Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Physical book:
1. Buy it.
2. Read it.
3. Put on shelf on the correct spot (however you arrange them).
If your house doesn't burn down, this book will be usable as long as it doesn't fall apart.
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My workstream for physical books
1)order book
2)wait for it to arrive
3)add book to Calibre (I bought a Palm way-back-when so that I could move my book catalog from index cards to digital and still carry it with me)
4) download cover and fix metadata including where the book will be stored
5)read book
5) rearrange my double layered bookshelves to make room for it in the
right place (the fact that my history books are organized chronologically according to subject matter probably doesn't help)
6) consider the merits of buying a sixteenth, sorry, eighteenth bookcase and then realize I don't have room
7)replace a few more of the most battered books with ebook copies so that I can stand the thought of maybe throwing them out sometime in the future
My paper books will last until they fall to places, are lost/demolished by children or we move somewhere which can't hold that many books. The second possibility has been greatly reduced by draconian policies but since I do want my children to read my books it can't be completely eliminated.
Quote:
Digital book:
1. Buy it.
2. Download the ASCM (in case of an EPUB)
3. Put it into ADE.
4. Pull the book into calibre to have Alf's plugins remove the DRM
5. Fix the metadata
6. Put in a cover (as they often don't have one)
7. Use the editor to have all problems fixed
8. Put it onto your e-reader
If you don't un-DRM and don't care about errors in the book, you can skip steps 4-7, or even just buy the book from the device itself. In that case however, usage of the book in the somewhat distant future is uncertain.
Many people don't (seem to) care, but I do.
You can't imagine how much time I've put into my e-book and music libraries to future-proof them as much as possible, and to remove all inconcistencies so I can easily convert them to newer formats if I ever need to. E-books and music together at least took me about half a decade. With a physical library, it'd take me half a day to arrange it in a sensible way.
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Most of the ebooks I buy do have covers and my obsessiveness lies more in organization than appearance so my ebook workflow normally doesn't include 5 or 6. It does include regularly backing up my books and data.
I've been around long enough that some of the books I bought in university or second hand are falling to pieces just from normal use. The fact that ebooks have the potential to survive decades with just a bit of tweaking was a relief when faced with the need to replace a well loved book
again