As do you. It is entirely possible to have the majority of a population on either side of the average (mean) value. I, for instance, have more than the average number of arms, along with the vast majority of humans. Distributions need not be symmetrical, or evenly divided around average.

I agree that the GP's distribution sounds unlikely, but it has nothing to do with what average means.

I think that might be quite taxing for calibre, in particular the import process *will* take a good many hours. I just tested importing 3930 books (novel length), it took about half an hour, so it seems that you look at at least two days of unsupervised imports. Then again, doing *anything* with 380k files is bound to take time :)

Look at partitioning your library into several libraries if you have logical ways of dividing your collection. calibre also supports something called virtual libraries which I haven't used myself, but it might speed up handling a very large library. As mentioned there are huge performance improvements in the last versions of calibre, but you will surely benefit from an SSD disk and a largish amount of ram in any case.

I hope you have reasonably good metadata, either in the files themselves or in your naming structure, or you will probably face insurmountable problems tidying up your collection afterwards (this is not particular to calibre - GIGO applies here as everywhere else). Reading metadata from path info will probably be faster, as calibre won't have to parse the file on import. Check out the "Control the adding of books" in the Add books dropdown menu, in particular the regular expressions for parsing paths and file names, in that case disable file parsing. Do a few test runs on small subsets to make sure that calibre catches at least author and title correctly. Do your imports in batches (you can use the tag on import feature to connect a book to a particular batch), verify that metadata is sensible as you go along. Some things, like correcting different variations of author names, can be done efficiently after import (if your library is at all usable).

I (and likely others) would very much like to hear about your experiences, feel free to make a thread on the calibre subforum of mobileread. Note that such a large library might seem suspicious to some users, as pirating is frowned upon. In any case, the devs are tuning the performance of the new and more efficient db code (one of the new features in the 1.0 release), and your library will be a good test subject :)

OK, we get it, you hate the look and feel of calibre. On the other hand I hate the recent trend of giving everything a Web 2.0 look and removing easy access to as much functionality as possible. Let me know if you find some ebook management software which has half the functionality of calibre, half the stability, *and* a beautiful interface, while maintaining usability. I won't hold my breath.

I don't really get what in particular you complain about; if it is "waaaaah ugly" then I frankly can't be bothered to scrounge up a lot of sympathy, if there are tasks you really can't figure out how to do after trying for a few minutes feel free to ask over at the calibre forums. This is not intended facetiously, "simple" (and not so simple) questions crop up all the time from the millions of calibre users, and there are a lot of helpful people to answer them. It is very likely that your particular use case is already covered by calibre.

Furthermore, while the GUI is not beautiful I find it very effective. I'm definitely a "function over form" guy, and calibre is nothing short of brilliant when it comes to ease of doing complicated stuff. calibre is a tool which aims to cater to both power users and casual ones, and few of them seem to have significant difficulties with the GUI. There are a lot of users with little to no technical experience who benefit daily from calibre when managing their book collections.

On a side note: offering "simple" and "advanced" interface options has been brought up several times on the calibre forums, but has been rejected for two main reasons: partly because no-one seems to agree on which subset of the functionality merits inclusion in the simple interface, and partly because maintaining two interfaces adds additional complexity to the development process which no-one wants to take on the responsibility for.

That is not an "ebook", it's a library comprising thousands of ebooks. You wouldn't call the whole children section of your local library "a book containing thousands of books", would you?

Unless your goal is to confuse the issue (indeed it seems so when reviewing your post), it's generally useful to employ the same terminology everyone else uses.

Yes, that'll work for your particular current device, and if you're happy with it, fine. I'll note that polishing an epub is really easy with only basic knowledge of CSS, though. Sigil is basically an IDE for epubs, and with it you can reformat an epub in minutes, most epubs only require slight changes to CSS. With an "official" plugin you can launch Sigil directly from calibre.

The epub is then usable as-is on most devices, and it is a very good source format if you want a fixed page format like PDF, or other flowing formats like K8 for Kindle. If anyone's interested I can describe a few "sensible default" modifications to particular CSS classes.

First thing I thought of as well. It's the story "Reason", found in I, Robot , btw.

Actually, I think he is :)

Luckily you don't have to learn a new language, as they can implement one you already know.

In Norway we have such a system (sans the "forgiving" of loans part - apart from the student loan not being inheritable you have to pay up eventually). It does work very well. Oh, and there is no tuition for government educational institutions, which are generally the best in the country.

Yes, we do, you can get high-quality education including university without paying a tuition. What's more, in Norway anyone can get a subsidised student loan from the government at very reasonable terms to help pay the rent and buy textbooks during your education. This effectively means that anyone, no matter how poor their family is, has the financial means to get an education all the way up to PhD level if they so wish. It's a huge boon for our society, and one that we take so much for granted that it's very strange for us to hear that some places you have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to even attend university.

There are private institutions, and for some areas (like marketing or business administration) you have to have attended them to be accepted in your professional community afterwards. For most professional areas, however, the state institutions are either equally good or the only alternative (no private institution offers education in literature, for instance).

Cat pee also contains dihydrogen monoxide. Pretty noxious substance.

Yeah, in Norway thre months bilaterally is the standard if you're not in a six month "trial", where you generally can quit or be fired on one month's notice. For a management position it's different, but they generally have a severance clause which amounts to the same security.

As for the "escorted out by security" as a matter of course, I don't get it when the employee himself is quitting. I mean, if they were disgruntled they've had all the time in the world to sabotage things, but their remaining time could be valuable for knowledge transfer. If you get fired I understand the rationale behind it.

Since you're probably not a poor man living in a shanty town, you have likely gone to the expense of electric lighting. This trick is not intended for you.

When at first I read about DNT I seriously thought it was a joke, along the lines of the Evil bit. They will *never* respect it.

Don't do that.

They'll probably just count emails and use that number further on, after having gotten the address included in every spammer list in existence. They don't request that you write something interesting in that mail.