eLibrary

I have explored a lot of media managers over the past several months. At this point, eLibrary looks very, very good, probably the best of the bunch in overall features and performance. But I'm a little confused or perhaps I found a bug... I built a sample library from a collection of 44 books. In a few cases eLibrary was unable to identify an ISBN or obtain any information about the book from the web. This is not unexpected as those few cases are not published ebooks with a well-known title and ISBN but just simple PDF files. I went to the edit screen for one of those files by RightClick->Edit Book Info and added the book title and other information manually. However, I could find no way to save my edits. How do I do that? After viewing the library index the most likely action I'll take is to view a selected book. I would expect that a DoubleClick on a book would launch the book in a reader. Instead, it brings up the edit window. Since editing a book's metadata is far less likely than reading the book I believe that the launching should be the most convenient and that editing should require an additional action such as Shift-DoubleClick or Alt-DoubleClick. When I do Shift-DoubleClick on a book, or select the Book->Open menu item, the book is not opened. It appears that I also need to click on "Set as Default" on the edit window but I can't be sure as I don't know how to save my edits. If that is the case then I suggest that the default action should be to always mark one file as default. By far, the majority of my books are single PDF files. Where there is only one file that should be marked default by default so as to not require an edit step for each book. Where a book consists of multiple PDF files then the choice is arbitrary but the first one in the list is probably a good idea. And since opening a book is such a common action I believe that an open button should be in the tool bar. Thanks much, Bill

Another observation... I believe that the Add Books window should display an hourglass icon when the Fetch Info button is pushed instead of just displaying replacing the button with Stop. It does appear to display the hourglass when the Save to Library button is pushed thought it takes some time. Is there a way to add jus books that were previously skipped because the metadata could not be found online? thanks Bill

And yet another... I can find no way to descend a directory hierarchy recursively and add all books found. Is there a way? That would be very useful with a library of well over 1000 books as I have. Thanks, Bill

When merging several PDF files with the "Merge Selected" there should be a way to adjust the order of the files, that is a "move up" or "move down" button that would move the selected file. Thanks Bill

Hi, When you edit the book's info, the edit button should change to a save button. (if that's not the case, then there is a bug) As for the deault/shiftclick - your right. Shift+DblClick will open the default file. As for all the other recomendations: 1. adding an open button is a good idea 2. descending the iiner folder has been requested by many users and will be implemented in the next release 3. move file up/down is an option, i`ll will think about it 4. the hourglass sounds like a bug i missed, will be fixed Regards, Amir

Amir, Thanks for the quick reply. Here is what happens on my copy of eLibrary, 2.5.13.0, with a collection of 44 books. Select a book in the Library with the left mouse, the three toolbar icons - pencil, floppy and green arrow into a box - are grayed out. Right click on a book to bring up a menu. Edit is NOT grayed out and brings up the edit page. The same three toolbar icons are now NOT grayed out. The pencil has an X in an octagon, brings up tooltip "The book on Amazon", but clicking it changes the edit window to an info window without saving changes. The floppy disk icon has tooltip "Fetch public tags" but it saves the edits correctly. The third icon with the green arrow displays tooltip "toolStripButton1" and brings up the "Book Information Harvester Wizard". So it looks like all the functions are there but not at all obvious because of misplaced tooltips and incorrectly grayed-out icons. Let me emphasize again that I believe a double-click should open the book - a modified-double-click should edit it. Thanks again, Bill

Another possible problem... I added slightly over a hundred books with several "Add many book" sessions. Most were added with one Browse for books followed by one Fetch Info and one Save library. The final addition was made with several Browse for Books followed by one Fetch and Save. Without confirming every one, it appeared that the books I added appeared in the library and a sensible count appeared in the lower-left of the status bar. It sometimes took a bit of "clicking around" in the tags list to get the full count to be shown. I exited eLibrary, rebooted my machine (for an unrelated reason) and on relaunching eLibrary only 44 books were displayed. I could find no "Save Library" menu function on the main window and so believed that the library would be saved automatically on exit as it was a few times. Is this the case? If so, what happened to my other 65 books? I could try to reproduce the problem but it is a bit too much unless you really need it. One datapoint that may help: In one case I had manually checked a book without a check mark in the "Save Book" column of the Add Books window. I wanted to include the book for future manual editing even though it had no web-supplied metadata or ISBN number. The "Add Books" window included many books with full metadata. On that occasion an error message was displayed but I don't remember what it was. I was unable to reproduce this failure. Bill

Hi Bill, I`ll address these issues next week, (I won't have time this week). Thanks for reporting all the problems, it's very important and it helps incredibly in improving eLibrary. Please let me know of any other bugs/bad behavior you encounter. Regards, Amir