SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

It seems a lot of members here use Calibre to manage their ebook collections. Does anyone also use it as a backup for GoodReads to track your reading as well?

I'm in the process of trying to set up a secondary library to track my reading in case something happens to GoodReads and/or the other reading sites I use.

The main problem I'm having right now is trying to set up dates read. There are a bunch of books where I only know the year I read the book because I haven't really been consistent in tracking my reading before this year.

Calibre doesn't seem to want to let me enter partial dates though and this is very frustrating for me. It's bad enough that I can't do that on GoodReads(insists on marking a book as read on Jan 1st of that year if I only enter the year which I don't want and end up leaving the date blank), but if I'm going to have an offline program to track my reading that includes customization options then I should be able to format the dates any way I want.

I've tried just doing the dates as text fields, but doing them this way won't let them sort properly unless I use a format I'm not fond of. I've also tried setting the month, day, and year as three separate custom fields and putting them all together in a composite column. This works for the most part, but it's rather cumbersome to enter the data that way.

Are there any experienced Calibre users here that have any ideas on how to deal with this problem?

There are some tweaks you can do in the Preferences -> Tweaks section (changing the format displayed also alters how much of a date you have to enter if I am remembering correctly, I have mine set to only add years), and you can add custom columns in nearly any format you like, but you probably want to ask here: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/foru... to get the real skinny.

Krazykiwi wrote: "There are some tweaks you can do in the Preferences -> Tweaks section (changing the format displayed also alters how much of a date you have to enter if I am remembering correctly, I have mine set ..."

Unfortunately that's not what I'm looking for. I want to be able to have a field where I can display the full date, but still have the option of displaying a partial date if I don't know the day or month.

I've already been to that forum(which is why I decided to try asking here, just in case) and I've pretty much been told that there's no way to do what I want, unless I have 4 separate columns(3 for the date and 1 composite column). I think that's just insane especially if I want to track multiple dates(at least 2 and possibly up to 4).

What really gets me is that I'm pretty sure Calibre used to be able to do what I want. I quite clearly remember being able to enter a partial date when I was experimenting with custom fields months ago. If my memory is correct, then it would seem that an "upgrade" broke this functionality.

Thanks anyway for your response.