[Tarana]

WELCOME to the world of ereading! Yes, I've way surpassed 1000 books (now about 800 audiobooks alone, not including ebooks, magazines, random pdfs). With Calibre, you can use tags to easily sort out stuff to include or exclude and it handles pdfs as well (It does NOT convert pdfs well at all, so don't bother).

I prefer Calibre for ebooks, but if you choose to have something secondary or family members who don't want to use Calibre (yes, I have them), my suggestion is to use the folder system. Genre > author > series. You can have a separate subgenre if you have a lot of them or just want to separate them out (my Mom loves mysteries, dislikes cozies while I love both). Don't waste your life with endless subcategorizing. You want to be reading, not sorting.

My main categories are Scifi, Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror, Crime/Thriller/Mystery, Mystery Cozy, Romance, Anthologies, Historical fiction, Fiction, Craft, and Non-fiction. Your categories of course will be different. I have a family member who only reads Scifi and a small smattering of books in other genres, so her collection is put into folders: Scifi, Anthology, Other, Reference and NotRead. Within the Scifi Folder, she sorts by author. In the other sections, the file is named with title and author or editor, but not otherwise sorted.

Most importantly, have off-site backups of all your books/audiobooks. My cousin lost everything that wasn't on a flashdrive when they had a fire (heat damages electronics even if flame or smoke never gets to it). So, burn to disk, flashdrive, HD and store elsewhere. You will thank yourself for it when your HD goes belly up without warning, as they often do.