Alfa ebook manager

[JSWolf]

I care where my books are. But I don't care that Calibre is handling them it's own way.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by mbovenka

Yes, if you are really hung up about having your books where you think you want them instead of having Calibre handle it all for you, that's the main difference between the two.

Actually "Calibre Library" can be anywhere on my filesystem that I have R/W access to as an ordinary user. That's got the books in it. You can even have more than one. It can even be on USB storage. Only a network share or "cloud drive" is a bad idea. But I use my own network shares for backups or shared copies in the house. The files in use for all applications are local.

[salamanderjuice]

I think people are talking more about the directory structure in the Calibre Library being by author(s) rather than where the Calibre library is located. Some people might want to organize books by series or alphabetical by title as opposed to authors or some other scheme and Calibre doesn't allow that.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

I think people are talking more about the directory structure in the Calibre Library being by author(s) rather than where the Calibre library is located. Some people might want to organize books by series or alphabetical by title as opposed to authors or some other scheme and Calibre doesn't allow that.

This seems like a distinction without a difference, since if one accesses one's library via the manager, Calibre definitely DOES allow one to organize books by any schema one chooses. Unless one insists on only accessing the files in one's library directly via the OS file manager (which would render any library manager redundant) there is no effective difference in how one's library can be organized in the manager.

[salamanderjuice]

Sometimes you might not want to boot up a whole program to copy one file somewhere. Or you could have books scattered across drives. Who knows?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Sometimes you might not want to boot up a whole program to copy one file somewhere. Or you could have books scattered across drives. Who knows?

Hmmm... so if I want to find "The Pursuit of the Pankera" in my calibre library from a file explorer, it does seem like a whole lot of extra effort to browse to Robert A Heinlein in my calibre library and then click on the folder with the book name. As for having books scattered across drives? At one point when I had more than my current two calibre libraries, I did have calibre libraries on multiple drives.

I gave up on using overly complex directory structures with either multiple copies of books or multiple links years back. I prefer to spend my time reading rather than maintaining my library.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

I think people are talking more about the directory structure in the Calibre Library being by author(s) rather than where the Calibre library is located. Some people might want to organize books by series or alphabetical by title as opposed to authors or some other scheme and Calibre doesn't allow that.

But it doesn't matter how Calibre stores the eBooks vs how the user may want them. If you want your eBooks in a specific order, just sort them that way using Calibre's frontend GUI.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

I think people are talking more about the directory structure in the Calibre Library being by author(s) rather than where the Calibre library is located. Some people might want to organize books by series or alphabetical by title as opposed to authors or some other scheme and Calibre doesn't allow that.

The interface allows any view. If you are going to have a book manager it makes sense that it has its own method for actually storing the books.

It only makes sense to have an arbitrary structure if you are NOT using an ebook manager. But actually real ebooks (as opposed to PDFs) take up so little space that I have two additional directories locally:
ebooks (all the public domain in ONE folder, I can sort by date)
bought ebooks (usually sorted by date).

Those and "Calibre Library" have mirror copies on the server which has the books the wife buys too.

PDFs are organised in hierarchical subject folders. Only the actual novels readable on larger eink are imported to Calibre. The 7.8" eInk Mars has about 90 pdfs.
The 10" Lenovo tablet using Xodo has a mirror copy of the several thousand PDFs in the same structure, on the 256 G SD card. These are old magazines, old technical reference, 1922 to current service info (for Radio, TV, Taperecorders, Record players, amps, Test gear), operation manuals (ones readable on 6" are in Calibre too), 1000s of component data sheets, application notes etc.

What Calibre does makes perfect sense and I never delete what it imports and puts in its own file structure. I wrote a document management system in 2004 and it used and SQL server. I found that a fixed directory structure to import copies of the documents was better than big blobs in the database. Users were not supposed to access those files without the program.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But it doesn't matter how Calibre stores the eBooks vs how the user may want them. If you want your eBooks in a specific order, just sort them that way using Calibre's frontend GUI.

Yes. It's a database, a copy. Don't delete originals.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The interface allows any view. If you are going to have a book manager it makes sense that it has its own method for actually storing the books.

It only makes sense to have an arbitrary structure if you are NOT using an ebook manager. But actually real ebooks (as opposed to PDFs) take up so little space that I have two additional directories locally:
ebooks (all the public domain in ONE folder, I can sort by date)
bought ebooks (usually sorted by date).

Those and "Calibre Library" have mirror copies on the server which has the books the wife buys too.

PDFs are organised in hierarchical subject folders. Only the actual novels readable on larger eink are imported to Calibre. The 7.8" eInk Mars has about 90 pdfs.
The 10" Lenovo tablet using Xodo has a mirror copy of the several thousand PDFs in the same structure, on the 256 G SD card. These are old magazines, old technical reference, 1922 to current service info (for Radio, TV, Taperecorders, Record players, amps, Test gear), operation manuals (ones readable on 6" are in Calibre too), 1000s of component data sheets, application notes etc.

What Calibre does makes perfect sense and I never delete what it imports and puts in its own file structure. I wrote a document management system in 2004 and it used and SQL server. I found that a fixed directory structure to import copies of the documents was better than big blobs in the database. Users were not supposed to access those files without the program.

Why don't you just sort your books by date in Calibre since it supports any view? Why have those local folders at all? You could even tag them by purchased or public domain.

[Quoth]

Those are the SOURCE. And are backed up.
The versions in Calibre may be edited/reformatted. Calibre & its files are also backed up.

Indeed there IS an owner column with purchaser, writer, or CC or PD. Copyright titles that were free are treated as paid for. I manage the ebooks also on the Wife's Kindle.

I'm just pointing out that real ebooks (as opposed to PDFs) are not large and people can organise copies outside of the Calibre "system" any way they like.

I did start to put ALL my PDFs in Calibre, but removed them as it wasn't appropriate for documents that would never be on eInk and need organised heirachically (sp?) via subjects because you know the kind of thing you want to look up but not the title or author and it needs the laptop or the 10" tablet and most are not books.

The sorting by date of the ebook directory makes it easy to see the block needing selected in the File Manager and Right Click "Open with Calibre" which imports them.

See, there is a method to my madness. But the point is that how Calibre stores books in its "private" files after import is irrelevant.

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Sometimes you might not want to boot up a whole program to copy one file somewhere. Or you could have books scattered across drives. Who knows?

Exactly this

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Sometimes you might not want to boot up a whole program to copy one file somewhere. Or you could have books scattered across drives. Who knows?

But if you do have eBooks scattered across drives, how do you know you'll know where the one eBook you want to copy is? With Calibre,as long as that one eBook is in your library, you'll easily be able to find it.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I'm just pointing out that real ebooks (as opposed to PDFs) are not large

That would mean that the 250 MB epub that I paid US$50 for, is not a real ebook.

Dividing the size of my Calibre folder by the number of books in the library, it looks like the average size book is 6.2 MB in size. The PDFs that are 5+ GB in size might be having a disproportional impact on the average size.

[Fiat_Lux]

Play with realistic 3D-models of your favorite book

Originally Posted by buffygurl

This is very funny, and that's a really stupid thing it offers

Offhand, I can see two use-cases where that would be an extremely useful feature:

• Books with pop-ups. This would enable one to see the pop-up as the designer intended;
• For maps, or images that are on both the left hand and right hand side of a page, this would enable one to see the entire map or image.
• Material with transparencies could be viewed as the author and designer intended;