For those who sideload books with Calibre

[PepSnickerMint]

If you sideload your books on Calibre, and you have a book series in there, how do you title yours? 

1. "Book Name"

2. "Book Name - Series Name, Series Number"

I'm just curious .. I've been doing it the first way but I'm seriously considering doing it the second way to make it a little easier on myself. I'm a bit OCD so I don't like anything looking out of ordinary, which is why I have been hesitant. I wish our descriptions would show up, but only the ones I've bought from B&N do, lol. 

[Sardonic]

Go to "Edit Meta Data" and you will be able to enter Series Name and Volume Number in separate fields.  I have attached a screen shot....it won't go through though...sorry...

[HumbleCorrespo…]

Except for title and author, side-loaded meta data does not show up on the NC. I title books in a series as short series name, book in series number, book title. That way books in a series stay together in their proper order, regardless of book title.

[roustabout]

"Except for title and author, side-loaded meta data does not show up on the NC" if you use the stock Nook reader software. 

One of the first things I did when I got the NC was to root it.  Having done that, I noticed that other epub readers all  supported landscape mode reading and good night mode. 

It tunrs out that many of them are able to read metatags added in Calibre, too, and sort accordingly. 

Once rooted, a great companion to your favorite reader app is a sync app, if one's available.  fbsync is free, and I've seen an Aldiko sync app for a couple of bucks.  By now, Aldiko premium may feature in-app syncing - I know that it's a very requested feature. 

The combination of a calibre, managing my own DRM, a rooted device, fbreader and fbsync means that I can sync my reading positions across all titles in all the hardware I use to read. 

I use Tasker to launch fbsync periodically.  If Aldiko puts in-app synching into their app, I'll probably move over to that as it would get rid  of many steps:

- Aldiko can read BN titles without a need to unlock them separately

- in-app sync would eliminate the need for a second program, and to remember to synch and/or set Tasker up

So you would get a lot of the benefit just from getting root on the device and installing Aldiko if they ever integrate sync, but it does not look as if they do.

I would strongly recommend against using the dropbox feature on aldikosynch or on fbsync if you have chosen to manage your own DRM.  Using dropbox as a store for your books means you are uploading unprotected material to a cloud service whose security is a) completely beyond your control and b) known not to be as good as claimed. 

Since managing your own DRM means that you are vouching for the confidentiality of the works under you control, uploading them to cloud storage wipes out any ability to assess the end-to-end protection you've committed to maintaining.  And you cannot maintain what you cannot assess. 

I'm governed by some interesting confidentiality legislation at the office, and often get "why not use Google Docs" or "why not use dropbox?" requests from users. 

I don't know of any cloud storage service which lets me audit access events on a per-file rather than a per-user basis in their storage container. 

I'm not as interested in knowing that my account touched a file X times from Y address (which is what several services offer their paying customers) as I am in knowing every account and network address that ever touched file X. 

Inside my perimeter, I can have that level of logging. 

[PepSnickerMint]

I think you all are misunderstanding me. I'm not asking how to edit the metadata, I know how to do that. I'm asking how you personally title your books - lol. What your preference is, and what is easiest for you.

[PepSnickerMint]

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HumbleCorrespondent wrote:
Except for title and author, side-loaded meta data does not show up on the NC. I title books in a series as short series name, book in series number, book title. That way books in a series stay together in their proper order, regardless of book title.

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Well, you didn't misunderstand me, lol. When you number your series, do you do it as "1, 2, 3 [..] 14" or "
01, 02, 03 [..], 14" Which one keeps it from going out of order?

I usually just search the store/net to find out which book comes next in the series, but it's a bit of a hassle. That's why I was thinking of editing my titles to show the series, to make it easier to know which book is which. I used to do it on the shelves but it seems like the shelves are wonkier with the update now. 

[Omnigeek]

I just use the book's title.  I put the series information in the meta-data even though the Nook doesn't seem to use it.  I just don't like putting the series name in the title.

[HumbleCorrespo…]

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PepSnickerMint wrote:

Well, you didn't misunderstand me, lol. When you number your series, do you do it as "1, 2, 3 [..] 14" or "
01, 02, 03 [..], 14" Which one keeps it from going out of order?

I usually just search the store/net to find out which book comes next in the series, but it's a bit of a hassle. That's why I was thinking of editing my titles to show the series, to make it easier to know which book is which. I used to do it on the shelves but it seems like the shelves are wonkier with the update now. 

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If the series < 10 then 1, 2, 3, . . .. If the series > 9 then 01, 02, 03, . . .. Both work for each circumstance.

[roustabout]

Might be safest just to get in the habit of using two digits, in case a series goes over, and to avoid titling part of a longer-than-usual series wrong and having to go in and redo.  I have technical references that I pull down in chunks and can easily have 50 pieces of. 

