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> Yes, its already there and quite organized in directories. So you do understand the general concept of a library. Then you also understand the limitations of
by PurpleRamen 8y ago
> Yes, its already there and quite organized in directories.
So you do understand the general concept of a library. Then you also understand the limitations of directories and how much work goes in maintaining this system.
> Now ebook readers came along and pressed those hierarchical data flat, with long waiting times, because it needs to index first.
I don't think Ebook-readers started this. ITunes had this first I think, or whatever app ITunes copied from back then.
> grep and find works quite well for most work loads and are fast, why not enhance (or fork) them to support ebook formats?
Doesn't solve the problem. Grep and find don't give a useful interface for elaborated tasks. They also don't support metadata which are not supported by a fileformat, meaning "external" metadata.
> And at the same time omit very useful information that normal file managers show. (File creation/write/access time, size, full file name, etc.)
Depends on the application, and the user. Not all of those information are useful for everyone. Calibre for example has good support for filemanagers. Each entry has a link to open the folder with the ebooks. The whole library is saved as a folder-hierachy with metadate extrated into seperate files. The Database-View is just an additional layer.
> As I said, with long indexing times. I had ~50000 books on a ebook reader once and that broke it. Just because there are files stored, that should not slow down the system or even make it completely unusable.
Indexing is a neccessary tradeoff for gaining power. The alternative would be to constantly scan all files, making every single task slower. grep and find have their price too.
> But very few ebook applications and handheld readers have the same resources to implement a similarly powerful library functionality. Instead they have half backed solutions that make finding and organizing the library more difficult then if they would have simply used a standard file manager and grep/find/...
Oh yeah, I guess grep on an eReader would be a real pleasure to use...
> IMO an application that lets you just open epubs and other ebook formats and render them correctly just like so many pdf viewer do, without any half assed library functionality duck taped on to it, is highly sought after.
Those applications exist. Calibre even comes with one out of the box. Not their fault if you just start the library and not the reader.
- chme 8y agoMaybe I should make myself a bit clearer here: I am not against an index or library in addition to the file hierarchy, but I am against a library or index replacing a directory listing. Both perspectives are very valuable! Also a full text search (grep) or (more or less simple) file search (find) are useful in addition to a library. To reiterate, for me it seems that itunes and ebook reader generation of devices and applications don't seem to value custom directory organization. > Those applications exist. Calibre even comes with one out of the box. Not their fault if you just start the library and not the reader. While the library part of calibre is very good, the reader part is not so great, but that just might be because a library application is much more difficult to implement than the reader, so bad UI can be looked over there, but not in the reader. Otherwise I agree that this the application of choice for reading ebooks on Linux desktop.
- kingaillas 8y ago>To reiterate, for me it seems that itunes and ebook reader generation of devices and applications don't seem to value custom directory organization. Do you primarily or only use one computer or one os? I'm on 3 different OSes regularly, over 5 different computers counting ones at work. For me, the effort to setup custom directory organization is a complete waste of time unless structure and tags can easily travel between computers, filesystems, and OSes. Letting the app (Calibre for books, Mendeley Desktop for pdf's) organize however it wants lets me just clone the directory and preserve tags, which is actually what is important to me (or in the case of Mendeley, log in and sync documents/tags). I'm not a music listener at work or I'd just let an app organize that too if it syncs my tags.
- ori_b 8y ago> structure and tags can easily travel between computers, filesystems, and OSes. They can -- they're just files.
- pnutjam 8y agoAt the very least you need the title and author metadata. This can be done in the filesytem, but it's unweildy. I use Fbreader and run a Calibre server to manage my collection and epub metadata. Fbreader lets me browse the filesystem, or search by different metadata.
- apostacy 8y agoI am honestly very curious about what file structure you use for your ebooks. After 500 or so, I threw up my hands and just wrote some Perl scripts to flatten the filenames into something meaningful, and threw them into a big git-annex repository. I have at least two dimensions I'm dealing with: title, and file type. Really though, it's nice to also organize by genre, and year. I also dislike most of these walled garden library apps, and they are usually poorly written and obtuse. I would love an app that can scan my existing ebook repo, and then also create an index database, and make the books available on my mobile device. One pattern for sharing my rigidly structured data from my desktop to my iPad, is to just share my working tree over Dropbox, because I use git-annex for my file collections. That way, I have automatic syncing of the files, but also the safety of snapshots. If I do want to incorporate a change I make on a mobile device, I can simply make a commit on my desktop, but if some poorly written app decides to start screwing with my metadata, I can re-check the files out. OSX Preview.app is infamous for this.