Multiple Questions

[Deb]

If any of these are dups of resolved problems and you can point me to the threads, I would appreciate it greatly. I have a hard time with the search function returning usable information.

1) Is there some way that Calibre can pull the ISBN info from a book's copyright information page to get metadata?

2) I pulled down a free Kindle book to try converting it to LRF, but it had a protection lock on it. How do I know what books will be convertable, or am I missing somthing? (not a new situation...)

3) I have run into a situation where I have two Edgar Rice Burroughs directories, one with duplicate titles but no numbers in parentheses (352, for example). Which files can I delete without my Calibre not being able to find the book?

4) Apparently, Calibre updates my Sony-700 reader automatically when I plug it in, and I don't have to manually send books to it?

5) When I've added a bunch of new titles to my Calibre folder, what's the easiest way of Adding Books? Do I need to remember what authors I've added, or can I just tell it to add everything without getting dupes? I know for small amounts it catches them, but I've got almost 400 books as of right now and have room on my memory chip for about 8k.

6) I have most of the Oz books in Word.doc or .txt formats. Do I just put them in the Calibre folder and run the convert program to make them .lrf books? Also, after I've converted from one format to the other, can I just delete the one I don't want

I know some of these are probably 'duh' questions, but I'm way behind on tech stuff. MSDOS? I'm great at that, but then I got left behind.

Many thanks for your assistance and forebearance.
db

[darkmonk]

1. Not that I'm aware of, although perhaps this might be something easy to implement in the future.
2.You can try to open the book in calibre's viewer. If it'll open, I believe it'll convert.
3.Delete the one without the numbers.
4.No idea.
5. You don't really need to add your books to the folder. Calibre works based on importing, as it has a database. Just click on add, and then select the folder you want to get the books from.
6. You can import them. I recommend not Deleting the originals. The conversion may get better latter and you may want to reconvert.
Don't feel bad about being behind the times - it's like when I first tried vi. *shudder* Nothing worked as it should...

[Deb]

2) I can't even open most of my EPUB/PDF books because of the DRM locks. It's irritating because when I change the font size on my reader the pages don't flow properly. I was hoping to convert them to .lrf so I didn't keep getting distracted from the stories.

Maybe it's me....

[slantybard]

Deb - you need to strip off the DRM from the books before calibre will be able to convert them. I know someone was discussing a plugin for removing DRM but I expect that will be a long time coming as there are legal issues depending on which draconian country you live in. The DRM is quite easy to remove, however, the forum rules basically forbid direct instructions being given here to do so. If you know the DRM type (ie the format), if you google DRM removal, info should come up. It can be intimidating the first time you try it, but is pretty easy in reality.

[rcuadro]

Originally Posted by Deb

If any of these are dups of resolved problems and you can point me to the threads, I would appreciate it greatly. I have a hard time with the search function returning usable information.

1) Is there some way that Calibre can pull the ISBN info from a book's copyright information page to get metadata?

2) I pulled down a free Kindle book to try converting it to LRF, but it had a protection lock on it. How do I know what books will be convertable, or am I missing somthing? (not a new situation...)

3) I have run into a situation where I have two Edgar Rice Burroughs directories, one with duplicate titles but no numbers in parentheses (352, for example). Which files can I delete without my Calibre not being able to find the book?

4) Apparently, Calibre updates my Sony-700 reader automatically when I plug it in, and I don't have to manually send books to it?

5) When I've added a bunch of new titles to my Calibre folder, what's the easiest way of Adding Books? Do I need to remember what authors I've added, or can I just tell it to add everything without getting dupes? I know for small amounts it catches them, but I've got almost 400 books as of right now and have room on my memory chip for about 8k.

6) I have most of the Oz books in Word.doc or .txt formats. Do I just put them in the Calibre folder and run the convert program to make them .lrf books? Also, after I've converted from one format to the other, can I just delete the one I don't want

I know some of these are probably 'duh' questions, but I'm way behind on tech stuff. MSDOS? I'm great at that, but then I got left behind.

