[islavet]

I downloaded Calibre a while ago based on rave reviews, got totally confused looking at it, and finally jumped in with both feet yesterday as I had time on my hands. I've spent most of the past 2 days importing books and reading articles and this forum, getting a plan together to better manage my sprawling ebook collection. I would really appreciate comments on my plan; I was all ready to go with Google Drive until I came across comments tonight saying NEVER USE GOOGLE DRIVE, so I would like to avoid any other potential disasters! My goals are to keep track of my ebooks and be able to highlight and annotate some of them. Because reading other people's workflow plans has really helped me, I will be detailed in my plan in case it sparks any ideas.

My situation: I have a PC, iPad, iPhone, and Kindle Touch I will be working with. I have PDF books, shorter PDFs which are often professional articles, and mobi/azw non-Amazon books. I've already realized most of the PDFs will not convert well. Instant syncing is not critical to me; the same day is usually fine.

I have a few hundred non-Amazon mobi or azw3 files, and those I plan to email or Send to Kindle from Calibre on an individual basis. Then any annotations will be saved in the Amazon cloud and they will be viewed as personal documents (which is OK, I just want to be able to put them in my Kindle Collections). From what I've read, it sounds like AZW3 is the best format for more recent technology. It also sounds like highlighting/annotating is not possible to automatically save to ebooks stored in Calibre folders... correct?

I will keep my short PDFs that are not really ebooks, and all my professional PDFs, in Evernote for searchability, and if I want to annotate I can open them in Goodreader or PDF Expert, and then open the annotated PDF back in Evernote. Then I will delete the original note. It seems a bit unwieldy, but I won't be doing this a ton, and I don't really like Evernote's annotation program (nor do I want to pay for it).

Longer, ebook PDFs are what have been stumping me. I want them cataloged in Calibre. I think I can drag & drop individual PDFs I want to work on into a folder in iCloud Drive for PC, staying under the 5 GB free limit. Then, I can open that PDF on my iPad in either Goodreader or PDF Expert and read, highlight, annotate, and keep it available on my iPad. Eventually, I can "add books" in Calibre to get my updated PDF into Calibre's files, and delete the original PDF in Calibre. Unless there is a way to replace the original file in Calibre??

For backing up my Calibre Library, which will contain all my ebook files, I think I can run SyncToy (periodic syncing to external hard drive), just copying the entire folder. This will save everything important, right? From what I can tell, the only way to backup my 15 GB library to the cloud is to pay a good deal more than the $2/month I thought I could pay for extra space in my Google Drive. I'll have to decide if that's worth it... most of my ebooks came in zip file collections, so I could perhaps keep my zip files in Google Drive just in case of, you know, an earthquake that destroys my computer and external hard drive but not me. :-)

Sorry for the long post! Any comments or other suggestions are appreciated!