[Sun_Cat]

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roustabout wrote: 

The combination of a calibre, managing my own DRM, a rooted device, fbreader and fbsync means that I can sync my reading positions across all titles in all the hardware I use to read.

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Thanks for a really useful guide, roustabout!

I manage my ebook collection with calibre and do most of my reading on my NST, though occasionally I'll read a little on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus with Aldiko or the stock reader app.

It sounds as if I might get some benefit from rooting my NST for the purpose you describe. Do you happen to know whether or not those apps run well on a rooted NST?

[trisha48]

I used to have it just title but changed it to show series/series # first (easier for me to know which order it is). My NC is not rooted. I just use calibre to add the series title/# first so that it will show up in NC.

I use the plugboard to modify my title so that when I send the book to my NC via Calibre it will change it to:

For ex: 

Karen Vail 01 - The 7th Victim

Preferences->Metadata Plugboards

Format: [Any format] Device [NOOK] --> AND/OR [NOOK_COLOR]

Source Template: {series: |  | -} {series_index:0>2s} {title}

Destination Field: [title]

Save Plugboard-->Apply

note: Space added between series: and | to remove smiley from post. Remove space for Calibre to accept as vaild.

Works beautifully!

[roxmysoxGA]

I just use the book's title. I prefer not to have my entire library loaded on my NC, so if I want to read a particular series, I just sideload that series. Using the "Edit Metadata" function in Calibre keeps my books organized perfectly 

[roustabout]

@suncat:  yes, works fine on the NST. 

Before you root your NST, make a copy of "noogie," the NST boot disk, and use linux (a virtual machine in the free vmware player will do fine) to make a complete device backup. 

dd if=/dev/sdX of=touch.img bs=1M

(or whatever you'd like to call your backup)

to restore, run the command in reverse:

dd if=touch.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

As long as you're tinkering, once you have a backup you can resize the partitions, too.  My NST has a 200 meg /data partition and close to 1G for /media, and I removed the /data/media/B &N Downloads folder and symlinked to a folder with that name on /media - all my BN content happily downloads to /media/B &N Downloads and I'm able to manage all the content there myself, including the (much smaller than on the NC) magazine files - straight epub on the NST, which I prefer to the silly and quite large NC/NT variants. 

Resizing's pretty straightforward, it's a matter of deleting /data and /media and then creating them at the size you prefer, I reformat them with mkfs.ext2 on linux, then restart - the NST goes "ooh, this looks like you need a restore" and restores the contents.  The script to restore the contents does not recreate the old paritions, it just copies in the files. 

But you definitely want an image backup before you start! 

[bobstro]

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roustabout wrote:

Before you root your NST, make a copy of "noogie," the NST boot disk, and use linux (a virtual machine in the free vmware player will do fine) to make a complete device backup. 

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There are some cautions over on the XDA thread to make sure the resulting file is approx. 2 GB in size. If it's smaller, you may have only backed up a mounted partition, not the entire device.

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[...] Resizing's pretty straightforward, it's a matter of deleting /data and /media and then creating them at the size you prefer

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Did you just create them with fdisk? I've got spare uSD cards around, so this is nothing urgent, but I am curious about the process.

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I reformat them with mkfs.ext2 on linux, then restart - the NST goes "ooh, this looks like you need a restore" and restores the contents.  The script to restore the contents does not recreate the old paritions, it just copies in the files. 

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Can you still mount the device when you plug it into your desktop? Is Windows OK with ext2? And is ext3 supported, by any chance?

[roustabout]

Thank you for catching the big oops on making the new partitions - one's ext2, one's fat32. 

"There are some cautions over on the XDA thread to make sure the resulting file is approx. 2 GB in size. If it's smaller, you may have only backed up a mounted partition, not the entire device."

If you actually issue the command as dd if=/dev/sdX rather than /dev/sdX# it should work, but anything's possible.

In my hands, a noogie disk boots up your NST and when you connect to it to a linux host, you can mount the partitions individually (and I often do) but it doesn't happen unless you tell it that it's OK.  I'm not sure what happens if you mount one, then run dd. 

Yes, I deleted and recreated the partitions with fdisk.  And of course I forgot one thing:  the /media partition is a fat32 partition.  It's worth grabbing your partition table and filesystem types for reference before tinkering with the layout. 

You actually do want to recreate media as fat32, using mkfat, rather than as ext2 - though it's possible that the Nook could catch the bad formatting during the reinstall and fix it, it's also possible that it would be very, very confused by the layout. 

so, yes, when you're all done you have a fat32 partition in /media that your windows box can talk to.  It's just a lot bigger than what BN chose to deliver

[bobstro]

If my refurb $20 NST shows up, I'll give this a try. I've been reluctant to do some things on my one and only simply because it is possible to irretrievably screw up a NST, unlike the seemingly idiot-proof NC. I did make the recommended backup images, but since restoring is an all-or-nothing proposition, I haven't tested them yet.

