Best way to add folders to Calibre? warning newbie post!

[BobKat]

I think I messed up the first try at adding a library, so I deleted calibre and am starting fresh with the portable version.

Sorry for all the questions at once.

If I have, say, five different folders with books in each set up by author in sub folders:
under the Folder I made called ebooks I have subfolders :
Sci Fi ( five authors and a few books each)
Historical
Mixed collection: Few hundred at least in here from over the years ( mismatch of different genres in text, pdf etc.. ) These are listed by a mix of folders, some with names of authors, some with book title as the folder name, some with a combination of book title and author.
cookbooks

All the above are generally organized by folders with the author's name. Some loose books jumbled together and unorganized.

My Question:
How do I add to calibre?
Should I work on them and transfer all to one folder or can I add them individually through calibre?
Do I go about adding folders by pointing calibre to each sub folder or can i just target the Ebook folder that contains them all?

What is the best format to set up the books for adding into Calibre?
Should I make a folder with author name then a sub folder with book name , and then a book file with name and author as the file name? or should I just lump all books in one folder with the file name of ; author, book. extension?

[travger]

My opinion:
1. Open empty library in Calibre and drag your Sci Fi folder into it (or some other folder with ca 20-50 books). See what happens. If it's too messy, you can select all, delete from Calibre and repeat with different settings (to tell Calibre if it detects title from file or from file name and how). I have no idea if the regular expression can be made to look at folder name, search the forum.
You can drag in bunch of mobis and epubs and take data from file, in my experience it's pretty successful with those formats.

2. Get few different books in and look for metadata - it helps you to learn what info you consider important and what fields you need to add. For example some time ago I found that I want to know who's the cover artist. People here have some very good ideas about custom columns, I've swiped a few.
It's easy to change 50 books if you decide to have subgenres (Cooking.it, Cooking.fr, etc), with several hundred it's harder. So, don't hurry.

3. In my opinion best format is the original. Calibre will convert, read, export it; but from Calibre it's easyly accessible, you can put your own comments into metadata (like 'awful quality, but best what I can get'). And who knows, maybe by the time you get to reading it you've gotten better quality copy.

Last but not least: Welcome to Mobileread!