> Most (all commercially available?$ebook readers are not as simple as that.
Only if you make them. Have been pretty simple for me. I don’t do most of the things you mention, and do not see myself wanting to.
I do use Calibre for conversion (through the command-line ebook-convert tool, wrapped in a script that converts and mails to Kindle in one operation). I don’t use different devices, to “automatically” does not mean much.
> Only if you make them. Have been pretty simple for me. I don’t do most of the things you mention, and do not see myself wanting to.
That's not how it works. Each device and firmware has its own way of doing things. For example, I would have no idea how to build "ebook groups" on my reader, but I don't have to worry about that because Calibre knows how to do it for me. Creating those by hand would likely involve a third party tool or XML/other structured text format editing, which would be annoying.
> I don’t use different devices
That's your setup. Another person may have three readers, for whatever reason. How would you keep track of it then, and would it not be easier to just hand over things to Calibre for automatic synchronisation?
> > Only if you make them. Have been pretty simple for me. I don’t do most of the things you mention, and do not see myself wanting to.
> That's not how it works. Each device and firmware has its own way of doing things. For example, I would have no idea how to build "ebook groups" on my reader
That would be you making it complicated. What are you all doing with your Kindles that needs multiple levels of organization?
> That would be you making it complicated. What are you all doing with your Kindles that needs multiple levels of organization?
A Kindle Keyboard 2 is completely different than a Kindle Oasis 3. The file format they use is different (they've changed formats a few times in the last 13 years,) the software is old enough on the Keyboard 2 that it's fundamentally quite different, etc.
This doesn't even preclude other e-reader companies existing which further complicates the setup. What if your old Kindle dies and suddenly none of your scripts work anymore because the new Kindle is just subtly different in how it works? What if you suddenly hate the Kindle ecosystem and want to switch to Kobo?
>Keep track of what?
Having more than one e-reader? This is not an uncommon case, honestly.
Formats are a different point from “ebook groups”. To answer your question — I’ll modify the line that calls the conversion program (which is, at the moment, Calibre’s ebook-convert). As you can imagine, I’ve already had to do that a few times over the last 15 years. It took me less time than the “add to library” dances would have.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Only if you make them. Have been pretty simple for me. I don’t do most of the things you mention, and do not see myself wanting to.
I do use Calibre for conversion (through the command-line ebook-convert tool, wrapped in a script that converts and mails to Kindle in one operation). I don’t use different devices, to “automatically” does not mean much.