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Will there be an advanced search like in CALIBRE?

January 28, 2013, 3:40 am
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Hi there,

I am a happy user of AEM 3.3.0.2. I have been using AEM since version 1.9.

AEM is indeed very powerful e-book management application. Its main advantages are:

- file management (bulk renaming, replacing...)
- metadata download feature (although it has problems with Amazon and download of generes)
- ISBN extraction feature, both from file name and even from file content

However AEM has a serious disadvantage - it has a very limited search capabilities. Advanced search is the most important feature a serious database application must have. What is it good to have a large collection of e-books if one cannot find the right ones? I have a large e-book collection (7500 titles) but I have big difficulties finding the right books I have to read when using AEM.

There is another very powerful e-book management application with huge number of advanced features. It is called CALIBRE (http://calibre-ebook.com). It is not only completely free but even more than that it is open source and open architecture application with large number of independently developed plug-ins which extend Calibre's functionality.

The reason why I am mentioning Calibre here is because of its very powerful advanced search capabilities (http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/gui.html#the-search-interface).

Advanced search in Calibre supports:

- simultaneous search on multiple database fields
- available fields for searching are: tag, title, author, publisher, series, series_index, rating, cover, comments, format, identifiers, date, pubdate, search, size and custom columns.
- making complex searches using REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
- making complex searches using RELATIONAL operators = (equals), > (greater than), >= (greater than or equal to), < (less than), <= (less than or equal to), and != (not equal to)
- making complex searches using LOGICAL operators AND, OR, NOT
- SAVING of complex searches and reusing them later or in other complex searches

Can you please tell me are there any plans to include advanced search capabilities like the ones in Calibre into AEM?

best regards

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A couple for suggestions

February 2, 2013, 2:38 am
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Hi!

I have recently started using Alfa Ebooks Manager and was surprised to find out that this is actually a good application. So first of all - thanks for making it! Really makes my life easier. However, there is a number of things I think could be improved, if you are interested in my opinion. These are:

1. The Publishing Date field should be able to accept just the year, not a full date, as many books only show the year. You advertise your program as a solution for academics as well, but let me tell you - selecting random dates is annoying and can introduce some turmoil afterwards, as one cannot be sure if the date is random or meaningful in that specifig instance.

2. Another academic thing - while preparing a bibliography, one is usually required to give the city name where the book has been published. Adding such field by default might be a good option.

3. I have multiple books, both electronic and printed ones, whose number of pages exceed 10 000. You have set the limit to 4 digits. Please expand it to 5.

4. I have 5 books in my collection, 1 genre and 7 sub-genres. Two of the books belong to two sub-genres. The main genre tells me there are 7 books total belonging to it.

5. Whenever some field is improperly filled in, I get a crash prompt which tells me about nothing what is incorrect. I guess a little info that is user-friendly wouldn't do any harm. The weirdest thing is that newly-added books with error are often not shown until restart. Morever, I often get the error even when I am pretty sure I filled everyhing in correctly.

6. I do not fully understand how the book covers are really stored, but I guess adding the option for using relative paths (i.e. to a sub-folder in a folder where the database is located) would be a good idea.

7. Some books are horizontal - why not add a flip option for the thumbnails?

8. If there are many editions, one might want a field for the original publishing date as well.

9. In many countries, Roman numerals are used for the number of edition, not Arabic ones, but the field only accepts standard numeric values.

10. Why double click doesn't open the book card when in the list view mode?

11. Could you PLEASE make the export option include other meta information? I would like to go for my book hunts with something more than the cover, author and title, and I don't really care that much for the cover :( Making a prompt windows with choosable fields shouldn't be that much work.

12. I think adding a view option to see the covers without the 3D effect and without covers at all would help browse the database in certain instances.

Thanks again for making such a good program! I hope you will consider at least some of the suggestions I made today.

Best regards,
Mirosław Koziarski

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Correct formating to use with "Retrieve ISBN from File Name"?

February 4, 2013, 10:11 am
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I have a large number of PDF files, that include the ISBN13 number into the file's name, I'm planning on using a batch file renamer to standarize the naming of all files, my question is, if I will be using "Retrieve ISBN from File Name" option to import the books (as some file do not have that info inside the PDF itself, so the "retrieve from file content", would not be optimal), what would be the best way to rename my files for Alpha to recognize and import them in the database? Should the ISBN be at the end or beginning of the file? should all 13 digits be together or separated by hyphens? Does it matter if the ISBN is inside of brackets, square brackets or separated by underscores? Does any of these matter or how should I separate the year from the ISBN numbers?

