Sharing Calibre experience from an Ubuntu user

[roger64]

I just wanted to comment on my three months experience using calibre for my PRS-505 with Ubuntu. I have a two gigas SD card and lots of books.

The experience is fairly positive and I never regretted not being able to use the Windows-only Sony software. My biggest recurring problems (now totally solved) were that the Sony Reader, once it had many files, proved to be a little unstable : what happened was that many txt, rtf or PDF files did not retain their meta-tags (I lost also collections tags and bookmarks) mostly on my SD card. This affected not only DRM PDF files but plain-looking files.

As I have a fairly big library, it proved tedious to edit again these tags. With this experience, I learnt that it's useless to try to "teach" these reluctant files the use of meta-tags, collections and bookmarks. They won't keep them for long anyway...

The only solution I found was to convert all you can to lrf or epub format, and then your library information will become stable at last. I just put them on a dedicated calibre folder on the Reader. And that's it.

The only five items that I could not convert were some PDF DRM books. But it's a very small minority and I hope a solution will soon be implemented to deal with that, the basket way.

So basically, my first advice is to convert all the files that can be converted to lrf or epub format. I do not use the library management functions of calibre, I just use it for downloading magazines, for converting files and entering them on my reader. For this it does a very fine job indeed.

The second advice, is to use a small synchronisation tool (like rsync or grsync) to immediately backup your files. It's a daily task, sometimes an hourly task and you need a convenient and lightning fast tool.

I would like to have a maintenance tool for the Linux software on the reader and still looking for it.

And that's it.