Calibre - An excellent program, but no thanks

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by bkilian

I really don't like flat, tag based management UI (Like Calibre and iTunes) I much prefer heirarchical organization, even if the heirarchies are arbitrarily chosen. (Like the Windows Media Player UI)

You have got a level of heirarchical organization if you click on the "tag" icon at the bottom right. It may not apply to you, but a surprising number of people seemed to have missed seeing this view.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by bkilian

.... My books are stored in separate subdirectory trees for source files and then a tree for each of the readers (We have both Kindles and Sony Readers.). When I get a new book, I put it in the source tree, and the scripts take care of making it available to the device trees.

Keeping this separate is good for regenerating all my LRF or Kindle books when Kovid makes a useful change to the conversion program. It also means I can point the Sony software at my Sony directory and not worry about it catching stray epubs and duplicates.

I use the Sony software to move books onto my device, pretty much sorting by the "Date" column. I have to manually scan to update when new books arrive, but that's a minor issue. I would prefer if it could detect that automatically. I use the software because I prefer not to make the reader do the pagination. It takes too long, and uses up battery I could be using for reading.

I only use LRF on my reader, and will keep doing so until they can get ePub to render correctly (justified, and not crashing)

I really don't like flat, tag based management UI (Like Calibre and iTunes) I much prefer heirarchical organization, even if the heirarchies are arbitrarily chosen. (Like the Windows Media Player UI)

So you have created a custom system (as the previous poster) and don't want to do it a different way. That's fine, thanks for the info/explaination.

[citac]

Originally Posted by booksonthemove

With respect, I'd say you're therefore not the target audience. The software is quite obviously for people who want to manage their ebooks in conjunction with using a portable reader. Or even several portable readers, some of which might be better at using a format particular to them.

I started using calibre hoping I would be a part of that target audience. It's become obvious to me that regretfully, I am not. Nothing wrong with that. There are many programs out there that don't suit my needs, so I use those that do.

I doubt that's the intention, though if it said something along the lines of "much more efficient for CALIBRE to look up" that might clarify things for you somewhat. It does not touch or modify your existing collection, possibly for the reason you've just described, i.e. you have your own ideas how you'd like your books organised. It has its own ideas. So it makes its own database. Without touching yours.

That wording I can live with. Yes, people have different ideas on what's efficient or not. You might be appalled at the way I organize my stuff, and I can be appalled at yours. Again, nothing wrong with that. No, it doesn't touch my collection, but it makes a duplicate. I don't have thousands of books, but the books I have are very image heavy pdfs and I don't have the money to buy spacious hard drives.

well blimey if that's not snarky then I don't know what is. If the software does not suit your idea of what it should do, you are under no compulsion to use it.

I believe I was very polite: "I wouldn't mind having one that would suit my idea of a properly organized collection." I never said that my idea of how files should be organized is the be-all, end-all of organization schemes and that everyone should start conforming to the way I do things, but that it works for me and I'd like to keep it that way. The original claim bothered me because I felt it implied that we couldn't possibly be smart enough to devise a scheme that suits us. I like to think that there was no ill intention behind the words, only unfortunate wording.

Like I said above, there are many other programs that are excellent, free or paid, but simply do not suit me so I use something else instead. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find an alternative to calibre for me to try. The Library management software has four threads:

- calibre,
- Sigil "an open-source WYSIWYG ebook editor designed to edit books in ePub format",
- Reading Software and
- OpenInkpot, "a community project aimed at creating a free, open-source firmware replacement for various e-book devices."

There is no venue for me to ask for recommendations for programs other than calibre. If you know of such a thread, or an outside link, I would be much obliged.

[Korayem]

I love calibre

But here is a simple question to @kovidgoyal: "isn't it possible and fairly easy to let calibre add books at their CURRENT location?"

just an optional feature in the settings will make everyone happy!

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by Korayem

But here is a simple question to @kovidgoyal: "isn't it possible and fairly easy to let calibre add books at their CURRENT location?"

Apparently not without significant re-work of the Calibre code.

It is on the "wish list" as a planned future enhancement, so at some future date this likely to become available. As always with a significant change it is likely to destabalise calibre for a while until the change settles in so will need to be done with care.

[stisev]

Hi all,

I never imagined this thread would extend to 13 pages long, but that's the beauty of open minds.

kovidgoyal,
Reading your posts for the past 13 pages, I've heard nothing but contempt and high-horse attitude. You're certainly welcome to act that way and it in no way has anything to do with your program. I would advise you to accept constructive criticism a little better, if you care about the quality of your program. That's all I'll say. You can bash me all you want




To everyone else.
After much searching, I have finally found "THE" program for managing my books. I tried tens of solutions and Calibre was the least of all "evils". Now, it's changed. Calibre goes in the trash until the author makes revisions and in comes bookTome.

Simply put, booktome is the best program hands down I've used so far.

