Does this still insist on making a copy of all my books on my local hard drive? I have about 10,000+ books on a network share. It would be nice to be able to search through them and download just the ones I'm interested in, but past versions of Calibre require the book to be downloaded to your local HDD before it pulls any metadata.
I don't think so, but there is inbuilt calibre-server which should suffice for most of your needs and apparently it was improved in last version. There is also calibre-web[0] project. And on Calibre's wikipedia page it lists quite a few Calibre related applications which could do what you want.
Could you tell calibre to open the network share as a library?
Not quite the same, I'm currently using calibre with a library on a remote server (albeit samba share over VPN) and it doesn't download the books to my local device, unless i choose to save them from my library to it.
Or people who have let's say an ebook reader, a phone, a laptop, and maybe a desktop that they want to share books between and don't want to eat up multiple GB of storage on each device by duplicating their library everywhere.
This is a bad advice. Calibre (as of version 3) doesn't support this mode of operation. If the network disconnects you will most likely corrupt your library database.
Well, if your HDD shuts down mid write all sorts of shit will go wrong too. Few developers test their apps for this case.
With that line of edge case reasoning you should avoid running the majority of desktop software. :]
I run Calibre with a network share that sits on my home NAS since years w/o issues.
A corrupted database in Calibre is a non issue if all you use it for is to move books between your e-reader devices and the library. You just recreate it.
P.S.: Just for example -- the other day my MacBook's SSD filled up as Adobe InDesign was mid write on a huge document. It crashed and the file was corrupted and not recoverable.
While (mid write) 'not enough space' is not the same as 'network mount went missing' or 'SSD kicked the bucket' it's close enough. And this is commercial software that has been around for 25 years.
This is bad advice. Using Calibre while knowing that certain circumstances surrounding a network disconnect might corrupt your library database is better than rejecting Calibre out of hand since it doesn't support network libraries well.
Best of all would be in Calibre's library handling weren't so finicky, but in the absence of that, I use Calibre with a remote share and I'm just very careful about library backups, how long I leave it running, and am patient with the slowness.
How often does your network disconnect? Sure, it would be great if the backend storage system was better at handling atomic operations, but I don't think this is really a huge problem assuming you're not using a really crappy network.
I run Calibre with the library mounted from a NAS. Works fine for my ~2000 book collection. Not as speedy as local SSD, but it is ok.
Does that work okay with multiple machines connected at the same time? I've been worried about what happens when there's a write conflict to the DB. I'd really like a way to easily share and manage my eBook library from both my laptop and desktop.
If I recall correctly you can have the actual database file on the ssd while the books on the network share that would probably improve the speed a bit.
