New Calibre user Questions

[Samurai]

Hello, new Calibre user here.
I found out about Calibre a week ago or so and well I love the app!

I was going around the forum finding plugins and whatnot, messed with stuff a bit and made it nice and everything. Now I'm adding more books and I have some questions.

1) Whenever I add books to Calibre, it saves (copies) the book to the folder I set up when I first installed it. All good here. Now, whenever I add a book, I delete it from the original folder, since it copied itself in the new (calibre) folder with authors names and all.
Is that a problem? I don't think it is since it IS exactly the same file right?
And I dont wanna have the same file twice.
Say something goes wrong with Calibre in the future and it won't open or I'll have to reinstall it or something.. all my books in the folder I created for Calibre are still gonna be there to pick em up manually, right?

I use an iMac btw.

2) What can I do about the metadata?
I have the Goodreads plugin (the metadata one) and I want every book to be pulled from Goodreads, and it if adds an amazon/google link too, I'm fine, I don't care.
But I need it to pull info from Goodreads first and foremost.
And it does find the book most of the times, but sometimes 2 out of 10, it doesn't, even though the book exists on Goodreads, so I have to go on GR and find the book get the id:number from the link and add it to the id:column on Calibre and do a search again for Calibre to locate it. So, is there any way to fix that? Or Any way to make Calibre search first on Goodreads?

Because if I'm gonna add books in bulk it mostly pulls info from Google or Amazon, and only some of the books have GR info pulled too, while I want it to pull from Goodreads from every single book, so a bulk search is not something I use now since I have to redo most of the books manually again just to add Goodreads links/tags/info.

This is basically mainly because I want the Series of the books categorized with numbers and such, and also, I want the GR link.

3) Is there a way to tell Calibre to find large size covers for my books? or better yet to make it search for covers big enough for my iPad?

4) I'm Greek. (sorry for my English btw) and I have lots of Greek books ofc, and there's a tag for Greek language, but it is not just "Greek". Calibre has the language as "Greek: Modern---" to distinguish it from the Ancient Greek, which I already tag as #Ancient on my books, so I want to change it to simply "Greek". How can I change the language? and is it safe to do it? Or I'd have to redo all my Greek books' language columns?

5) Is there any way to have 2 different editions of the same book in the same entry? Like, I know I can add the book again like I add the greek version and the english version, but if I have a 2nd edition of a book in English I'd like it to be in the same entry as the 1st.
(Like the thing Calibre has with being able to add a .pdf of the book AND a .epub too in the same entry, but what if it's 2 epubs? or 2 pdfs? That's what I'm looking for).

6) I have the page count plugin, which is great on counting pages give or take, but, is there a way to make Calibre to pull the pages info from Goodreads?

7) Published.
When I go to change the date a book was published, it doesn't change and I don't understand what I'm doing wrong, I cant type or anything, I can just choose the day/month/year from the little calendar that pops up, and then if I click anywhere else it goes back to the wrong date or the undefined- and whatnot, if I press enter, same thing. What am I doing wrong?

I'm sorry for the long read with all the questions, and thanks in advance!
I'm sure I have more questions but I think that's enough :P since I cant remember anything else I stumbled on and wanted to fix it or adjust it to my needs.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Samurai

6) I have the page count plugin, which is great on counting pages give or take, but, is there a way to make Calibre to pull the pages info from Goodreads?


I'm sorry for the long read with all the questions, and thanks in advance!
I'm sure I have more questions but I think that's enough :P since I cant remember anything else I stumbled on and wanted to fix it or adjust it to my needs.

the download option in the count pages PI uses Goodreads

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Samurai

7) Published.
When I go to change the date a book was published, it doesn't change and I don't understand what I'm doing wrong, I cant type or anything, I can just choose the day/month/year from the little calendar that pops up, and then if I click anywhere else it goes back to the wrong date or the undefined- and whatnot, if I press enter, same thing. What am I doing wrong?

You must do(Click) them in order and the window self closes
Year
Month
Day

or in the text grid view
double click on just the Month or day or year and change each, you can not select and type MM-DD-YYYY (or other format)

[Samurai]

Ah, thanks a lot for the feedback the ducks \o/

I didn't even click to see the Goodreads option on page count. I'm stupid. I was just clicking the plugin and that's it. Anyway, thanks!

And thanks for the 'Published' column too. It worked like that! Didn't know it had to be in order.

[BetterRed]

@Samurai

1. Adding books - If you stop using calibre and uninstall it, it will NOT delete the library folders, in fact if you Remove a library it will NOT delete the library folder, it simply removes from its list of known library folders. If you want to keep a record of the original file name the GetFileName plug-in will do that.

3. I believe some people use the Search the Internet plugin to get 'better covers'.

4. I believe the Language codes and names are as defined by the ISO 639-2 standard

5. Multiple files of the same type - users have devised a variety of solutions for this, searches calibre forum for 'additional files', 'supplementary files', 'extra formats' etc, should find some. Here's what I do Calibre and Evernote The thread makes mention of some of the alternative solutions I used before I settled on that one.

BR

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@Samurai

1. Adding books - If you stop using calibre and uninstall it, it will NOT delete the library folders, in fact if you Remove a library it will NOT delete the library folder, it simply removes from its list of known library folders. If you want to keep a record of the original file name the GetFileName plug-in will do that.

3. I believe some people use the Search the Internet plugin to get 'better covers'.

4. I believe the Language codes and names are as defined by the ISO 639-2 standard

5. Multiple files of the same type - users have devised a variety of solutions for this, searches calibre forum for 'additional files', 'supplementary files', 'extra formats' etc, should find some. Here's what I do Calibre and Evernote The thread makes mention of some of the alternative solutions I used before I settled on that one.

BR

Thanks for answering BetterRed, and wow, that Evernotes thing with Authors info/notes and such, sounds SO good, I'm going to look into it.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Thanks for answering BetterRed, and wow, that Evernotes thing with Authors info/notes and such, sounds SO good, I'm going to look into it.

Then you need to be aware of this ==>> Calibre 3.0 changes and bèta release date? - see posts 13-19.

Calibre 3.0 affects the links from EN to the calibre library Author and Book records via the calibre server, V 3.0 won't affect the linking of calibre authors and calibre books to EN Notes.

The links from EN to calibre were an afterthought, I added them when I found myself saying - 'What I really want is access to the books I have for this author.' When the new server is released I will continue using the server from the last 2.nn release for EN integration with calibre. That's trivial to do and manage in Windows - I don't know if that's true for OSX.

Given you're just starting with calibre I recommend you wait for the 3.0 server release before you consider linking EN Notes to calibre Authors and Books. My implementation of EN->Calibre links utilises Windows .lnk files embedded into EN Notes - I don't know if that's doable on OSX with embedded .alias files. I use embedded .lnk files rather than urls because I don't want to use my default browser for calibre server.

BR

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Then you need to be aware of this ==>> Calibre 3.0 changes and bèta release date? - see posts 13-19.

When the new server is released I will continue using the server from the last 2.nn release for EN integration with calibre. That's trivial to do and manage in Windows - I don't know if that's true for OSX.

Given you're just starting with calibre I recommend you plan on using upcoming 3.0 server and its url scheme. When 3.0 is released I will look at how I might migrate from the 2.nn server - I might decide its not worth the effort.

BR

Well, I have no idea how to mess with all that.. Servers and whatnot, so I haven't even touched that on Calibre and I don't think I will, mostly because I don't wanna mess things up, and also I don't care much about looking at my library when I'm not home.