It's portable! (yes!) NO settings saved outside of the registry if you run portable mode.
Well-designed interface
USER-managed titles. Yes, it took me a couple of hours to manage my 500+ books on economics, I know the titles are 100% correct and correlate to Amazon.com.


Yes, it is SLIGHTLY buggy, but the author has a wonderful bug tracking system on his site. I do wish he (the author) was as swift to respond to requests as kovid is, but the product is free


Thanks to the author of Calibre for spending the time to do it, but as the title says -- no thanks. If you were a completely abrasive individual that had the best software, I would use it. As it stands now, bookTome is a better solution for me (and I imagine for many others, given the general displeasure I've heard through private chat from this site).

With that, I close. The stage is now yours.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by stisev

Hi all,

I never imagined this thread would extend to 13 pages long, but that's the beauty of open minds.

kovidgoyal,
Reading your posts for the past 13 pages, I've heard nothing but contempt and high-horse attitude. ...

....

With that, I close. The stage is now yours.

Speaking of an arrogant high horse attitude, I think you take the cake.

Have fun.




P.S. booktome doesn't appear to even integrate with ANY ebook reader.

[kennyc]

Here is the list of Known Issues with the current bookTome Release (from the website). I particularly like that fifth bullet - it doesn't support Ebooks.

-------------------
Known Issues

The following known issues are present in this version:

* Searching on numeric fields is currently only permitted as if they were text,
* Minor display issues when running in Large Fonts (120dpi),
* Changes to the Description field are not entered in the history database,
* There is no support for changing the name of authors, publishers and other lookup lists,
* There is no support for eBooks, which will be introduced in future versions.

These bugs will be fixed in a future version of bookTome.
Language Support

Unfortunately due to technical and time limitations the program does not support foreign languages. This includes both the translation of the user interface into other languages, as well as typing and displaying foreign languages that use the Unicode or UTF-8 format. This section will be updated if the situation for this issue changes.
------------------


Only runs on Windows as well.....

[itimpi]

I must agree. I would find BookTome completely useless as the features I use most in Calibre are the conversion capabilities and the integration with my eReader - neither of which BookTome supports.

BookTome also does not support storing eBooks - this is something I could do without using Calibre, but using Calibre for this has brought a lot more discipline into how I do this.

In other words BookTome seems designed for cataloging and managing paper libraries and not eBook ones.

[pshrynk]

For the final time, I am asking that posts to this thread be kept within the range of civility that we have all come to expect at MobileRead. If this thread goes back into name calling, it will be closed.

pshrynk (Moderator)

[kennyc]

Apologies, if that was directed at me. I probably should not have responded "in kind."

[Alexander Turcic]

Although I am a moderator in this community, please consider this post as a personal remark from someone who loves dealing with ebooks.

I have been into ebooks for what must be over 10 years, exactly when I got a Palm V as a Xmas gift (thanks dad). I know how cumbersome it was to deal with different ebook formats, to make an ebook compatible for my specific device(s), and to find a way to keep track of everything I have already read. Then I discovered calibre (I wasn't one of its first users although it had been already a dedicated part of this community), and today I can say without hesitation that it is one of the few tools I couldn't live without anymore. Not only has it made most other ebook related tools obsolete for my own needs, but also does it do so many things better than I could have ever wished for. For this, I greatly thank Kovid and of course everyone else who has been involved in the project.

Now, as a moderator speaking again, I would kindely ask everyone to remain respectful to each other. Sure, you may disagree with someone or someone's work, but then you are also free to look for alternatives or do your own thing. Only, please be respectful, in particular to those who've helped a lot to make the ebook movement prosper. My thanks again to Kovid.

[JirkaS]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

calibre does not compress files, it does not store all books in one file, it is perfectly possible to do differential backups with calibre's library (I do it all the time). You can change where calibre stores its books, in fact you can have multiple libraries at different locations. You can run calibre entirely off a USB key if you want to.

The OP really should ask about things before making assumptions and then complaining.

And I defy anyone to give me a single use case where having calibre support their pet folder structure is better.

Well, I can give you example why zipping HTML book is not good idea:
- I use one css file for multiple books in one folder
- My css file in the folder refers master css file (located in the top folder)
- in case I need to update HTML file, I need to manualy copy it out from ZIP, change it and manualy copy it back.

I understand that handling (I mean copying all related files) is easier this way, but since you are handling teh folder structure yourseft, you could handle file collection without zipping them either, right?

[stisev]

Hi all,

I just wanted to issue an apology and retraction to kovidgoyal (author of calibre). After booktome did not work for my needs, I gave this program another shot. I suppose I didn't fully understand the program intent/my needs from a program.

Although I do maintain that the user should still be given the option to add books but not modify the layout of the user's books, I've found calibre's style of doing things now fits my needs.


I am looking forward to working with kovidgoyal + mobileread to make this program an even more perfect solution.

[kovidgoyal]

Welcome aboard. Always glad to have a new convert