Many thanks for your assistance and forebearance.
db

1. Calibre will try to get the ISBN and other meta data if it has enough information. For me, I have found that with the book title and author it does a good job in locating the rest of the information.
2. Any book you get from Amazon will have DRM (protection) so you will not be able to convert it. The protection can be remove but that is a whole other story.
3. Calibre assigns a number at the end of a book title in parenthesis... if it hoes not contain them then it is not in the Calibre library. When Calibre imports a book, it is copied over to the Calibre library directory and assigned its own number. There should be no reason as to why there would be a dirrectory with a number and an identical one without... unless when you installed calibre you selected your library location to be the same place where you kept your ebooks to begin with...
4. Calibre does not automatically update your reader. All it does is take a look at the reader and see what books are on the reader after you connect it. If you want to send a book to the reader then you have to send it manually.
5. The easiest way I found it to simply drag and drop the book into Calibre. It will then attempt to read the meta data from the file and then Calibre will place the book in the correct place. If you try to add a book that is already there it will know, warn you about it, and give you the option to add the book anyhow or to cancel. Keep in mind though that if the metadata is incorrect then you may end up with duplicate book. Also remember that Stephen King and King Stephen are two different authors so you are going to have to watch how you have your books and you also have to be carefull with spaces. If there is an extra space after King then, well, you have a third author...
6. Yes, add them as a txt or word document and then convert away. You can then select the book you want, click on the edit metadata button, and on the top right you can select the format that you dont want and delete it.

[Deb]

Originally Posted by slantybard

I expect that will be a long time coming as there are legal issues depending on which draconian country you live in.

Sac, CA, USA. Where consumer protection is a right, unless it costs corporations too much. After all, according to the Supreme Court, Corporations are People too!

sigh...

[Deb]

Originally Posted by rcuadro

1. Calibre will try to get the ISBN and other meta data if it has enough information. For me, I have found that with the book title and author it does a good job in locating the rest of the information.

It does this when I do the individual metadata search, but by having the ISBN for the PB edition of my e-book I get exactly the description and cover I want. Mostly I go to FantasticFiction.com and look up the ISBN there. So much easier if C could pull the ISBN from the publishing information and use that for the search. From what I'm hearing (reading) this is something that is being considered, not yet implemented.

Originally Posted by rcuadro

2. Any book you get from Amazon will have DRM (protection) so you will not be able to convert it. The protection can be remove but that is a whole other story.

Amazon = evil. I was a small independent book store owner when Amazon was starting by going millions of dollars in debt while I only owed in the low thousands. Guess which one of us is still around. The moral? Become 'too big to fail'.

But the protection is also inherant in the books I get from BoB and e-Diesel. You would think that since the books can only be read on authorized machines they wouldn't care what format you put it in. On the other hand, you'd think the publishers would take e-book cost savings into account when pricing their items. Baen Books is the only one I know of who does that, so I get all of my Baen directly from their website.

Originally Posted by rcuadro

3. Calibre assigns a number at the end of a book title in parenthesis... if it does not contain them then it is not in the Calibre library. When Calibre imports a book, it is copied over to the Calibre library directory and assigned its own number. There should be no reason as to why there would be a dirrectory with a number and an identical one without... unless when you installed calibre you selected your library location to be the same place where you kept your ebooks to begin with...

Yes, when I pull books in, I put them in my Calibre library with subfolders and names to match the C formatting. Very rarely do I get dupes, but when I do, if I delete the wrong one I get the 'book not found' type message. Knowing the one with the number is the one I want will help me keep my database cleaned up.

Originally Posted by rcuadro

4. Calibre does not automatically update your reader. All it does is take a look at the reader and see what books are on the reader after you connect it. If you want to send a book to the reader then you have to send it manually.

I'm not sure this is totally correct, unless I've done something without realizing it (a not impossible scenario). I've got about 400 books in C, and when I've tried to have it do a full library transfer it quits responding. On the other hand, my new items are on my SONY.

5. Yeah - I do frequent cleanups to get everybody in their proper places. When I first got Calibre I had a little over 300 books. Imagine having to go through them 1 by 1 to get all the information corrected. Once again, FantasticFiction.com was a lifesaver as I could find the pb ISBN and do the metadata search on it, as well as finding out where in the series books belonged.

