Best practices for organizing books

[christineb]

Hi everyone,
First a big thanks to Kovid for developing Calibre! I'll be visiting your donate button soon and if you ever want anything done in Photoshop give me a shout...

Anyway, before I start importing books into Calibre like a mad woman, what tips and suggestions does everyone have for organizing your books? I think ideally I'd like to look at books by Category>Author>Book Series and plan to set things up accordingly.

Any better ideas so I don't have to do it twice? Should I be including book series in the title so I can see them on the reader? Also what categories are you using?

Thanks!

[zelda_pinwheel]

ha, that is the million dollar (euro...) question, indeed.

personally, i only did a batch import once, because there is usually a LOT of retouching to do by hand in order to get the meta data displayed correctly. my favorite shortcut in calibre is E for "edit metadata". since then i import one by one, which is more fastidious but also avoids those infuriating mangled entries where the meta data is missing or wrong.

for series, you can include it in the title if you like, that way you are sure to see it once it's on your device. however in calibre i recommend you *also* use the dedicated "series" field which allows you to name the series and then indicate which volume it is. you can then sort by this field which is very convenient, and like tags it will create a collection on the sony. i use the comments field for a description / summary of the book and any other pertinent info ; the sort of thing you find on the back / inside cover, or in the amazon page. for almost everything else you can use tags. i use tags sometimes for category (obvious use) but also to specify if i've read the book or not as this allows me to sort them by read vs. unread. little tip, tags created in calibre will automatically create a "collection" when you send the book to your sony, so you can look in the collections page and choose by "mystery", "news", etc. corollary, don't create too many tags, or you will have eleventy million collections on the sony.

let us know what good ideas you come up with yourself, i'm always interested in better ways to organise my books.

[zelda_pinwheel]

oh, i forgot to mention : you can edit tags in batch : just select all the books you want to add a tag to (ctrl + click), then E and there you go.

[christineb]

Thanks Zelda. I like the idea of a tag for unread books. I guess you just resend the book to the reader to update the metadata.

One trick I have in other apps is to put numbers in front of categories to force their order when they are alphabetized. It looks like that will be needed here to get the main genres to show up on top of the collections list. Be sure you use leading zeroes or the single digit numbers won't sort right. (01-Non Fiction instead of 1-Non Fiction) or two leading zeros if you will have over 99.

[zelda_pinwheel]

that is also a good trick. i use that myself to force items to the top of a list (like, i created a little text file with my info in it, just in case, and i named it "__00_in case of loss" with the same name as author, so regardless of the sort order, it will always be the first item in the library. hopefully i will never have the occasion to find out if this is useful.

[persiphone]

when i edit the metadata I put (series name:B3) that way I know the series name as well as what book number it is, I also use calibre's series dropdown also, but that way I can visibly see which book it is that I am on.

[persiphone]

oh and I put that next to the title, if it gets too long you can change your view so you can see it or put the (B3:series name), it takes a long time to do all this, but I do love how organized my ebook reader is

[Format C:]

I like to use the publishing date instead of the insert date that calibre uses.
That's because sometimes series order is not the same order in which the books where written (Just think about Asimov, Wilbur Smith or the Sharpe series). So I use series number for the chronological order, and the date for the writing/publishing order...

To edit metadata in batches, I've set up a couple of sqlite3 scripts: one for extract all the data in a CSV file to be edited in OpenOffice, and the other to reload the changes in the database.
Obviously I needed another script to write that date in the exported mobipocket file: calibre does not export it.
The last script I did, writes the language tag in the mobipocket file.

Calibre's database is very well designed and simple to read and edit.

[asktheeightball]

Originally Posted by persiphone

oh and I put that next to the title, if it gets too long you can change your view so you can see it or put the (B3:series name), it takes a long time to do all this, but I do love how organized my ebook reader is

Great idea Persiphone! I started doing this recently and it really makes a difference.

I also started tagging all my books with their genre. The trick here is to prefix each genre with an asterisk so all the genres show at the top of your collections (i.e. *Sci-Fi, *Action etc).