I like the idea of pointing all content to the exposed, mountable partition. That alone might be why I bother with this. Otherwise, I've got more than enough storage with an 8 GB uSD card.

One clarification: You can repartition without rooting, correct? If you make changes via filesystems mounted on your desktop computer using noogie, everything you've described -- including the symlink -- will still work, will it not?

This also got me thinking about your concerns regarding ICS with Calibre: Using something like noogie on the NC, NT or other tablet, could you not boot Android 2.x with USB mountable support and do your calibre synchronization functions in a "sync" boot mode? It's not quite as convenient as automatic mounting, but it avoids having to remove the uSD card. ICS is "user mode", 2.x is "sync mode". A multi-boot option would round it out.

[Sewinglady51]

I use Calibre so that I can control what device I read my books on.  My husband and I both started out with Aluratek readers.  They were great and still are.  I keep them up to date with all of our books just in case one of our Nook Color's fails.  Like others have experienced sometimes the book cover does not show up on sideloaded books on the Nook Color.  Thanks to Roustabout answering a previous post on the same issue I now have BOOKCOVERS hooray!!!  I spent yesterday using the edit metadata feature and now have covers.  I also am in the process of numbering books in series.  Again kudos to Roustabout!!!! My husband was thrilled to learn that now he can have series numbered and covers.  He is fussier about that than I had been.  Anything to keep him happy using his Nook!!!!!! LOL

[roustabout]

Bob asks "If you make changes via filesystems mounted on your desktop computer using noogie, everything you've described -- including the symlink -- will still work, will it not?"

I'm not 100% on that question - I set up the symlink after I repartition and root the device (since I'm installing fbreader anyhow) - so I'm sure what happens if you do the repartition then symlink from your linux box, then pull the boot card and reboot.  If, after repartitioning, you mount the NST partitions as /tmp/data and /tmp/media I think you'd have the best chance of making the paths work - I'm just not clear enough on what happens as symbolic links get done. 

Certainly you could try it;  you'd know if it worked because once you boot the NST and download a book or two, if they either could not download or did download but were invisible then either the symlink was broken completely or was just not parsed once Android was running the show. 

You don't need to persistently root to repartition;  the Noogie disk boots you up in a rooted mode, and does not put files down onto the NST at all, so all partitions are completely changable. 

I suppose you could boot from a cm7 card on an ICS device (has anyone made a cm7 disk for the Samsung 7?) and try mounting the internal filesystems. 

One issues is that the filesystems are different on newer platforms - you cna't use fdisk to work with them, but need to use parted instead, and I'm not sure how you'd go about mounting them on your computer - I suppose there's a /removable/internal_storage branch of the filesystem tree, but is that a fat32 filesystem? 

Honestly, though, that's a humongous process to go through every time you want to poll the device.  It's why I've always preferred internal root to booting from SD card.  I was more interested in what I was seeing as far as Calibre being able to use the sdcard in the recent releases than I would be in setting up an alternate boot and power cycling twice. 

It does mean, though, that the well-priced Galaxy 8.9, whch Best Buy is offering with a keyboard for 350  isn't as interesting as it might otherwise have been - without an sd slot, it's crippled.  (Well, that and the processor - the CPU in the 7 plus smokes the CPU in the 8.9, I was sorry to see that only ATT has the 8.9 with the better CPU, and that it costs a huge amount of money from them plus a data contract.) 

[PepSnickerMint]

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trisha48 wrote:

I used to have it just title but changed it to show series/series # first (easier for me to know which order it is). My NC is not rooted. I just use calibre to add the series title/# first so that it will show up in NC.

I use the plugboard to modify my title so that when I send the book to my NC via Calibre it will change it to:

For ex: 

Karen Vail 01 - The 7th Victim

Preferences->Metadata Plugboards

Format: [Any format] Device [NOOK] --> AND/OR [NOOK_COLOR]

Source Template: {series: |  | -} {series_index:0>2s} {title}

Destination Field: [title]

Save Plugboard-->Apply

note: Space added between series: and | to remove smiley from post. Remove space for Calibre to accept as vaild.

Works beautifully!

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Thank you! This did work. I'm not sure how much I like it, simply because I'm so used to just using the title, but I do wonder if it will help me keep track of the series' better, especially since that's usually the only things I read. Hopefully I can get used to it fast.

[PepSnickerMint]

I wish there was a way to give it 3 lines, lol. Such as ..

Series Name Series Number

Title

Author