For example I would like to standardize files something like: (book category published year) book name_ISBN13.pdf, so it would look like "(Apress 2012) Pro HTML5 Games_978-1430247104.pdf"

Just need to know which variation works best with Alpha. thanks

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"support" did not work

February 10, 2013, 1:46 pm
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I cant send email to support. When I try to do it I get the same massage:

Validation error, please try again. If this error persists, please contact the site administrator.
The answer you entered for the CAPTCHA was not correct.

I am sure the answer for the captcha was correct.

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Kindlean paperwhite support

February 11, 2013, 1:05 am
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Like I great other many people, I am looking for a Kindle (paperwhite) ebook manager that can support Collections. I see in the Kindlean FAQ that it cannot support firmware 5.3.3 - which can with my KPW.

So, is the ebook manager any different? Is the problem being worked on?

I would love to purchase the product to try it out, just as soon as I know it can support the feature (setting collections) with the version I have.

Kind regards.

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Error message when updating from Amazon

February 11, 2013, 3:51 am
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Hi there,

I am a happy user of AEM. I am using AEM 3.3.0.2, my plugins are up to date (so says the online HELP -> UPDATE PLUGINS check) but my updates from Amazon do not work, specifically the following fields: Genres, Tags, Rating are not updated for any book.

I already reported this problem a year ago when I used an older version of AEM. Back then I was told to contact your support team and I was sent an e-mail with download link to a small utility which was supposed to test if there is something wrong with my connection to Amazon or with my .Net framework installation. However the utility successfully retrieved ALL the metadata from Amazon indicating that everything is correct with my .Net installation and connection to Amazon. After testing with the utility I was told to make few tests in the AEM and to send you a sort of a dump file which AEM generates automatically however I remember that after using the utility the problem suddenly disappeared in the AEM itself.

However after upgrading AEM with later versions the problem is still there.

1) When I select a book and update using "Web Update..." button nothing happens, there are no error messages, however genres, tags and ratings are not updated.

2) However if I open the book card and press the "Update book from the web..." button the genres, tags and ratings are updated. But when I press OK to close the book card window which is supposed to save the downloaded data AEM reports the following error message:

The save operation was cancelled because some of the values are invalid. Please correct the field:
A foreign key value cannot be inserted because a corresponding primary key value does not exist.[Foreign key constraint name=GenreBook_Genre]

Please provide me with the instruction what to do. I heavily depend on the missing metadata and Amazon updates.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

kind regards

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Folder Tracking feature

February 12, 2013, 1:57 pm
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Hello guys, great product. A must have.
Just a comment if you wish to take it into consideration for improvement in next versions.

When you manage a large collection of ebooks, you use to have a "Library" folder or "My Books" or whatever...with thousands of them and in a day to day basis you add new books, you can delete others, but I don't know how to track which files are already inside my AEM database...I don't know if you have any shortcut to do it...or having such a folder tracking feature (or similar) could be an improvement for next versions...

Thanks very much.

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Is there an easy way to purge non used authors, tags, genres, or other fields?

February 28, 2013, 11:03 am
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I mean is there an easy way to delete all those fields that were once created but no longer used?. For example in the case of the author’s field, sometimes when importing books, they are generated based on the info. Available inside the file itself, i.e. “John Smith” as the author for book X. If I later update all fields using a web source (such as Amazon), the correct or complete name of the author may be imported like “John M. Smith”, so I end up with a database with two authors, one with a book linked to it, and another with “0” books.

I know, that non used authors (continuing with my author’s field example) can be deleted manually, but there is no way to sort authors by their book count, to make this easier. Hopefully a database cleaning tool could be added to AEM, to delete all those unused or redundant fields automatically. Thank you.

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SDF file @NAS folder

March 2, 2013, 9:48 am
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Hello guys,

I'm trying to point to a SDF file located @ my nas device. I'm getting the error:"Unknown Application Error: Cannot open the shared memory region". Is a database SDF file located in a network drive not supported?. If is not supported, could we try to locate the SDF file @ a dropbox folder?"
I'm trying to figure out out to share my ebook database through different devices.
Thanks very much.

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Reading in alfaebooks

March 6, 2013, 12:42 pm
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Hi

How do I read downloaded book in alfaebooks or is it only a cataloging programme?

Thanx

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Export to Text File

April 18, 2013, 10:17 am
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Hi!
It would be nice add to Customize template Description and Custom (1-5) Fields.
Best regards,
Evgeny.

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Sorting list by author. Also : reporting a bug

May 4, 2013, 9:07 pm
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Hi and thank you for this very usefull software. I have a huge collection of books (and also a few ebooks) and it looks so far that Alpha is the perfect tool to manage it.

