I already have a perfect library management system: my filesystem. I want my book reader to just open the file I give it, and the same with the music player.
A music management app can navigate a large quantity of files via more effectively than clicking through artist -> album -> track hierarchies. You can ask it to find music by a particular genre, time frame, rating, tag, etc etc.
You can ask it to show things you commonly listen to or things you haven't listened to or haven't listened to recently.
Beyond this it can offer you the ability to perform a variety of operations on your selection whether its the antiquated notion of burning it to a disk, streaming it over the network, converting it to a different format finding more music by the artist etc.
Similarly calibre offers a way to dig through a substantial collection of ebooks in a lot of different way and perform operations on same.
Example. Find all the ebooks that don't have an epub or pdf format available and convert whatever existing format they do have to epub.
Find all the books that match a particular query that aren't on the currently connected device example foo bar baz and ondevice:false
Then send wirelessly to device.
Given a bunch of books for which some pieces of metadata is lacking guess what metadata probably matches and let me review your guesses.
Why not provide a stand alone binary copy2kindle (or sync2kindle) and let me use that? Instead we need to accept that in order to do a single task the tool needs to first re-organise the world.
EDIT: That doesn't mean that one can't also create a tool that manages the library on top of the various binaries. In fact if one architects the app fairly reasonably it would be very little additional effort (or could be done by third parties).
EDIT 2: WOW! Calibre has done exactly this... There is a whole range of ebook-* commands. (Thanks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24587793)
I understand that some people like a whole book management suite. Particularly people who don't use much tech, so it's just their computer + their Kindle + their phone.
But others need something task-oriented. I don't just mean whiny software devs like myself, but students, researchers and - in general - people juggling more devices and document types. Such a user needs a bullshit-free way to view an .epub by double-clicking on it straight in their Dropbox folder. A "send to Kindle" under a right-click menu. A "Kindle sync" that works by having it mount itself as removable storage, so that you can simply copy files over, the same way you put your music on your Android phone.
(Hell, maybe even a dedicated app would be good - one that looks like an orthodox file manager[0], showing you your files on one side, Kindle on the other, and helpfully detecting when you upload the same file twice. But that app would be orthogonal to the concept of opening a book, and to the concept of managing a book library. And I'd still want the right-click context menu integration. Hell, Windows actually had a place for it since time immemorial - the "Send To" section of the context menu!)
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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Orthodox_file_man... - i.e. Norton Commander, Total Commander and friends.
I still use Calibre for copying the occasional EPUB/MOBI to the Kindle, but I could replace that, too, with a shell script. Calibre’s ebook-convert is a standalone program, you could script that without ever opening the Calibre library-management application.
It will go out and find the appropriate metadata and cover for almost any book.
If it works for you, great - but anything can play music / display a photo. A good library system is golden.
IME music players usually focus on playing music and library management is usually just tacked on. Is there any other player where library management is close to as comprehensive as it is in MediaMonkey [0] (windows only)? It’s one of the extremely few I’ve seen that’s management first, player second.
I know there are CLI music players, though I haven't used them much. Of the ones I did, Winamp 3 was nice; Foobar2000 was great once I switched its default layout to display folder-oriented structure of the music library. I stayed with Foobar2000 for almost a decade (now I just use YouTube for streaming), because every other player I've tried out either didn't support incremental filtering (super convenient feature), or didn't understand that I don't care about metadata on mp3s (most of the time they're missing or wrong anyway) - I want its "library" to reflect the folder structure, instead of the player adding its own VFS on top of the native FS.
And now there's the same problem with ebook readers. I've recently tried to find a Windows epub reader that would just open the file, like a PDF reader opens a PDF. I failed. Everything wants to bundle its own "book library" management. But here's the thing: I already use Zotero for managing my research documents, including an occasional epub. I want a reader that will open an epub that I double-click on in Zotero.
(EDIT: Elsewhere in the thread someone mentioned Sumatra; maybe I'll give it another shot. I previously dismissed it because I don't need another PDF reader, and I really like Drawboard PDF - I use its annotation features a lot.)
At least in the image space, photo library management is a separate category of applications from photo viewers.