Comment by mynameisvlad
3 years ago
> Formats are a different point from “ebook groups”.
The point is that even in the same line of readers, there are subtle differences. Replace "formats" with "ebook groups" if it somehow makes it easier for you to understand that different readers have different ways to do things.
> I still don’t understand “keeping track”. So you have several readers, there are books on them, you read the books. Calibre does not sync notes or reading position anyway (and certainly not wirelessly), as far as I know.
Uh, yes it does: http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/showthread.php?t=296205
And if you have thousands of books and multiple devices, keeping track of what's on each device and which format is best for the device gets messy. It's not a hard concept to grasp.
> different readers have different ways to do things
Sure. Yet the underlying activity (reading) is not complicated.
> Uh, yes it does: http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/showthread.php?t=296205
I opened that link and skimmed it. There is a whole thread of people there who can’t get their reading position synced using Calibre.
> And if you have thousands of books and multiple devices, keeping track of what's on each device and which format is best for the device gets messy.
I don’t see a reason to track that, and think you are inventing a use case where there isn’t any. People are obsessive, though, and will spend countless hours tracking things for no benefit when given a tool to do so.
Calibre comes from a period in the '00s where people did a lot of this sort of metadata tracking and cataloguing. There used to be a whole class of applications to track your physical library (with barcode scanning &c; I remember Delicious Library), physical CDs, … All are now dead. Music collection managers are barely alive.
There is very little point in maintaining a “collection” of digital stuff you did not create and do not plan to use. Your beach reading is not it.
There are very useful parts of Calibre — formats, device profiles, the plugin ecosystem. Sadly, it is not particularly modular in terms of workflows (which is the underlying cause of this whole discussion), yet has become a standard platform for all community efforts into deDRM &c.