Note, Calibre requires a very specific directory structure which you are not supposed to change manually via file manager.
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#id35
Quote:
Why doesn’t calibre let me store books in my own directory structure?
The whole point of calibre’s library management features is that they provide a search and sort based interface for locating books that is much more efficient than any possible directory scheme you could come up with for your collection. Indeed, once you become comfortable using calibre’s interface to find, sort and browse your collection, you wont ever feel the need to hunt through the files on your disk to find a book again. By managing books in its own directory structure of Author -> Title -> Book files, calibre is able to achieve a high level of reliability and standardization. To illustrate why a search/tagging based interface is superior to folders, consider the following. Suppose your book collection is nicely sorted into folders with the following scheme:
Code:
Genre -> Author -> Series -> ReadStatus
Now this makes it very easy to find for example all science fiction books by Isaac Asimov in the Foundation series. But suppose you want to find all unread science fiction books. There’s no easy way to do this with this folder scheme, you would instead need a folder scheme that looks like:
Code:
ReadStatus -> Genre -> Author -> Series
In calibre, you would instead use tags to mark genre and read status and then just use a simple search query like tag:scifi and not tag:read. calibre even has a nice graphical interface, so you don’t need to learn its search language instead you can just click on tags to include or exclude them from the search.
To those of you that claim that you need access to the filesystem, so that you can have access to your books over the network, calibre has an excellent Content server that gives you access to your calibre library over the net.
If you are worried that someday calibre will cease to be developed, leaving all your books marooned in its folder structure, explore the powerful Save to Disk feature in calibre that lets you export all your files into a folder structure of arbitrary complexity based on their metadata.
Finally, the reason there are numbers at the end of every title folder, is for robustness. That number is the id number of the book record in the calibre database. The presence of the number allows you to have multiple records with the same title and author names. It is also part of what allows calibre to magically regenerate the database with all metadata if the database file gets corrupted. Given that calibre’s mission is to get you to stop storing metadata in filenames and stop using the filesystem to find things, the increased robustness afforded by the id numbers is well worth the uglier folder names.
If you are still not convinced, then I’m afraid calibre is not for you. Look elsewhere for your book cataloguing needs. Just so we’re clear, this is not going to change. Kindly do not contact us in an attempt to get us to change this.
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