[unboggling]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

...That was the balance that ended up working for me anyways. Like I said, if I was starting from scratch today I would just use the "author by author" gradual approach to add from windows explorer to Calibre. The risk for people who have multiple conflicting formats of a book is to try to add them all to Calibre - my advice is find your best format and only add that one in. You can associate the Calibre ebook viewer with the various file types like epub, mobi etc so it is just a double click to open them from the explorer search results.

That point just sank in. So, I've noticed that OS X has excellent search feature out in the OS, I've been using it a lot on "Raw Books" folder. So that's one way of avoiding having a "needs-cleanup" library, when combined with the other point about adding a few at a time per author from there into one calibre library and fixing metadata and formats together at that point. Knowing me, though, I'll try to do too much at once and have the backlog problem too.

Originally Posted by Starson17

I keep them all in one and tag them according to whether they've been cleaned up. I use the content server a lot, and if I don't keep them in one library, I can't access them, or find out if I've got a book or all books in a series, etc.

Most of my books were in decent shape for reading as TXT format, and I had too many to wait until they were all converted.

Being retired I don't travel much anymore so normally I don't need to use the Content Server. During my first month or so of calibre use I investigated the Content Server as a way to have 2 views of 2 different libraries open at once, see if it would be more useful to me than generating a CSV catalog out to Excel for printing purposes - before I learned the server couldn't look at two libraries simultaneously or printing was impractical for a large library and started to rely on booklist in calibre library view, a catalog on a device, or a copy of relevant library open on a side-by-side computer. Neither Content Server nor Catalog give me enough of my tags densely enough (as opposed to a second calibre instance open on separate computer method), or maybe I just didn't set either up correctly to begin with. So I tend to forget about using the Content Server, and for more mobile people that is an excellent reason to just use one library. Also Content Server and Catalog generation were one reason I started to put most of my tags all in the default tags column at several months into calibre use.

Originally Posted by travger

One reason why I started cleanup library. …Kiwidude advised to find your best format and only add that one in. I like to see at a glance what I have for the book.
So my Calibre shows 'formats' in book detail and just one look tells me what I did. If there's only mobi, it means I dl-d it and have no gripes (not happened yet). Mobi/prc + txt = some gripes (maybe not worth the cleaning, maybe some other comments). Pdf/epub + prc + ace + txt = converted and cleaned up, details in txt, materials for mobi creator in ace.
One click on format opens it - mobi in mobireader, pdf in acrobat, epub in Calibre reader...
When I've read it, then I delete all other instances of the book from my HD (exept Calibre backup of course)….

Like nearly everything else, seems there are pros and cons for strategies, approaches, methods, practices. Primary thing I didn't like about using 2 or more libraries was not having all books in one place when looking for how I named that series or other metadata for that author after adding a new book to clean-up library. While not having all of the formats for the same book in one place didn't bother me at all.