TLDR at the bottom
Hello everyone, I wanted to get some opinions from other people on a topic that is quite important to me. The organization of my digital book collection.
I know many people will say to just use calibre when asked how to organize ebooks, but I think this is not really a complete answer.
With this post, I thought I’d share my approach to organization, explain its reasons and quirks, and hopefully hear how other people manage their libraries. Maybe you guys have some good ideas for organization which I can copy ;D
Columns in calibre
As probably most other people do, I am using calibre nowadays to manage my library and its metadata. One thing that calibre lacks in its default library setup in my opinion, is a way to group books together that may not be part of the same series, but are part of the same universe.
For this purpose, I have added 2 additional custom columns which I call “World” and “World Index”. As an example, take the Shadow and Bone trilogy by Leigh Bardugo. It’s a standalone series which takes place in the so called Grishaverse. Other series in the Grishaverse are the Six of Crows and the King of Scars series.
To organize these series in my library, I will use the default series column for the book series and fill the custom world column with “Grishaverse”. My World Index is basically an arbitrary number for sorting purposes. In the beginning I tried sorting books in chronological order with it, but quickly determined this isn’t feasible for more complex series. Nowadays it’s a bit more relaxed and basically constitutes my recommended reading order.
Export to my E-Reader
This is probably the part where most people will shake their head at me. I do not use calibre to manage the books and metadata on my e-reader (a Kobo Clara 2E). The reason for this, is that my e-reader only groups books together by series, but I want them grouped by world.
So instead I connect calibre to a folder and send the books there. The books are exported in the following scheme:
World/World Index; Series #Series Index - Title - Author
My kobo has a plugin called Autoshelf installed, which when activated will automatically create collections on my device based on the folders the books are stored in and fill out metadata information using regex to parse it from the filename.
Things I currently don’t like
Most things I dislike about my current setup come about due to calibre.
One thing I still miss from calibre, is the ability to add a single book to multiple series. Although it’s rare, I have come across some books which are like this and did not fit into my library properly.
Another problem I have is that I like to store all my media on a NAS and manage it using tools hosted on my server. This is not possible with calibre and while people have stored their databases on a network share, it is not a recommended setup since it can lead to database corruption.
I am also missing a sort of auto export feature. Currently whenever I add a new book to my library, I have to manually send it to my export folder so that it has the correct filename and folder structure for my e-reader to handle. When I update the title or other metadata, I have to delete the book from that folder and resend it.
My final issue is with the kobo software/the autoshelf plugin itself. My previous device was a tolino, which natively supported collections based on folders. This is not the case on kobo, which instead wants to rely on embedded series metadata. This would obviously not work for my approach which is why I need the Autoshelf plugin mentioned above. While the autoshelf approach works, it can only group books which have already been imported and the process is only triggered when the connection to a PC is disconnected.
This means, that I have to plug my device in twice, first to transfer the books and let them be imported and a second time to trigger the autoshelving process.
TLDR
My books are managed using calibre. Custom columns are added to enable additional groupings by world and reading order in case there are multiple series playing in the same universe. Export to my kobo e-reader is done manually to keep the world groupings using the Autoshelf plugin.
I don’t organise it 🥲
How many books do you have? It took me a while to see the point as well. My library isn’t that large yet with about 400 books but I think I started when I had like 50-70. Back then I just threw everything in folders based on the world they belong to but I disliked the metadata being all over the place, especially the quality of the covers.
A lot, it’s just a mess though because I downloaded books to my kindle from multiple computers (I’ve had my kindle since 2015). But I can use the search function to find what I want to read next.
I would have enjoyed a TLDR section.
I’m not a huge fan of managing in general, therefore my answer might disappoint you: I use Calibre and my columns are restricted to title, author(s), and tags. Once in a while I make a backup . On my ebook reader (a Pocketbook) all ebooks are stored on a SD card, no folders. A new ebook is send to the reader by mail, moved from internal storage to SD card and then imported to Calibre.
I kind of forgot about that when writing it out. Thanks for the reminder. I’ve added one now
Interesting, I haven’t heard of Pocketbook. What features do you like? Do you have a stylus for it?
I have the Touch Lux 5 and it is not so much about features, but about the price/performace ratio and the independence from format. No stylus though.
I just use the default Calibre sorting, I’ve never found a need to sort by world or anything like that. I have about 1,800 books in my collection. I can see how OP’s case is different and that the solution is pretty slick as well.
I use readarr’s built in auto-organizing to set up each book as I like it. Took a bit to figure out what would and wouldn’t show up on my older kobo ereader (6+ years old, can’t remember exactly) but now it works great.
General format is Author/Series/Series #/ Title. If the book isn’t a part of a series it defaults to Author/Title. I don’t use calibre or anything, I just sideload the books onto my kobo and it works from there.
I haven’t felt a need to organize further as most ebooks are fiction and part of a series.
I’ve really got to try those arr programs out some time. I think I had a docker container with one set up once but got confused and decided to not use it
It’s rather simple to set up, I followed this guide to set it up since I’m using openmediavault anyways. You should be able to use the docker compose files the same way on straight docker easily enough.
Only difference is I used readarr instead of lazy librarian, and prowlarr instead of jacket. Same idea though.
Next step is to figure out a way to have only transmission in the vpn and all the arrs outside of it with split tunnel or something similar. Having the arrs in the vpn causes problems after a while with the indexers, but it’s pretty minimal work involved to fix.
I use the directory hierarchy to organise them.
I got ~500 ebooks. They’re all in files in my HDD, as I do not trust “someone else’s computer” (cloud services) to allow me access to my ebooks in the long run. When I want to access them from another device than my computer, I use either my home network to do it or I copy the file.
The books directory is organised as such (note - I’m translating the names):
- ~/books - main directory. Things that don’t fit any subdir go here, like the Anarchist’s Cookbook.
- ~/books/weeb - light novels and web novels. Subdivided further by series.
- ~/books/lang - anything Linguistics- or language-related. Most things go straight into this dir, except Romance- and Latin-related, those go to ~/books/lang/roma
- ~/books/cult - literature. Divided by author, when I have 2+ books of the same author.
That works For Me®. For other people who might want to adopt a similar system, here are a few tips:
- try to split your books into directories of the same magnitude. Having a dir with 50 books and another with 10 is fine; but if you got 100 in one and 2 in another, your system could be tweaked.
- don’t be afraid to reorganise the books later on.
- if you’re really lazy, an “unsorted” directory is a godsend.
- when possible/reasonable, use objective criteria to sort your books, like author or purpose. Genre is not objective and books will often fall right between them.
- give the Dewey sorting system a check. You don’t need to replicate it, but the general idea is the same - recursiveness.
- know yourself and your books - you should have a rough idea of how many books you have, and how to roughly split them. For example mine are split that way because I’m into Linguistics, weaboo stuff and literature; you do you however.
By the way I tried Calibre. I got it installed in my machine for its conversion feature, but I don’t use it for its main purpose.
Thanks for this. Going to take a look at the Autoshelf plugin.
I don’t use many plugins with Calibre except the deDRM ones. Are there any others that you think are useful?
There’s KFXInout I think it was called, for the conversion of kindle books together with dedrm
I tried it a couple of times when a book wasn’t available on any platform beside amazon. Getting those books to open at all was a pain in the ass and didn’t always work the same way so I would recommend only using that as a last resort anyway.
Aside from those 2 I don’t think I use any plugins.
Keep in mind that Autoshelf is not a calibre plugin but a mod for kobo ereaders
Thanks. I think the KFX one is what I use. I use a Kindle but always remove the DRM from my purchases.
