Comment by akho

Most (all commercially available?$ebook readers are not as simple as that.

And a file manager doesn’t track which books of mine are synced and which are not. Calibre does.

A file manager does not make it easy for me to correct the ebook’s metadata so it appears properly on the ebook reader. Calibre does. Calibre will also automatically download metadata for you from a variety of sources (with many options for the level of automation, including individual review with diffs from the existing metadata).

Calibre also makes it trivial for me to create a web server so I can access my books from any device from anywhere.

Calibre will also track which books I’ve read and which ones I haven’t. Which a file manager won’t.

Calibre also makes it possible for me to read the books on my computer itself before I sync them to my device.

Calibre will also automatically convert my book to a different format depending on the device I’m syncing to, something a file manager won’t do either.

While you can do that with a Kobo you can't drop the file and expect it to appear in some collections. To associate a book with a collection you have to either use Calibre or the vendor's app. I have epubs and PDFs that weren't bought through the Kobo/Rakuten store and they don't get filed in my collections. With Calibre (and a plugin) I can do that.

I do agree I could live without it but files tend to accumulate and putting books in collections help.

All of this would be much easier if the kobo was dumber and just created shelves/collections based on folders.

I have an old Kindle and it's always had trouble trying to just load files over a USB connection - books show up in the wrong section, no metadata, etc.

Calibre makes it simple and the books appear properly on the device. And it can fix metadata on books downloaded from the internet. That's the main reason I use it. Add in the fact that it's a nice management tool for seeing all my books at once and I'm very pleased with it.

There's a lot of nutty stuff under the hood like ensuring that covers are sized optimally for each device, which often have their own aspect ratios, DPIs and what not.

It also does a lot of database management ie; for Kobo, inserting things into the Kobo database, where schemas have varied over time etc etc.

You can of course just copy paste files as a baseline and it'll work.

If I knew how to do that on either the Kobo Libre or the Kindle 2012 model, I'd do it. As it is, Calibre is very easy to use anyway.

the extensive library of plugins allows you to do things not possible with just command line tools or the file manager. But of course the basics are just awareness of metadata, metadata editing, and grouping different file formats of the same book together in one entry. Using an app that is aware of the metadata conventions of the specific media files you are managing is indispensable to me.

I use its ability to add the number of the book in a series. So I get:

This is a book - book 1 of 3 That book - book 2 of 3 There book - book 3 of 3

There's more to it but that is the gist of it. It's awesome.

They may be "files" but I have thousands of them on my devices. And there is no way in the world I'm managing that through Kindles interface.