Originally Posted by rcuadro

6. Yes, add them as a txt or word document and then convert away. You can then select the book you want, click on the edit metadata button, and on the top right you can select the format that you dont want and delete it.

I'm presuming I can edit the initial docs before converting - no way for the program to know... Will C pick up chapter headings automatically or do I need to create a table of contents with Word?


Thanks bunches for all of your knowlege and assistance!
db

[rcuadro]

Originally Posted by Deb

It does this when I do the individual metadata search, but by having the ISBN for the PB edition of my e-book I get exactly the description and cover I want. Mostly I go to FantasticFiction.com and look up the ISBN there. So much easier if C could pull the ISBN from the publishing information and use that for the search. From what I'm hearing (reading) this is something that is being considered, not yet implemented.

C will extract the ISBN from the file... if it is there to begin with, and that is the problem I run into most of the time. The metadata on ebooks does not seem to be standard so at times things are missing. I even noticed that a book I download from Amazon has the author as "King, Stephen," and I have to change it all the time. Not only that but they also dont have the ISBN associated with it to I have to get the info when I edit the meta data to get it to look like I want.

Originally Posted by Deb

Amazon = evil. I was a small independent book store owner when Amazon was starting by going millions of dollars in debt while I only owed in the low thousands. Guess which one of us is still around. The moral? Become 'too big to fail'.

But the protection is also inherant in the books I get from BoB and e-Diesel. You would think that since the books can only be read on authorized machines they wouldn't care what format you put it in. On the other hand, you'd think the publishers would take e-book cost savings into account when pricing their items. Baen Books is the only one I know of who does that, so I get all of my Baen directly from their website.

It is hard to find a book that is sold without DRM. The only times I have found them is from self published authors who can write a great story but cant get a book deal.

Originally Posted by Deb

Yes, when I pull books in, I put them in my Calibre library with subfolders and names to match the C formatting. Very rarely do I get dupes, but when I do, if I delete the wrong one I get the 'book not found' type message. Knowing the one with the number is the one I want will help me keep my database cleaned up.

Anything that you put into the Calibre library directory will be a duplicate. Once you import the book from where ever you have it initially you can delete it. That is what I do.

Originally Posted by Deb

I'm not sure this is totally correct, unless I've done something without realizing it (a not impossible scenario). I've got about 400 books in C, and when I've tried to have it do a full library transfer it quits responding. On the other hand, my new items are on my SONY.

You can click on the rotating hour glass when you connect your reader and it will tell you what it is doing. I am willing to bet that is it just collecting data from your reader and building you a list of the books you have there. An easy test is to add a new book and then connect your reader to see if it transfers. Right now Calibre does not have the ability to differentiate between one reader or another. And by that I mean it cannot what reader has what book. It was asked a while back and the issue is that currently Calibre would need to extract the serial number from the reader to remember who has what.
Calibre is smart enough to know what formats go with what readers though

Originally Posted by Deb

5. Yeah - I do frequent cleanups to get everybody in their proper places. When I first got Calibre I had a little over 300 books. Imagine having to go through them 1 by 1 to get all the information corrected. Once again, FantasticFiction.com was a lifesaver as I could find the pb ISBN and do the metadata search on it, as well as finding out where in the series books belonged.

No need to imagine! Been there, still doing that

Originally Posted by Deb

I'm presuming I can edit the initial docs before converting - no way for the program to know... Will C pick up chapter headings automatically or do I need to create a table of contents with Word?

Yes, you can edit before or after you import it. Calibre know that the book is there but not what is inside the book. As for detecting the chapter headings and ToC, Calibre will detect them.

Originally Posted by Deb

Thanks bunches for all of your knowlege and assistance!
db

[user_none]

Originally Posted by Deb

1) Is there some way that Calibre can pull the ISBN info from a book's copyright information page to get metadata?

No. Some formats support having this stored in the metadata which calibre will use. Also, if the ISBN is in the file name you can have it extracted. As of right now calibre will not pull the ISBN from the contents of the book.

Originally Posted by Deb

4) Apparently, Calibre updates my Sony-700 reader automatically when I plug it in, and I don't have to manually send books to it?

