Creating Catalogs (Archived)

Do you know what would be cool? Adding the tips and tricks discussed here to the standard help page for Calibre under the catalog section. Not much there now.

http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/gui.html#catalogs

Or at least the material in the first post of this thread. One stop shopping for how to create and manipulate catalogs.

[alexxxm]

Originally Posted by solitaire

I can do this by manually selecting the books that I have uploaded to my device (nook) and then create the catalog. Calibre only creates the catalog for the selected titles.

Now if only there was a way to open the books directly in the device when clicking on the titles listed in the catalog.....

good idea, but very heavy to perform, with a huge database where to pick one by one the ~50 titles on your device, hopping back and forth between the device/database screens...
We really need a one-click solution for this device-only-catalog.

Originally Posted by dwanthny

I don't mean to transfer my ignorance to you, but I thought the same thing until I realized that the catalog was the first epub (at least the first that made a difference) that used a true Table of Contents and on the menu page of the book I had to select Table of Contents instead of selecting begin.

I too have 1000+ ebooks and once I looked in the right spot it was surprisingly easy to navigate through. If this isn't your experience maybe it will help someone else.

thanks for the info, I was suprised too! It definitely works, though the catalog is so big that it's a bit slow to navigate.
That improved a lot my catalog experience.

alessandro

[Jaelle]

I just wanted to thank you guys for all the work you do on calibre. I've read raves about it on the Amazon forum for the last year but never felt I had any need of it. I just recently heard about the catalog feature though and it suddenly turned into a must have!

I'm still entering my books into my library so have a ways to go yet. I had no idea I had so many! Made a list for myself of everything to go through and look for and clean up before trying to generate a catalog based on the posts here. I've got my fingers crossed it will go smoothly.

I do have one stupid newbie question at this time. It's in regards to the + for designating already read books. Is the plus sign a tag I need to enter into the tags field in the metadata portion for each (read) book in my library before I generate the catalog? Or exactly how is that accomplished? (Type slowly and with small words if it's not the tag field please!)

Thanks!

(Assuming this all works I'll be sending a donation your way!)

[GRiker]

@Jaelle:
Yes, + is the default representation of a 'read book'. And yes, you are correct. Add + to the tag(s) for books you've read, and it will be shown as a 'read book' in the generated catalog. If you have multiple tags for a book, they should be separated with commas, something like this:

Fiction,Suspense,+

The order does not matter.

If you prefer to use a different character, you can change it in the 'Generate catalog' dialog in the 'Mark this book as read' tag.

As you're learning to use the catalog feature, try this (using 0.6.45):

• Connect the Kindle before generating the catalog, wait for the Jobs icon to stop spinning, and for the Reader icon to be displayed.
• Click the small down arrow next to 'Send to device', then select 'Fetch annotations (experimental)'. This will copy your bookmarks from the Kindle to calibre.
• Build the catalog as usual

The 'Recently read' section will show your reading progress on all your open books.

Have fun!

G

PS: If you're planning to edit the titles/authors of the books on your Kindle to fix sorting problems, typos, etc, as displayed on the home page, please take a look at this thread. It's important if you have bookmarks and annotations that you want to keep.

[Jaelle]

Thanks for the quick reply! I always keep my books sorted by most recent on the Kindle because it gives me more control that way. But thanks for the tips!

[DoctorOhh]

@GRiker Do you have any idea if Series will ever be included at the same level as Genre, title, author etc...

The reason I ask is because of the way Sony deals with collections on its readers many of us treat Genre and Series similar. If I have a Series listed for a set I most likely don't have a Genre assigned otherwise I get multiple collections on my reader and collections can stretch out for many pages and get cluttered.

Kovid understood this when designing his browse books by tags option and ensured series was at the top level. Of course Kovid was a Sony user early on and your experience is with the Kindle so your experiences are different.

The catalog feature is a great addition to Calibre but until it treats series at the same level as tags it is of little use to me as a Sony user.

Thanks again for all of the work you've put into this feature.

[GRiker]

I'm planning to take a closer look at this when I get my iPad. As you know, there's an active feature request ticket which has some ideas about how to implement it, but frankly it's pretty confusing, perhaps because I'm not a Sony user. If you'd be willing to summarize the design input, that would be a big help when I do get to it.

G

[CCLady]

Help, please...

I just downloaded version 6.45. When I try to create a catalog, I click on the arrow next to the Convert E-books button, I get Convert Individually and Bulk Convert. Those are the only two choices. Am I missing something?

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by CCLady

Help, please...

I just downloaded version 6.45. When I try to create a catalog, I click on the arrow next to the Convert E-books button, I get Convert Individually and Bulk Convert. Those are the only two choices. Am I missing something?

My guess is you are missing a menu item due to having two versions of Calibre installed.

Kovid usually says the following.

Uninstall any calibre entries from add/remove programs and delete the directories C:\Program Files\calibre C:\Program Files\calibre2

Then re-install the latest version.

[saxondawg]

Let me apologize in advance if my question is a retread--this is a long thread and I've tried to check most of it. I saw this mentioned but not solved.

Earlier versions of my catalog (on Kindle) gave me contents, like a periodical, at the bottom of the screen. I could quickly go to a list of titles, authors, genres (tags), etc. At the beginning it did NOT do this, just had it like a book with nothing at the bottom; then it functioned with the contents; now it's back to no contents.

I'm fastidious about my tagging, so that I have about ten or fifteen genres that are the only tag on each book. In other words, if a book is tagged "thriller" that is its only tag. So I don't think tags are clogging the works.

What can I do to make the contents come back, so that a catalog will again be functional in Kindle?

[GRiker]

@saxondawg:
1) Confirm that you are running the latest calibre (0.6.45)
2) Follow the instructions in the first posting in this thread to post a build log, either here or create a bug report with the build log attached.

G

[saxondawg]

Thank you GRiker. I am running the current Calibre.

I believe this is the relevant section of the Build record:

*** TOC discontinuity: nodes are not sequential ***
node 385: 'Titles beginning with Symbols' offset: 0x11BE4A length: 0x150
node 386: 'Titles beginning with 'A'' offset: 0x10A780 != 0x11BF9A

Not sure what "nodes are not sequential" means. Something I can do with my titles beginning with symbols perhaps?

[GRiker]

@saxondawg:
File a bug report with both the complete build log and the generated catalog file attached.

The problem is a title that starts with a symbol, but I can't resolve the problem without all the data.

G

[saxondawg]

Greg, you have already solved my problem. I found a title that began with a bracket. I've corrected it. I'm sending a donation through Paypal. This is a marvelous program and I couldn't live without it.

[GRiker]

dawg: Thanks for letting me know about the bracket causing the problem, and thanks for contributing to the cause.

The next release has a fix for this sorting bug - you should be able to use any characters in the title.

G