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

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wales:
I had not heard of Qiqqa, had a look and it appeared something for me.  However after download  and attempting to install on xp service pack 3 the error "service pack 2 required"

Please can anyone help?

40hz:
I had not heard of Qiqqa, had a look and it appeared something for me.  However after download  and attempting to install on xp service pack 3 the error "service pack 2 required"

Please can anyone help?
-wales (February 15, 2012, 11:19 AM)
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@wales - That's got to be frustrating. Especially since you have SP3 already installed.

For installation issues, your best bet is to put that question directly to Qiqqa since their developers would have a better idea what's causing the problem is and how to solve it. Their support link is here:

https://getsatisfaction.com/qiqqa

 :)

wales:
Thank you for your reply.   I have contacted qiqqa and a no reply email has said that they are busy and will try to answer my question asap.

gwynevans:
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?
-app103 (February 15, 2012, 10:13 AM)
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eBooks aren't all that big, so it's a reasonable choice to take a copy of them into it's library tree, rather than try & track changes that would occur if it just tried to reference them 'outside'.  I've currently only got just over 1000 books in mine, and the library around 912MB  (Mostly ePub, rather than PDF though).

One advantage not mentioned is that using Stanza on the iPad or the browser on a Kindle, I can access them wirelessly via Calibre's server & WiFi!

It does allow you to choose where to place the library (and to have more than 1 if desired), including moving an existing library tree around.

IainB:

* Ability to "pull" metadata from many different sources is very useful.
* Ability to "harvest" online content-sources and convert them to e-books is a brilliant idea (not yet tested by me).-IainB (January 23, 2012, 08:32 AM)
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@40hz has had a look at this feature (copied from another thread):
re: calibre: Ok, I just gave it a workout. What it does (i.e go out and get a feed at a scheduled time, download it, and create an ebook out of it) works quite well.

per the developer of calibre:
The news downloading feature, one of calibre's most popular, has an interesting story behind it. I used to subscribe to Newsweek, back when it was still a real news magazine. But one fine day, Newsweek simply stopped being delivered to my house and no matter how much time I spent on the phone with various sales reps, it simply would not start again. Since I'd just got my first e-book reader at the time, I decided to add the ability to download and convert websites to calibre. From the beginning, I decided to make it as modular as possible, so that other people could contribute "recipes" for different news sites. The calibre cookbook has kept on growing and now calibre has recipes for over three hundred news sources in many different languages.
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The limitations, however, are annoying. Each feed gets made into its own book. You can't combine feeds using the standard scripts provided by calibre. I'm guessing you could if you were to combine them in you own script. But that defeats some of the convenience being sought.

The other problem is that a new book gets created for each source each time the "get news" button is pushed. So if you were tracking 10 feeds daily, on Monday you'd find 10 books in your library list. When it ran again on Tuesday you would then have 20 books in your library unless you deleted Monday's run. Not a real problem since you could just select all and delete. But what happens when you add something in that only gets checked weekly - and for which you want to keep a few back issues on hand? Since calibre doesn't allow you to set up folders, it starts getting excessively "manual" keeping your newsrack pruned. Which, in all fairness, may only be a problem for tech news junkies like me.

I'm in the habit of closely tracking about 30 feeds daily - and well over a hundred additional between those I peruse on a weekly or monthly basis. So having somewhere between 100 and 150 "books" in my library just for that doesn't really work for me. I suppose I could do it using a portable installation of calibre which would be used just for feeds and act as a super-newsreader. But it's kind of a kludge. And it still doesn't combine multiple feeds into a single book. I don't want a library's periodical room. I want a geek's version of Reader's Digest.

What I was hoping for was something that could support a few different collections of RSS feeds. Something that could take three different feed lists and use them to produce a daily newspaper, a weekly journal, and a monthly magazine, all on an fully automated basis.

calibre can't do that. But it's soooo close it makes me want to scream.

But that won't accomplish anything worthwhile.

So now I'm firing up my email program and composing an extremely polite message to calibre's developer Kovid Goyal to ask what it would take to get that capability added.
-40hz (February 15, 2012, 03:07 PM)
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