this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
728 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
63010 readers
4996 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is why you never connect your kindle to the internet. Calibre forever
I just tried Calibre hoping it would help me get the metadata in my library in order... But maybe I am stupid, but I don't understand the purpose of this software. It apparently can't choose the MTP device as your library, only a folder on your computer? And only push the books onto the reader? I don't get how that's massively different from just copypasting the files into the reader. Is the main point convenient metadata editing?..
It's a library manager, like iTunes for music, or Plex for movies, Google Photos/Picasa for photos/images . You pick a spot for you library locally, and then your local lib is a jump off point to load in on to any reader device you want. It will understand what device you are pushing it to, and automagically convert it (like Amazon’s proprietary format to mobi or epub 😜 !) to supported file-types. If you are into that kind of stuff, you could run it as a service on your network, and have all that fancy BYO cloud ebook solution.
The big difference with just copy-pasting is that you have a full library somewhere locally, and you can pick and choose what you load up on your reader. For me and maybe you, those lists are pretty close to identical, but what if you have a very large collection? And what if i just had to RMA my Libra? One click and a couple minutes after i receive my replacement, all of my books and reading progress will be synced back. If you had put your lib on the device itself, you would have had to rebuild it from scratch.
TLDR: Collection Management/Self Host and auto-convert are the big plusses.
It's like iTunes, but for books.
That barely tells me anything because I could never afford Apple tech :/ But from what I read, Apple devices genuinely need an external piece of software to even upload anything there rather than you just copypasting the files, so idk how fair of a comparison it is.
Meta data manager, file organiser by metadata, upload a subset to your device, sync device metadata back to your library, built-in reader, file format conversion, file editing.
It's a whole suite really.
This doesn't track.
To pull my books into calibre, I need to first download them onto the Kindle, which requires wifi.
My kindle has been on airplane mode for years and I read new books all the time with it, but hey, whatever works for you