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radius · 09-15-2016, 03:14 PM

I am one of the few here that doesn't appear to use Calibre. One option you could try is just dumping everything into Google Play Books and trust Google to keep improving their sorting and searching features. That is their core competence after all.

Last year, I merged a couple of old Calibre libraries, my Sony library (and new Kobo-ified epub version of that Sony library), along with thirty years of collected text and HTML.

I just use the basic file system on my Mac for categorization and metadata. At the top level, I have my libraries broken into read, unread, and uncategorized folders about 1300 and 900 books respectively right now, but I still have a bunch of read books that I haven't added to the library yet. Then I break down by author surname. The way I find things is by using Spotlight to look for a title, author or tag. I only wish Spotlight was able to look into epub contents too. Oh well.

I started off by putting one source of books into my uncategorized folder and then I just methodically moved one book at a time into the appropriate place. This is the time I harmonize author, sorting and series information as best I can. The way I do it is to use Spotlight to find that author or that title and see how many copies I have, then try to decide on a definitive copy to keep. If I was unsatisfied with that definitive copy, I also did a quick search on Mobileread and Gutenberg for a cleaner copy (and maybe even with illustrations nowadays).

I try to keep my archive copies as epub because that seems the most future proof to me. I do have some books left over as LRF (Sony format) because they were left behind in the Sony->Kobo store transition or because I had downloaded them from Mobileread and there was no epub version. In my spare time I occasionally convert these to epub, but as there is so much hand coding involved, I only do it if I'm really bored or motivated to re-read.

For books I have in HTML (like some early Baen webscriptions prior to epub) I usually do a quick and dirty epub version.

For books in text I do an epub version if I'm motivated or just keep text if I'm not.

The folders that I store the books in are a) backed up to my server in the basement, and b) synced to my private cloud so that the books are available over the internet to all my devices. I don't use a public cloud like Dropbox because I can't be bothered encrypting all my books on client side and I am not guaranteed to have the tools to do the decryption on all my possible clients (e.g. e-book readers!).

When I want to read a book on my Kindle, I run it through Sigil to make sure it has text encoding set and maybe adjust the margins and fix the cover etc, then hand generate the mobi using kindlegen.

09-15-2016, 03:14 PM	#45
radius Lector minore Posts: 660 Karma: 1738720 Join Date: Jan 2008 Device: Aura One, Paperwhite Signature	I am one of the few here that doesn't appear to use Calibre. One option you could try is just dumping everything into Google Play Books and trust Google to keep improving their sorting and searching features. That is their core competence after all. Last year, I merged a couple of old Calibre libraries, my Sony library (and new Kobo-ified epub version of that Sony library), along with thirty years of collected text and HTML. I just use the basic file system on my Mac for categorization and metadata. At the top level, I have my libraries broken into read, unread, and uncategorized folders about 1300 and 900 books respectively right now, but I still have a bunch of read books that I haven't added to the library yet. Then I break down by author surname. The way I find things is by using Spotlight to look for a title, author or tag. I only wish Spotlight was able to look into epub contents too. Oh well. I started off by putting one source of books into my uncategorized folder and then I just methodically moved one book at a time into the appropriate place. This is the time I harmonize author, sorting and series information as best I can. The way I do it is to use Spotlight to find that author or that title and see how many copies I have, then try to decide on a definitive copy to keep. If I was unsatisfied with that definitive copy, I also did a quick search on Mobileread and Gutenberg for a cleaner copy (and maybe even with illustrations nowadays). I try to keep my archive copies as epub because that seems the most future proof to me. I do have some books left over as LRF (Sony format) because they were left behind in the Sony->Kobo store transition or because I had downloaded them from Mobileread and there was no epub version. In my spare time I occasionally convert these to epub, but as there is so much hand coding involved, I only do it if I'm really bored or motivated to re-read. For books I have in HTML (like some early Baen webscriptions prior to epub) I usually do a quick and dirty epub version. For books in text I do an epub version if I'm motivated or just keep text if I'm not. The folders that I store the books in are a) backed up to my server in the basement, and b) synced to my private cloud so that the books are available over the internet to all my devices. I don't use a public cloud like Dropbox because I can't be bothered encrypting all my books on client side and I am not guaranteed to have the tools to do the decryption on all my possible clients (e.g. e-book readers!). When I want to read a book on my Kindle, I run it through Sigil to make sure it has text encoding set and maybe adjust the margins and fix the cover etc, then hand generate the mobi using kindlegen.