Calibre - An excellent program, but no thanks

[poshm]

And yet another happy ending on mobileread

Sydney's Mom has had her lost Kindle returned after several months by an honest chap and this thread gets a nice ending. I like it - waiting for the 3rd good thing on here to happen today!

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by stisev

I just wanted to issue an apology and retraction to kovidgoyal (author of calibre). After booktome did not work for my needs, I gave this program another shot. I suppose I didn't fully understand the program intent/my needs from a program.

It's good to have you back. Your post was one of the first that I read here, when I was trying to understand how Calibre worked. Like you, as a new user, I didn't fully understand how Calibre was designed and I initially thought there was something wrong with the way Calibre named and organized the books. The responses of others to your thread helped me understand how Calibre worked, so your thread provided useful information to me.

Although I do maintain that the user should still be given the option to add books but not modify the layout of the user's books, I've found calibre's style of doing things now fits my needs.

You do understand, don't you, that Calibre doesn't touch the layout of your books? It makes copies of them, and sets them up with a name and directory structure that you should never, ever, ever, need to look at. As others have said, Calibre's copy of your books and the directory structure it uses should be treated as a black box. When you want a copy of your books, you can have them with any name and in any named directory structure you want. That's completely configurable. It's the behind-the-scenes do-not-touch-or-look-at system that can't be changed.

If your main concern is "lastname, firstname" issues, there is a tweak to have Calibre use lastname first in both the author and author_sort fields. That also has the effect of using "lastname, firstname" in Calibre's directory structure, so it actually is possible to change the black box structure if you absolutely have to have it.

I am looking forward to working with kovidgoyal + mobileread to make this program an even more perfect solution.

Great!

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by poshm

And yet another happy ending on mobileread

Sydney's Mom has had her lost Kindle returned after several months by an honest chap and this thread gets a nice ending. I like it - waiting for the 3rd good thing on here to happen today!

You're such a romantic.

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by poshm

And yet another happy ending on mobileread

Sydney's Mom has had her lost Kindle returned after several months by an honest chap and this thread gets a nice ending. I like it - waiting for the 3rd good thing on here to happen today!

Any moment now we will learn that Nate got his Cherrypal Africa!!!

[stisev]

You do understand, don't you, that Calibre doesn't touch the layout of your books? It makes copies of them, and sets them up with a name and directory structure that you should never, ever, ever, need to look at. As others have said, Calibre's copy of your books and the directory structure it uses should be treated as a black box. When you want a copy of your books, you can have them with any name and in any named directory structure you want. That's completely configurable. It's the behind-the-scenes do-not-touch-or-look-at system that can't be changed.

Heh, yea I realized this a bit late. In my case, I actually deleted the copies and am now backing up my user-edited authors. I will be trying to bulk-download meta data and see how it works out. If it screws things up, I always have my own backup copy.

I read a lot and have over 490 books (mostly free books from Mises.org.


And for those of you who don't know, Calibre works perfectly in Sandboxie (a sandboxing program). It prevents me from having to backup/restore settings (royal PITA, IMO) when I reinstall windows.

[pshrynk]

Last time I used my computer in a sandbox, the hard drive started making funny noises and smoke came out.

Oh. You meant something else...

[stisev]

Is there a perpetual bug thread?

I keep getting this error when downloading some meta info from sources for book "Study guide to Human action, a treatise on economics" "Robert P. Murphy & Amadeus Gabriel"

[code]WARNING: There were errors: There were errors downloading social metadata

Amazon

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\metadata\fetch.py", line 197, in fetch
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\metadata\amazon.py", line 35, in get_social_metadata
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\metadata\amazon.py", line 27, in check_for_errors
Exception: Failed to get metadata with error: AWS.InvalidParameterValue9781933550381 is not a valid value for ItemId. Please change this value and retry your request.



p/code]

[kovidgoyal]

That just indicates Amazon doesn't recognize the ISBN in question.

[stisev]

1) Is there an output profile for Stanza for iPhone in Calibre?

2) Most (95%) of my epub books are MUCH larger than my PDF. Why is this happening?
For example, the book: The state, the enemy - Albert J. Nock.epub = 25.362mb vs PDF =9.177mb

3) is there any way to modify how many books Calibre shows in the web content server?
20 is waaaay too little, IMO. Any chance of user-inputable entry be added in a future version?

[stisev]

I don't know if this is the place to be posting these requests/bugs, so please feel free to correct me on proper procedure.

kovidgoyal, any chance you could offer calibre in ZIP or RAR files as "BIN format" or something? It would make things so much easier for a few of us

[kovidgoyal]

1) No, not that there's any need for one, since stanza automatically resizes pictures to fit the available screen area, unlike Adobe Digital Editions.

2) Hard to say but probably having to do with image compression.

3) No, there isn't. Feel free to open a feature request.

Use the version of calibre from portableapps.com, it's closer to a binary bundle

[stisev]

Calibre is now THE center of my eBook 'experience' on my PC.

I download my books (95% of the books I read are free online!) online, enter them using Calibre, send them to my jailbroken iPad using WinSCP and wham!

Best reading experience ever!
I do need to clean up the author sorting a bit, since different books have different variants of the same author's name (e.g. Hayek F. or Hayek F.A.) but that will be a one-time big job.


I think the only thing I am left wanting from Calibre:

1) binary zip/rar download! I know a few users have requested this (as have I). I run Calibre and all my other apps in a custom 'sandbox' and your installer fails to install 100% of the time. (I get the error "installation directory must be on a local hard drive").

I know there's portable apps, but it's more a hassle than getting it directly from your site + user would have to wait for your wonderful updates.
I guess it would make it so much easier for a (minority?) few of your users to give us the option of RAR/ZIP file on your website, alongside the installer. Most devs do this and make the steps for people like me easier. If it's very time consuming, just let me know and I'll stop nagging

2) Calibre to add an option to mow my lawn.

[kovidgoyal]

calibre requires the msvc runtimes to run and these have to be installed ina system directory, so no zip/rar bundle I'm afraid.

[stisev]

Hi kovid,

After first installation though, it should be doable, right?
Is there a way to tell the user "upgrade ONLY" in big, bold, red writing, or even put it in a deeper place on your website (with RSS support, of course) so more advance users can find it?

[kovidgoyal]

Why dont you just run from source? It's realy easy and that way just issue a single command to update calibre.

See http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual...nt-environment