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voldacar 7y ago

Calibre is good, but last time I checked, it didn't let you organize books in a tree-like directory structure, does it still just dump all your books in one "folder"?

freddie_mercury 7y ago
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#why-doesn-t-calibre-let-me-store-books-in-my-own-directory-structure https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#why-doesn-t-calibr... "If you are still not convinced, then I’m afraid calibre is not for you. Look elsewhere for your book cataloguing needs. Just so we’re clear, this is not going to change. Kindly do not contact us in an attempt to get us to change this."
aasasd 7y ago
In my experience, if a management tool provides good tagging, search and sorting, it doesn't matter how the items are organized inside. Dump an item into the collection, assign tags, it joins the rest in the search and sorting. Over time, you grow and nurture your set of tags. (The exception is an outliner structure, however books wouldn't benefit from it. And directories aren't an outliner, they simply don't match the speed and convenience.) Notably, tags themselves can use a hierarchy.
majkinetor 7y ago
Its better then having folders. Folders are meaningless in organization of multimedia. Better to use tags as they are more flexible. Then you create virtual folders via tag search. You can show them as tabs or have them in the menu to select. Single book can be in more then one virtual folder that way - for example in Biology and Programming. But no trees of any kind.
- groby_b 7y ago
  Folders aren't "meaningless", they provide relational information (in form of a hierarchy), something that tags are really bad at. It's not folders that are important, it's subfolders. Many fields have an implicit hierarchical organization, and reflecting that in some way is extremely helpful. As are tags. Ideally, you want both.
  - majkinetor 7y ago
    Folders are special case of tags. Tags can be organized better - its easy to create tag exclusion groups, something that for example Gitlab recently added in the form of tag1::tag2 so when you put one of those any existing one gets removed You can get folders from tags within VFS, for examle TMSU does this ( a x-platform file tagging system).
    - groby_b 7y ago
      As a user? I don't care a lick. Of course we can map any kind of relational system into a series of strings. What matters is support to do it in an intuitive way. Nested folders are intuitive, in terms of organizing, browsing, and highlighting the existing structure when adding new items. Tags fail at least at the last two without UI support.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  Slightly OT: I want to use tags for my files (general, not books) - is there a good manager out there for that (Linux, but preferably cross-platform)?
  - majkinetor 7y ago
    There isn't. I search for one for years. Here are some FYI: https://tmsu.org/ https://tmsu.org/ https://www.tagspaces.org/ https://www.tagspaces.org/ http://www.tagflow.ch/en/ http://www.tagflow.ch/en/
jpindar 7y ago
Calibre does have full support for multiple libraries, but they're not tree-like since there's only one level.

ekianjo 7y ago

Calibre is in python2 and the author has no plans to move to Python3. Even after Python2 is completely deprecated. Not sure I would recommend Calibre right now as a long term solution.

majkinetor 7y ago
Now explain how that affects users ?
- eindiran 7y ago
  If the program continued to only support Python 2, the plugins you mentioned in your post would need to be written in a language which most operating systems soon won't have an interpreter for, or will require jumping through hoops to get. Plus, it looks like Calibre doesn't come bundled with a python2 interpreter and relies on the system python2 install, so again, when python2 isn't supported on OS-X and Windows and <insert Linux distribution here>, and your favorite package manager doesn't have a copy any more, that will be pretty inconvenient. With that said, it looks like there are efforts underway to port Calibre to python3: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/blob/master/README.python3 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/blob/master/README.pyt...
  - majkinetor 7y ago
    It can always bundle it so, no, nothing would have to be maintained, it could literally work forever (I count on this, Calibre library is among first things on my apocalypse readiness plan :). It does so on Windows ATM. Plugins are not really a problem in Calibre, I could disable all of them and would still use it as it has enormous amount of functionality OTB. It might be even better to not rely on plugins like on any other system. So not a problem really, even if it were true. Python2 is going to hunt us at least several more years anyway.
eindiran 7y ago
I don't think this is correct. In the Calibre repository on Github, there is a page on the progress being made porting to Python 3[0], and a pull request that tracked the progress and has been merged into master[1]. [0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/blob/master/README.python3 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/blob/master/README.pyt... [1] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/pull/870 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/pull/870