Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
One level virtual folders are not as useful as many levels fixed folders. Also the tools to add tags does not exists on all platforms that you want to handle your book collection on. Real folders are the basic thing that is really useful. One level virtual folders is a nice add-on but not essential.
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The tools are available for 99% of the people. If somebody wants to create ebooks that person can use Mobi-Creator or Calibre. It is very easy to include meta data. And in most of the books you buy or get for free the meta data is already in place. If the data is not correct there is a group of tools called MobiPerl that will do the job very nicely
. They are available on Linux and Windows and on Windows you don't even need Perl. You can get the compiled version. All software mentioned her is free of charge.
And I have absolutely no problem with multi level virtual folders. First sort on Genre, then on Author and then on Title. Or first on Author then on genre and than on read. The information is already available in a mobi book. Why not use it?
Fixed level folders have on big disadvantage. The are
fixed. You can use virtual folders as fixed if you like it that way. But you cannot use fixed folders in a virtual way.
If you for example have a fixed tree like Genre-> Author -> Serie -> Title That will not give you all the books from one author if that author has books that fall in different genres. Or if a serie is written bij several authors you will also run into trouble. When you use virtual folders based on meta data you can find any book from Author 'X' or any book in Genre 'Y' Or all books belonging to serie 'Z' writen by author 'Q'
At the moment I have my books in folders by Author and sometimes series. That works reasonable when I sort my books on filename. They are grouped by Author and then sorted on (serie) title. But it makes a joke of my Perry Rhodan serie. That one is written by several authors. So I have that one under 'Author' Perry Rhodan. But then I cannot find the real author in an easy way.
That is the reason why all large databases are not made in Excel
The town you live in probably has some kind of big database of all people living there. Birthdate, Gender, marital status, drivers licence, address and probalby more. I can guarantee you it is not build as a big bunch of fixed folders for every person. It will be a big relational database in SAP or Oracle.
Because sometimes they want to know which people are over 65 and were they live. So they can plan medical facilities in the correct part of town. But the next time they wil want to send everybody information about the new type of tickets they use in the public transport system. Then they want to sort on address so they send them on five different days to five different parts of town. And the week after they will want to know how many girls between 10 and 13 there are so the can set up a vacination scheme for HPV.
Fixed is better than nothing, but is the answer to only one question. And that question is 'asked' at the moment you are building your tree.