Quote:
Originally Posted by nabsltd
Calibre is much easier, of course, but here's how I'd do it using file system: - Create a directory named "Books", and place each book in a subdirectory below that. Basically, what Calibre does, but without author directories.
- Create a directory named "Authors" at the same level as "Books". Create a subdirectory for each author inside the "Authors" directory.
- In the "N. A. Grotepas" subdirectory, create a symbolic link to the "Summer Solstice Shenanigans" subdirectory.
This allows you to search for an author, change to that author's directory, and see all the books they are related to. Think of the author as a type of "tag" for the book, and you can see that any other tag system you want can be set up the same way as the Authors directory (Genre, etc.).
Again, Calibre makes it far easier, because a database is designed to handle the relations that you would have to manually create using the file system, plus allows you to easily search for details that are not tag-like (ISBN, publication date, etc.). |
What I used to do before I switched to using calibre was similar to your suggestion. However, the point I made was that I was ending up spending more time copy/pasting authors, series, titles, etc. and tweaking my directory setup than I was reading books. At one point, I was looking at how I was storing the Grantville Gazette series and started looking for a better solution and ended up looking at calibre.
calibre made a lot of my cataloguing tasks exceedingly simple without spending an excessive amount of time on managing my ebook collection. As you said, I could search on almost any criteria including the ability to use multiple search criteria in a search at the cost of not managing the file storage, a tradeoff that I have never regretted.