However I have 2 little problems that I hope you can help me with.

1- I am not abble to sort my list by Authors. In the Table View for instance I can click on the head of any column to change the sorting order, except for the "Author" one.

It is not really a big problem at this time since I just started adding books in the database. I already add them one author at the time alphabetically so they are in the right order when sorter by "Add Time".
But when I'm done with my current library, and when I will add new books in the future I would like to be abble to sort the list by authors (last name preferably).
And ... A multiple level of sorting would also be nice ;)

2- I also have to repport a bug : When Alpha is running on my computer, whenever I move or resize a window on the screen (any window. Could be the main Alpha window, a Chrome window or Notepad window for instance), Alpha will crash and I have to restart it.

I currently use the free version of Alpha eBooks Manager but will very much consider buying the full version if there is a way to fix those mathers.

Thank you :)

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Execute Alfa Books from two computers

May 13, 2013, 9:29 pm
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I have Alfa Books installed on my desktop computer, with the books and database on the desktop computer. I'd like to run Alfa Books on my laptop and access the mapped drive database on my desktop. I've tried, but I can't open the files (epub). The database info is correct and the file path appears correct. However, the file path is not active. Perhaps I did not setup Alfa books properly. If this is possible, what is the process?

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Sorting Books by Author should be a Must

May 18, 2013, 7:20 am
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Started using AEM-Lite (registered May 18 2013) Issue with author of book-title

There are many nice features in the program. But....

There are a couple of things I stumbled upon that were disappointing...

- As one of the previous posters remarked, it is possible to sort by almost anything, exept by author. The reply was that this is not possible, because of possible multiple authors.

Being able to sort by author (in various views) is definitely a must for me to keep on using AEM. If there are multiple authors, why no possibility to use the name of the first author? Sorting by author (Surname, first name) should be one of the standard features in AEM in my opinion.

- When scanning for new books (several times in a row) on my pc during one session AEM crashes each time. When I restart the books have been added. All my .NET software is o.k. The problem keeps occurring.

- In the shelf-view I would like to see: author, book title and cover image. The latter two are shown, but again: no mentioning of the author. After exporting to html (pane-view and bookshelf view) the author is also missing (This can't be true!). Some of the cover-thumbs are too small to distinguish the author's name, so author's name shown is a must.

- After exporting the shelf-view to Adobe PDF, the shelf doesn't fit on the page (the panes are o.k.). The end of the page shows the title, then a black rectangle, and the cover image on the next page.

- The quality of the thumbs in the exported pane and shelf view is significantly less than in AEM.

- Why is it that from one author all of his titles can be found under his (one) name, and from another author the author's name is mentioned multiple times for several books? (while authors name is the same in metadata, but books added in multiple sessions).

Greetings,
Willem
The Netherlands

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Problem whit italian localization

June 24, 2013, 3:11 am
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Good Morning,
the program, in English, works very well, but if I choose my language (Italian) there is a little problem:
when I open Book Card, in the fields "Publisher" and "Series" disappears the description and you will see a series of zeros.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Imer

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Current Version

July 6, 2013, 11:32 pm
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Hi,

Is it possible to know what is the last current version of AlfaeBook Manager ? Is it 4.0.0.2 (Pro Version)

if it's not the current version, what is the link or the way to download it from web site ? Will I receive a email about new version and download link ?

Thanks to keep post current in forum to tell what is the current version.

Pascal H.

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Is there a way to choose the last page of a file as the back cover?

July 31, 2013, 7:29 am
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The default seems to be the second page. Most of the PDF book I have have the last page as the back cover of the book. Can the manager be told to get the last page somehow?

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How to change/remove label on cover "NEW"

August 6, 2013, 10:28 am
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I like Alfa Ebook Manager ! Better than my Sony Reader Manager (the old version that can scan directory without imorting) I have been using.

One of annoying, or two annoting things:

1. Label 'NEW' on the cover. How can I remove it ? When will it removed (as not new anymore) ?
2. Can you put the label on the cover type of the books (epub, pdf, chm, etc) ?

Thank you for the great software !

AlfaUser12

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Jump to nowhere and lost

August 6, 2013, 10:42 am
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When I set icon size to 1:1 (the largest), if you click on a book it will jump to I don't know where and lost it. Can you fix it on the next version (my version 4.0.3.2)

Thank you,

AlfaUser12

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Can cover change image to be placed inside db ?

August 7, 2013, 8:34 am
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When I made cover change, the cover is saved in a separate directory. How can I make it to be placed inside the database file ? Replacing the current image in the db.

Thanks

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