but see that's the thing, i don't even need that silly thing. i just run syncthing everywhere I need to (and it pretty much runs everywhere, including the kobo), and that's it. no middleman required (other than the syncthing meet-me infra of course, which is not as much as i expected: https://relays.syncthing.net/).
This is actually what I want Calibre the most for. It sorts things in folders quite nicely.
I am one of those weirdos that really appreciated iTunes setting up my music by Artist/Album/Track.mp3 format back in the days... until I realized how much badly-tagged garbage I had in there at which point, yeah, I was upset. :p
But nowadays I just have books setup by Author/Book/book.epub and that ... works okay. I mean it's one way to sort things around. I am actually considering a fully flat structure now so that koreader can show me previews, and I think Calibre could allow that, as I can customize its naming patterns...
But yeah, it can be kind of annoying for software to rename files for you especially if you're not starting from scratch. But Calibre is the first thing I used to sync books on my ebook reader (a sony PRS-T2 i think!) so i did start from scratch and just kept going, so i didn't get many bad surprises, and it in fact forced me to keep my metadata clean to a certain extent (otherwise books end up in the wrong folder).
looks like an interesting project... but I must admit it's not really something I use or need anymore. I used to do some book conversions when I would only find (say) a `azw` or a `mobi` file and would need to convert to `epub` but these days (a) I just find a `epub` but even if not (b) koreader can read `mobi` files and a lot more i can throw at it and (c) `azw` files are basically unconvertible, if I followed that correctly.
Author here, fancy seeing this here (again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190657)! I keep updating that article as I find things, the most progress there is is in ebook readers. I mostly use Koreader on a Kobo now, but they also have an Android app which I used when I had a tablet (which has been unfortunately bricked recently). This meshes well with Syncthing as I have read progress propagate everywhere, and I use git-annex for archival / backup / redundancy.
I still use Calibre for importing books. I think I could get rid of it if I had Something that would:
1. take a book and search for missing metadata (e.g. publication date, author, title, series, publisher, cover)
2. record addition date (git-annex or filesystem m/ctime could be used for that)
3. ... well, that really is it
Really, I don't use Calibre for anything else anymore. In the article I talk about the book browser, but I don't really use that anyway. I'm actually considering "flattening" my archive so that all books are in the same directory. That would make Koreader possibly more usable as it would directly show book covers while browsing around. It might also make navigating through a file manager better for exactly the same reason.
More broadly, I wish we had better file managers on the Linux desktop. What I'm looking for, repeatedly, is something that would show me a preview of what's inside a folder, kind of a photo gallery / music browser / ebook browser all rolled into one. The generic idea is that if there's a `cover.jpg` or whatever it's named inside a folder, use that as a icon or at least some sort of overlay when displaying the folder. I'm not sure how that would work, I'm not a designer, but I can't help but think there Must Be A Better Way here.
I use syncthing to sync my library around now, as mentioned in the article (I believe). This works great for Koreader, which stores read stats in a plain text file next to the ebook file. That can lead to syncthing conflicts sometimes, unfortunately but I suspect that might be more because of my combined use of git-annex and syncthing to archive my collection than anything specific to syncthing.
It does mean I need to use koreader everywhere though, I don't have a way to sync read progress back into Calibre, but then I don't really have read progress there anyways. I have a "read/not read" flag there, but it's some custom thing I added somehow, Calibre doesn't support that out of the box anyway.
and how does niri do it? a workspace is shared among all monitor, or it's one workspace per monitor?