You have to manually send books to it. News items it can auto send. This can be disabled in the preferences.

Originally Posted by Deb

5) ... I've got almost 400 books as of right now and have room on my memory chip for about 8k.

I would advise against putting that many books on your reader. While the Sony devices have the best library management, it is still a chore to find a single book when you have a few thousand on the device. For instance if the Authors last name starts with A and you have 500 books in that listing moving to the page with the book at position 300 is going to take a bit of time.

Originally Posted by Deb

6) I have most of the Oz books in Word.doc or .txt formats. Do I just put them in the Calibre folder and run the convert program to make them .lrf books?

TXT is a supported input format. Word.doc is not. You can have calibre import the file and use the management features with it but you will have to have word save the file as something else if you want calibre to convert it to a different format. Saving Word.doc files as HTML is your best option.

Also, you might want to consider using the EPUB format instead of LRF. It has wider support and Sony is slowly discontinuing the LRF format. EPUB is generally considered the best archival format. It is also one of calibre's best supported formats. For instance, internally when converting anything the input file is turned into the internal structure of an EPUB file then turned into the output format.

[slantybard]

Originally Posted by user_none

I would advise against putting that many books on your reader. While the Sony devices have the best library management, it is still a chore to find a single book when you have a few thousand on the device. For instance if the Authors last name starts with A and you have 500 books in that listing moving to the page with the book at position 300 is going to take a bit of time.

Ah, if you have that many books per category, you can SLIGHTLY aid in navigating by holding down the page next key longer just as you would in a book. In the book, holding the page next/previous key longer jumps by ten pages. In the collections, this jumps to the last page or first page of the collection.

[Deb]

Originally Posted by user_none

I would advise against putting that many books on your reader. While the Sony devices have the best library management, it is still a chore to find a single book when you have a few thousand on the device. For instance if the Authors last name starts with A and you have 500 books in that listing moving to the page with the book at position 300 is going to take a bit of time.

That's what author folders are for. Fortunately, Calibre lets me get all of the author names in the same format

Originally Posted by user_none

TXT is a supported input format. Word.doc is not. You can have calibre import the file and use the management features with it but you will have to have word save the file as something else if you want calibre to convert it to a different format. Saving Word.doc files as HTML is your best option.

Thanks - will try that.

Originally Posted by user_none

Also, you might want to consider using the EPUB format instead of LRF. It has wider support and Sony is slowly discontinuing the LRF format. EPUB is generally considered the best archival format. It is also one of calibre's best supported formats. For instance, internally when converting anything the input file is turned into the internal structure of an EPUB file then turned into the output format.

Interesting. I'm trying to get away from the ePUB and PDFs because of the hanging page breaks. It really throws me out of a story when I turn the page, there are two lines on the next page, and then I have to turn the page again to get to the next 'book page'. Not a problem at the end of a chapter, but then I've been reading for 50 years and I'm used to that.

'Nother question - which, in your opinion, are better transitions to the SONY-700 as far as set-up goes - ePUB or PDF? I've been switching back and forth when I buy them (sometimes one is cheaper than the other, as well). I know that one is supposed to have different font capabilities, but for the life of me, I can no longer find the site that had that information.

Thanks bunches!
db

[user_none]

Originally Posted by Deb

'Nother question - which, in your opinion, are better transitions to the SONY-700 as far as set-up goes - ePUB or PDF? I've been switching back and forth when I buy them (sometimes one is cheaper than the other, as well). I know that one is supposed to have different font capabilities, but for the life of me, I can no longer find the site that had that information.

Use EPUB as the source for conversion whenever possible. PDF input is rather limited and does not produce the best results a lot of times. It is being worked on but it will never be as good as EPUB. One major reason is EPUB is a reflowable format so it's very easy to tell where one paragraph begins and ends. PDF is a set layout. While there are ways to determine paragraphs they are not 100% and can / do detect incorrectly. Oh and easy stripping of headers and footers in PDF files is not available yet. It is possible but a bit cumbersome at the moment.

[Deb]

Thanks - I've been putting off adding titles to my shopping carts pending feedback on this.