Sync and Other Content Server Observations

[rozen]

Hi,

Yesterday I upgraded to 3.0 and immediately became intrigued with the content server. So I quickly came up with feature requests; of course these are not well thought out. And I understand the work involved to get the great results that I see. So take this with a grain of salt.

I think I want to run Calibre on two Linux machines, one is my house machine where I want run the GUI to build and maintain my library, and separate server machine where I think I want to run the calibre server because it is usually up and running. My house machine is usually in suspend mode. I also want to want to read my epub's on several devices like tablets and PC's. When I change my Calibre library, add or remove an epub, on the home machine, I (1) kill the calibre-server on the server, (2) user rsync to sync the Calibre library on the server, and (3) restart the calibre-server.

The main problem I seem to be having is that I can't figure out how to get the reader sync function to work to work across devices. I read an epub on one device then go open it on another device, activate "sync" and nothing happens. I can't figure out what I am doing wrong. I also opened the same book on three different devices went to different pages and it seems that the reader remembers the position on each device rather than the last or furthest position on any of the devices.

The reader displays percentages; I would greatly prefer page numbers. But for them to be really helpful, "Go to..." would need to recognize page numbers as destinations. I gave up on Marvin because of its use of percentages.

As implied above I would really like to have "Go to <pg_no>". I frequently jump around in books between text passages, table of contents, notes, and illustrations and for that percentages are useless. Also, I have books which I am reading with other reader that I would probably like to easily move to the new calibre reader without have to struggle to find my old location.

I find that per device page layout settings are global but font size is not.

Finally my tired old eyes would like access to a bold or medium bold font.

I would really appreciate any help on the cross-device syncing,

Don

[kovidgoyal]

For sync to work the server must be running and accessible from all devices. The way it works is that whenever you change the page of the book you are reading, after a second the reader updates the last read position stored inthe server. When you click sync the reader on the other device asks the server for the updated last read position. And you have to setup user accounts, it will not work with anonymous access, because then anybody accessin gthe book will change the last read position for everybody else.

As for page numbers, you can just directly use the URL to go to any particular location in the book. If you use the url from one device on anither device it guarantees that the content from the paragraph at the top of the page on the first device will be somewhere on the page in the second device, which is about as close as you can get with reflowable formats.

Page number will never match across devices, so I dont see how you intend to use them to find particular locations.

[rozen]

Hi,

Thank you for your immediate response. I now have sync working across several readers. My big mistake was not realizing that I had to setup user accounts.

I was not clear in my rant about page numbers; I was referring to page numbers in the original book, not the content of a reader window. Google Play Books and the Nook application both can display the readers location in terms of book page numbers. I have found that to be very useful whereas percentage thru the book is less useful for me.

Thanks Again for Your Help,
Don