Quote:
Originally Posted by Logan06
I dont like the books listed by title - author, I would rather have them by author - title. It's an OCD thing I guess.
|
Read Manichean's post about reading the sticky.
Where would you put
Shadow of the Lion, which is a collaboration between Flint, Freer, and Lackey? Under one author's name? A different one? A special folder for all three? That's the problem with trying to use the filesystem for metadata: it's inflexible. You can't file
Shadow of the Lion under
both Lackey and Flint, for instance; you have to pick one or the other, or maybe Freer. And if you set up a folder for all three, it wouldn't be in the same folder as
Take a Thief, which is by Lackey alone. Filesystems are not meant to be used for metadata, not to the extent that you need for organizing a library, anyway. For that you need, well, real metadata.
The cool thing about calibre is you can organize the books any way you want to in the calibre GUI. That's the whole point. If you want them sorted by author, by title, by genre, by your personal tags, whatever you can imagine, the calibre interface will do that for you.
Shadow of the Lion can be found if you click on Lackey, Flint, Freer, or whatever else you've tagged it with -- fantasy, historical, and Venice, perhaps. Maybe to-be-read, or finished, or anything else you want. You can't do any of that by trying to force the computer's filesystem to supply your metadata, and what little you can make it do is so painfully limited.
With calibre, you're organizing books, not files. Never mind what calibre does "under the hood" with its files; they don't matter to you any more than the blocks and sectors that make up a computer file matter when you're looking at it with Notepad. Calibre deals with books, and those books come in (or can be converted to) formats. Anything you want to do with them -- read them, transfer them to your reader, send them off to a friend, sort them in any possible order, etc. -- you can do with calibre.
Really, read the sticky. That explains it. So does my .sig: let calibre do what it's best at, and don't try to circumvent it; that works about as well as deciding you're going to ignore the filesystem entirely and do physical access to your hard drive. My boss bricked the company mainframe that way once, back in the day. Good thing it was him, not me.
