I said, my primary laptop takes 3.5 seconds with a core i3 and an SSD (for comparison, LibreOffice takes about 2 seconds). For fun I just broke out my other laptop which is a core i5 with a 5400 RPM drive and it takes 35 seconds to launch.

Both with mirrors of the same library (3200ish books), running Ubuntu 16.04 with ext4.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

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.

And then there is the Find Duplicates plugin that will allow you to find binary duplicates or duplicates by title (or title/author).

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And then there is the Find Duplicates plugin that will allow you to find binary duplicates or duplicates by title (or title/author).

The fuzzy matching on title and author is handy especially when you are comparing between libraries. I've never found the binary compare to be much use since editing the ebook breaks that functionality.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by barryem

My laptop has a Core I7 and a very fast SSD and with just a few books it takes about 5 seconds to load. My old laptop with a Core I3 and a 5400 RPM hard drive took close to a minute to load, also with very few books. I think it was on this or my previous laptop that I made the decision not to use Calibre as a librarian. Although I have to admit I really prefer doing it myself anyway.

I still find your startup speed for calibre on the slow side. I just timed calibre opening 5 times (used a test program which launched calibre and stopped timing when I clicked on the stop timing button after seeing the user interface open and ready to use (dual monitors). This took 3.6 seconds on the average with ~8200 books in my library. The SSD calibre is launched from is a Samsung 850 EVO which gets decent speed ratings but not the fastest out there.

[kovidgoyal]

Just FYI, you can startup calibre in debug mode, calibre-debug -g from a command prompt/terminal and it will print the startup time.

When you are measuring startup times, be sure to distinguish between cold and hot startups. Because calibre includes its own DLL files, these are often not in the OS cache on first startup, therefore, first startup times are typically much longer than subsequent startup times. The vast majority of calibre startup times (for libraries of a few thousand books) is actually spent loading DLLs and initializaing state.

Things that can really affect startup time on windows are lots of accumulated windows updates (use disk cleaner to remove old ones) and antivirus programs that slow down loading of files from the calibre installation and temporary folders.

Finally, as more anecdata, calibre starts up with my thousand book library in under a second (0.93 +- 0.05 over ten hot starts) on a three year old machine (albeit with a SSD and /tmp in RAM).

[Alpha o]

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

Thanks, that never occurred to me. I use 7 pro and want nothing to do with Cortana, Google or Siri. Artificial UNintelligence. Ever argued over a homonym?

I started with DOS, but have been using Mint for all personal transactions so I'm familiar with terminal.

[EowynCarter]

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, ...

I don't do any of this.
I buy books to .

Back then, i edited the books to set the margin right, now the cybooks (or kobo), fix this all by themselves. Been a while since I had to mess up with an e-book to make it readable.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

I don't do any of this.
I buy books to .

Back then, i edited the books to set the margin right, now the cybooks (or kobo), fix this all by themselves. Been a while since I had to mess up with an e-book to make it readable.

I'm with you on this. I want to READ! For example, I used to mess around with Sigil, but find it now a complicated waste of my energy and time. I use it now mainly to generate a Table of Contents when one is needed or to fix the one that may already be there. Everyone's mileage differs, of course, when it comes to these types of programs. And everyone has their little loves when it comes to using such programs.

Like I say, I'm here to read. I now use calibre (almost exclusively) to organize my ebooks and to fix the little problems, since it's such a breeze to use for those types of issues.

Oh, yes: And I use it to put ebooks on my Kindle and Kobo. It's as easy washing dishes [use warm water] or making mashed potatoes!

[Nabeel]

'Finally, as more anecdata, calibre starts up with my thousand book library in under a second (0.93 +- 0.05 over ten hot starts) on a three year old machine (albeit with a SSD and /tmp in RAM).'

I so admire someone who can use a term like 'anecdata' in a message.

Thank you, Kovid, for Calibre. It is becoming like an old friend.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by kcladyz

Well I figured out how to add apprentence elf to calbre but my kindle has a format that I can not remove the DRM

See post #94

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by kcladyz

What I really want to do is add my Nook books to kindle. When I plug my device into my PC and look in the nook drive it tells me its empty. LOL odd

Apprentice Alf works on Nook books and Amazon books.

I'm using Windows 10 and I use the Nook app from the Microsoft store and am able to import those books to Calibre and remove DRM.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by kcladyz

Well I figured out how to add apprentence elf to calbre but my kindle has a format that I can not remove the DRM and when I connect my Nook Glowlight onto my PC it says its empty. WTF. So i give up and will figure it all out later. This is taking too much time. I appreciate all the help I recieved till now

I suspect the books on your Nook are purchased from B&N and not sideloaded. I don't own a Nook but seem to remember there were comments about not being able access books downloaded over WiFi from B&N.