[ficbot]

I'm starting to find it a bit unwieldy to manage my large library. I just did a big tag reorg, and went to find books I was sure I had but the author was tagged the wrong way or something. In one case, I had an author where I was sure I had more from her than what Calibre was telling me. One of the books was tagged 'Fictionwise' which I was sure I bought there and when I went to check my Fictionwise account for which others I had, that book was not in there.

I think I also have vague ideas that down the road, I might want to share books with an eventual husband or child or something and would want them to have a way to wade through my very large collection for books of interest. There is too much in there now, some great, some only so-so but I won't get rid of, and a tiny handful I took out of Calibre because I could not stand then. Also, I have found that Calibre seems to run much slower when I leave multiple formats of things lying around, so when the book is an epub I have converted, I have removed the epub original into a backup directory outside of Calibre.

So, here is my current 'system; and I welcome suggestions for making this easier to manage.

1- The Stars. I use these to denote the book's current 'status' for lack of a better word. No stars means it's ready to go on the Kindle at some point. 1 star means I have read it and it is now part of the general library. 2 stars means it is an e-copy of an old favourite from my paper days and I plan to re-read it someday once I get through my new stuff. 3 stars means it is on the Kindle right now. Four stars means it is personal content like documents for work. 5 stars means I have no plans to read it but I will not delete it for some reason.

2- The Tags. I use tags for genre (mystery, science fiction, magazine etc), for source (Fictionwise, Kobo, Internet etc.) or type (anthology, magazine etc.) I also have a new ratings tag for books I have read and books which are favourites. I have just re-done them all to include the actual word 'Genre' in the genre tags, the actual word 'Source' in the source tags etc. so that when I use the browser in Calibre and they sort alphabetically, all the genre ones are grouped together, all the source ones are grouped together etc.

3- Collections. I just started using this because I had several authors where I had many books by them and I thought my tags list would get too long if I started adding author tags. So, about a dozen authors, I went through and made collections with author name. That way, if someone is in the mood for, say, Agatha Christie, they can just go to that collection and there they are.

I like the star thing because I can easily see which books are on the Kindle and which are not. The tags and collections though, it is getting a bit out of hand. Some of my tags have several hundred books attached to them and I worry that if I create too many tags, it will be a mess to browse. So I need to just bite the bullet and use a more detailed database where a hypothetical other family member would have more flexible browsing options and can just get the title they want that way and use Calibre only for downloading? Or any suggestions for streamlining my Calibre system a little to accommodate this many books?