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Advantages for me (I have a lot of books many public domain or scanned im my younger days)
All of the metadata functions particularly downloading and the ability to send books to your device with the series info embedded leaving the calibre copy untouched.
The ability to have consistency in authors names, series and tags fairly easily. Nitpicky of me but I hate 6 different ways of listing the same author.
Custom columns allow me to tell easily what I have read and also what I think I want to read the most. Also allows me to flag books for formatting problems which I am not into dealing with immediately.
Very easy to limit the view in the GUI to a subset of books which I often do.
Plugins allow you to bulk check for duplicates, missing covers etc.
Easy to set up for use with multiple devices. I have 5 plus I manage my mothers kindle.
When I got my first reader I found calibre and started using it just for conversions. I was saving to disk, naming books author-title-series or some other convention I made up or came across. After about 500 books I started to get confused and frustrated with the results. I think I was saving each authors books in a folder but books with multiple authors, psuedonyms etc. had me stymied. After 1000 I actually spent some time putting all the books back in calibre and as calibre was a lot more basic at the time I had to rename most of them manually. Now it would be pretty easy.
Calibre is an excellent conversion tool, but it really shines at library and device management.
My advice (unasked for I know) would be to use your current folder system as you are happy with it, but leave the books in calibre at the same time. You will thank yourself one of these days and disk space is cheap.
It is easy to see the books in added order so you usually don't even have to look for the books you are converting.
Helen
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