Comment by akho

> 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.