[chilady1]

I have about 14,000 books in my library and by using tags, it makes it easier to find what I am looking for quickly.

Here's a sample of my tags:

- Bibles (I have few in electronic form)
- Anthologies
- Business
- Chick Lit
- Cookbooks
- Inspirational
- Humorous
- Self-Help
- Fantasy
- Science Fiction
- Suspense & Thrillers
- Mystery
- Romance (this is the only category I break out)
- Romance - Contemporary
- Romance - Adult (Erotica)
- Romance - Historical

You get the idea. Like booklover6, I also created a custom column called On Device so once I put the books on my Kindle, I check this column off. This prevents me from always having to plug the Kindle in to know what is on the device. Other custom columns include Date Read and once I input the date I completed the book, it changes the entire line to the color RED so visually I can see all the books I have completed.

The last custom column I created is called Author-Series. This one is mostly used so that when I use Calibre to make my Collections, it pulls from this column only. My Collections then appear with Series Name - Author Name (# of books) in the Collection. The metadata plugboard handles the rest.

Home Screen shows:

Raines of Wind Canyon - Martin, Kit (5). Inside the Collection, all the books are listed from 1-5 which is great - no more looking up what is the next book.

I can relate to those struggling with a large library and the time it takes to do a search. One trick I learned in the Calibre forum is to change your search preferences and narrow down the criteria that Calibre searches on. For me, when I search, I am either searching on author or title - that's it. It has dramatically increased the search speed in Calibre, because it is using less variables to search on, and with 14K books, it makes a big difference.

Like Blue2u, I keep a mobi and epub version of all books that are in my Calibre library so I don't have the need for an ADE library but I like the idea.

The last reason for one library is that I would get to confused with multiple libraries and I don't have the time to maintain more than one. Just some helpful hints.