Can Calibre show hum much of the book is read?

[kapsi]

Kindle shows reading progress with little dots under the book title. Can you set a column in Calibre to do the same (better if it can be just a percent number) ?

[cybmole]

i cannot see how that could work, as the book is most likely being read on other hardware. knowing how much has been "read" in calibre viewer is kinda pointless

[kapsi]

Sorry if I made myself not clear, I mean show how much was read on the device. I'd like this option because I send a lot of web pages (with the www.klip.me bookmarklet) to Kindle, and end up with 30 pages of read and unread articles and books. I'd like to quickly delete read items in Calibre, and now I can't see which ones are read.

[cybmole]

so how could that work for users who have >1 device

[kapsi]

It would show only on "device view".

[speakingtohe]

Would be nice but a lot of work I imagine for developers. Each device is different in the way they store that information so each driver/plugin would have to be modified.

AFAIK it is not available.

Helen

[theducks]

What about devices that do not offer 'how far read'?

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by theducks

What about devices that do not offer 'how far read'?

it is probably doable only for some devices, and a lot of work for little gain. e.g. My Sony, with prs plus, already displays how many pages read + total pages under each book thumbnail- so a calibre plug in would need to access & reformat that info. Without PRS+ I don't remember it being able to do that.

When I owned a Kindle3, it did not do "pages" but it did have the concept of % read. again that would have to be located within the Kindle device file structure, extracted & displayed. when you start a book on Kindle it creates a metadata file for that book which stores, amongst other things, where you've gotten to in the book. if you find & delete that file the book reverts to showing as "new"


for those of us who are not interested in the calibre feature, we'd want it OFF as it could slow down the device connection process, if calibre plug in would have to examine every book on the device.

a simpler proposition would be to check only for which books were unread and return/display a Y/N field.but most devices should already be able to show that status & sort on it.

maybe the OP should ditch his kindle, buy a sony & install PRS+

[pchrist7]

Originally Posted by kapsi

Kindle shows reading progress with little dots under the book title. Can you set a column in Calibre to do the same (better if it can be just a percent number) ?

Hi kapsi
If I understand you correctly, this might be what you want:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...&postcount=137

Use it myself, but as you can see in the thread there are several versions.
I suggest you try the first example, just to see if it works for you.
Several other versions/examples in the thread, as far as I remember.

Cheers, Per

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by kapsi

I mean show how much was read on the device.

I agree that it would be very useful to show reading progress in device view (when connected to a device). Even a read/not read (never opened) indicator would be useful.

On the Kindle 3 and Kindle Fire, the modified date of the .mbp file indicates when last read and no .mbp file means never read. I don't know if these get updated if you sync reading location across devices, but either way this is still a valid indicator. So, a last read column for a Kindle would be easy to do, without reading the contents of the mbp, and would include never read. The last read location is inside the .mbp file, which has a binary format. See mbp file format description from mobipocket notes file extractor. This would be more work to get, but last read location would add value - either in addition to or in place of last read time.

Is the .mbp file handled the same way on the Kindle Touch?

I take the point raised by several posts that this is intrinsically device specific, but I don't see this as fatal in device view - which has to be at least in part device specific. Perhaps this implies a plugin approach?

[kovidgoyal]

The .mbp file format depends on the firmware version of the Kindle. Given the number of Kindle models this is not a trivial thing to accomplish robustly. IIRC, the changing nature of the .mbp file was what caused GRiker to give up on the fetch annotations function. Even the location of the .mbp file with respect to the ebook file varies in different models. And then lets not forget KF8 which will require a totaly different way of marking positions like the last read position in books. If Amazon holds to their promise of adding KF8 support to the current generation of e-ink devices, that means that this functionality will break when that firmware update happens and after the code will have to be modified to deal with whatever system Amazon uses for KF8, assumng that system is even exposed over the USB connection.

But if someone wants to have a stab at it, feel free, I wont refuse a patch, as long as they also commit to dealing with the bug reports along the lines of calibre is not showing the correct read status/last read position for my book.