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Calibre - e-Book (Personal Library/Document) Management - Mini-Review

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app103:
I used to be a user of My Ebook Library until the services and community associated with the application shut down, and you could no longer retrieve book information from the internet.

I tried Calibre as a possible replacement but quickly uninstalled it when it insisted on destroying my well organized book collection by moving all my books into a single folder. That was a deal breaker for me.

Have they done anything to make that optional yet? I want to keep my books right where they are, organized in folders by subject (non-fiction) or author (fiction).

IainB:
@app103: The version of Calibre I am using does not move anything around, but copies (duplicates) your documents (Word and PDF) into a folder, and changes the filenames a bit:
Example: C:\Users\[User]\Calibre Library\[Author ID]\Document file name.ext

Calibre also puts metadata in that folder, and seems to include any other files that it thinks might be related/relevant - e.g., as the cover page.
It appears not to scan and OCR PDF files with images containing text, so you will search in vain for (say) the string "toffee cats" that is in such a file.

By comparison, Qiqqa does that brilliantly. lt builds its own (duplicate) library of your PDF documents, with the PDF image documents all apparently OCR-scanned in the process and made text-searchable. Very handy. I'm not sure that it handles Word docs though.

elvisbrown:
I've been using Calibre since I bought a Kindle and quite frankly for what it does there is not much better available. However there are a couple of things that it doesn't do too well. I am talking about 95% brilliant and 5% could be better to give you some idea of scale of my comments.

Libraries
It doesn't manage large libraries at all well, I'm talking about 1000+ books (I'm on i7 with 8GB) and I am not sure it was ever intended to cope with libraries that big in the first place. I think the storage needs to be ported to a proper database structure instead of the folder method that's being used now.

Kindle Collections
Kindle Collections is an extension for Calibre and I find it can be hit and miss at times. I use it to organise my collections but when I restart the Kindle it is seldom the way I organised it.

Small change in return for what it does do well like manage metadata, covers and the downloading of news is worth it just for that alone. I have made donations for both Calibre and Kindle Collections and I would urge anyone using it regularly to the same.

Kindlean
I have just purchased Kindlean which does nothing but manage Kindle collections and it is beautiful, functional and efficient.

Alfa Ebooks Manager
I've been looking at this for managing my library. It is the best I have seen so far. The free version really doesn't do much but point out what the paid version would do. The full version is not cheap ($40) but if it did what it says it does it is probably worth it. The only problem I have struck is that on one of my laptops (both Win7 64Bit) it throws .Net errors when it tries to start then fails completely. Spending that much money on a product that won't even start makes me nervous even though the other laptop runs it perfectly.

To sum up I think I need three applications because I haven't found one application that does everything well.

* Calibre to manage what goes from my library to my Kindle
* Kindlean to manage the collections on the Kindle
* An Ebook Library manager as yet undecided.
Thanks for the article on Calibre :-)

Daleus:
(over 50 eyes)
-Daleus (January 24, 2012, 06:33 AM)
--- End quote ---
Wow, with >50 eyes you sure must read fast!
-cranioscopical (January 24, 2012, 01:43 PM)
--- End quote ---

Doh! Yeah. And it takes hours to clean my glasses when I've been out in the rain.

app103:
@app103:[/b] The version of Calibre I am using does not move anything around, but copies (duplicates) your documents (Word and PDF) into a folder, and changes the filenames a bit:
Example: C:\Users\[User]\Calibre Library\[Author ID]\Document file name.ext
-IainB (February 14, 2012, 10:47 PM)
--- End quote ---

So I'll need to buy another hard drive just for Calibre?  :huh:

Does it at least give you the option not to put all of that on your OS drive?

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