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[Paul58]

I'm not saying my wife it computer illiterate, but she is definitely technologically challenged! She still can not figure out how to add e-books to calibre in order to manage them on her Sony PRS-300. Is there a function or option to have Calibre automatically scan a specified folder for new content, and add the new e-books every time the program is started? She downloads a bunch of books from the library and they automatically get placed in the Digital Editions Folder on her MacBook, and she can never figure out how to find them and import them into Calibre so she can click a button to load them on her e-reader.

If this functionality already exist, can some one tell me how to enable it? If it does not exist is it a function that can be added to a later release? Thanks again for the awesome program and support!

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Paul58

Is there a function or option to have Calibre automatically scan a specified folder for new content

Sorry, but no. It's been requested before, but Calibre is multiplatform, and to do this requires significantly different code for each platform. My impression from the comments about this is that it's not likely to be added - at least not soon.

Have you tried just adding from your download folder, then teaching the wife how to use Calibre's Add button? Calibre recalls the last folder used to add books.

[Paul58]

I'll give that a try, unfortunately, different sources (i.e. library, e-book stores, etc) all tend to dump in different places. If I could somehow control that it might simplify things...

The other problem is the filenames don't always match the title, so finding the e-book after it's downloaded is sometimes a challenge. We recently converted from PC to Mac, so learning the new file system is also a hurdle.

An option to scan for new e-books (in specific formats like EPUB & PDF) and automatically adding them to Calibre would be so cool! Hopefully if there are enough request, and someone breaks the code we will have a feature like this in the future.

Thank you for your reply and suggestion!

[Worldwalker]

I'm not sure how this would work on the Mac, but here's what I do PC-wise:

I have a folder (creatively named ebooks) with subfolders for the various sources I get my ebooks from. Any ebooks I download, I direct into the proper subfolder -- mobileread, for instance. Then, when I'm ready to import them into calibre, I switch the open file dialog to list view, sort it by date, and import the ones downloaded today. So if I pick up a bunch of stuff off Manybooks today, for example, I'd just import everything with a file date of 6/26, and not even care about the names or anything else.

I'd certainly like an auto-scan feature (preferably one that can handle subfolders, so I can just point it at \ebooks and it can monitor \ebooks\gutenberg, \ebooks\mobileread, etc.) but the way I'm doing it works, and there are things I want much, much more, like something that can scan my preferred ebook sources for books I don't have.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Paul58

Thank you for your reply and suggestion!

You're welcome, not that it helped much. I have a wife who is competent, but we divvy up responsibilities, and Calibre is mine. You could adopt our method - she drops the books she wants into a folder, and I make sure everything there gets into Calibre. I know your wife may have trouble with getting it into that folder, so you could use a synch program to replicate automatically from your various source folders. I don't use Macs, but they must have such a program.

[capidamonte]

Macs are BSD-based, right? You could probably cron a copy of everything new that day from your various source directories into a single directory, then use calibre-db to add them, I think. Can you write simple bash scripts?