Setting Up a Calibre Library on an SD Card

[Epsilon Rose]

I've decided to, finally, get around to downloading and organizing the collection of e-book bundles I've purchased from Humble and I'd like to use Calibre to help with that. I also think I know what I'd like the final result to look like, but I'm not sure how to get there and I'm hoping someone on here can help me. Here's what I'm trying to do:

• I want my entire library to live on a microSD card. (I explicitly do not want two copies of my library, with one on the PC and one on the card.)
  • The card will move between my PC and Boox TUC e-reader, based on what I'm doing, but it will likely spend most of its time in the e-reader.
• I do not want to rely on a network connection to my PC while I'm reading on my e-reader.
• I'd like to use the portable version of Calibre, so it can live on the same card, but I'm extremely flexible on this point, if there's a decent reason not to.
• I'm planning to use Moon+ Reader and Boox built in reader on the TUC, but I'm open to other apps, even paid ones, so long as they don't require a subscription.

Now for the tricky part. Here's how I'd like to interface with my library:

Reference Books
-> Subject
-->Sub-catagory

Graphics Novels
->Manga
-->Series
->Western Comics
-->Publisher
--->Series/Event/Character
---->Sub-Series
Novels
->LN
-->Series
->Western Novels
-->Author
--->Series

Now, I know Calibre relies on tags and filtering, rather than a folder structure, and it's pretty easy to see why. Unfortunately, that only works if you have access to the tag and filter functionality, and I don't think Moon+ Reader does. Without it, reverting to author->title is pretty cumbersome. To my knowledge, the main ways to deal with this are to either A) Export your library, which allows for an arbitrary folder structure, or B) Remotely connect to Calibre to handle sorting and retrieving the books.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, neither of these solutions really work for me. A requires maintaining two separate copies of the library, and duplicating all of the books, while B) seems to rely on a remote connection to my computer and, possibly, also duplicating the books. Is there another way around this dilemma or something I'm missing?

To be clear, I don't have a problem with Calibre maintaining it's own folder structure and using the same kind of tag/filtering on my TUC would be an improvement, but I don't know if that's possible. Is there a way to get Moon+ Reader to present my books in a more accessibly structure, without relying on the folders (possibly based on a file Calibre hands it or meta data) or is there a better app I should be using?

Also, any other tips on setting up this kind of mobile library or dealing with Humble would be appreciated.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Epsilon Rose

The card will move between my PC and Boox TUC e-reader, based on what I'm doing, but it will likely spend most of its time in the e-reader.

No, that's not how Calibre works. The ebook files only exist as ebook files because it's not viable to import the actual ebook content into an SQL database, esp. SQLight, so the actual SQL database file has the ebook file information. You need to treat the ebooks imported to Calibre as if they are invisible, except for backups.

There is a Calibre "Save to Disk" and that should be used with the SD card for the Ereader if not connecting it via USB. I connect my phones, tablets, ereaders etc via USB direct to Calibre and manage them. I backup the Calibre "system" including the private ebook files with rsync when Calibre is not running.

I've also tested the OPDS via Content Server and WiFi on one tablet running Pocketbook, but USB is simpler.

With Save to Disk, you can use templates to have any filestructure you want. But any ereader App (Moonreader, KOReader) that only uses a file system interface is like 1960s computing and gets very awkward with more than a few hundred titles. I found KOReader nearly unusable with 6,500. Also file organisation can't do collections (files would have to be duplicated) or series or multiple author titles easily.

You can't change how Calibre stores the imported ebooks, because those are ONLY for Calibre, they are part of the database.

I have about 7,000 ebooks and I'm happy with how Calibre works. Some people may have 60,000 or many more (maybe they can read half a dozen books a day or will live for 100s of years?).

The SD card has to have an export from the library, it's not the library, and you can use template to have the structure you want for Moonreader.

[Quoth]

Yes, Moonreader isn't the best. Lithium and Pocketbook apps are far better (even free Pocketbook, uncheck 2nd box at install time). If the ebook needs tweaks, fix it in Calibre Editor. You can check an added ebook quickly with Calibre viewer and fix something faster than fiddling with over-ride settings in an ereader app.

Calibre is Library, device manager, viewer, editor, search system (inc full text search), ebook creator from docx and conversion program. The ebook files, once added are "private", hence being able to treat a directory/folder/disk as a device for "Send"/export/save.

[Epsilon Rose]

Originally Posted by Quoth

No, that's not how Calibre works. The ebook files only exist as ebook files because it's not viable to import the actual ebook content into an SQL database, esp. SQLight, so the actual SQL database file has the ebook file information. You need to treat the ebooks imported to Calibre as if they are invisible, except for backups.


There is a Calibre "Save to Disk" and that should be used with the SD card for the Ereader if not connecting it via USB. I connect my phones, tablets, ereaders etc via USB direct to Calibre and manage them. I backup the Calibre "system" including the private ebook files with rsync when Calibre is not running.

Ok ... But those "invisible" files still take up disk space. They'll take up the same amount of disk space as the actual "read" copies of the files. That may not sound like much, but when you're dealing with graphic novels and manga that you want to be decently high quality, it starts to add up pretty quickly. I don't want to dedicate that much space to my library on my computer's built in drive, especially when I won't be doing most of my reading on said computer.

I'm also aware of the "Save to Disk" feature; it's what I was referencing when I mentioned the export feature. (Sorry for the mistake.) The problem with handling it this way is it, functionally, doubles the size of my library, which I'd rather not do for what I hope are obvious reasons.

With Save to Disk, you can use templates to have any filestructure you want. But any ereader App (Moonreader, KOReader) that only uses a file system interface is like 1960s computing and gets very awkward with more than a few hundred titles. I found KOReader nearly unusable with 6,500. Also file organisation can't do collections (files would have to be duplicated) or series or multiple author titles easily.

I feel like you have an unrealistic view of how computing worked in the 60s ... or how people used computers for most of the time since then.

The SD card has to have an export from the library, it's not the library, and you can use template to have the structure you want for Moonreader.

Unless the "library" can not have the files for the books, and just stores data about them, the SD card needs to have the library.

Originally Posted by Quoth

Yes, Moonreader isn't the best. Lithium and Pocketbook apps are far better (even free Pocketbook, uncheck 2nd box at install time). If the ebook needs tweaks, fix it in Calibre Editor. You can check an added ebook quickly with Calibre viewer and fix something faster than fiddling with over-ride settings in an ereader app.

Unless I'm looking at the wrong versions of Lithium and Pocketbook, both of those seem to have some very serious shortcomings.

Lithium seems to only read EPUBs or, at least, they don't bother to list compatibility with anything else. And, while Pocketbook does have compatibility with all of the file formats I need (epub, pdf, cbr, cbz, probably a few other random ones), it doesn't seem to have any meaningful tools for actually viewing your library. As far as I can tell, if you aren't viewing it by file structure, you're limited to filtering by file format, looking at manually created collections, or free-form text search. It can, apparently, sort by series, but you can't browse by series or see a list of series. I'm certainly not seeing any sort of tag filtering.