A question about how calibre manages books

[princektd]

I am new to calibre and haven't yet downloaded or used it.

I read the FAQ and saw the question about the directory structure.
Now, this is not a suggestion, rather a doubt.

The situation is this:

I have some e-books (all are either .mobi or .prc formats) that have different titles (of course) and different authors.
The file names of these e-books were edited by me and are arranged in my own custom directory structure to help me find them more easily and to display them together.
The thing is, these books belong to a novel/story series.
For ex. the Riftwar Cycle which has around 8-9 sub series, each of which has around 2-4 books. In this case, the author is Raymond E. Fiest and so using author for sort/management is ok.
But others like the novels belonging to the WarCraft game series are different authors, sub series, etc. . I would like these books to be available together as a series rather than separated by author.

an example of my custom arrangement is :
My Library (root DIR)
--Riftwar Cycle (DIR)
--01 Riftwar Saga (DIR)
-> Book 01 - Magician.mobi
-> Book 02 - Silverthorn.mobi
-> Book 03 - A Darkness At Sethanon.mobi
-- 02 Empire Trilogy (DIR)
-> Book 01 - Daughter Of The Empire.mobi
-> Book 02 - Servant Of The Empire.mobi
-> Book 03 - Mistress Of The Empire.mobi
-- 03 Krondor's Sons (DIR)
.
.
.
-- 09 Demonwar Saga (DIR)
.
.
.
-- 10 Chaoswar Saga (DIR)
-> Book 01 - A Kingdom Besieged.mobi

Here, all books are published by a well known author and have ISBN and so on.
Other series like HP, star wars etc. that I have in my collection often include fan-made books, so that no publications or ISBN info is available.

How would calibre go on about managing such series? Will I be able to keep such books as part of a series, in their correct order (chronological/reading order) ?

As I have not yet used calibre, I do not know, and I am afraid whether my own custom arrangement (as shown above) of eBooks will get rearranged by calibre. I prefer not to have 2 copies of the files, one for calibre library and one for my custom arrangement. If calibre manages to correctly manage such novel series properly, then my fears are baseless and I definitely would like to use calibre
Thanks.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by princektd

an example of my custom arrangement is :
My Library (root DIR)
--Riftwar Cycle (DIR)
--01 Riftwar Saga (DIR)
-> Book 01 - Magician.mobi
-> Book 02 - Silverthorn.mobi
-> Book 03 - A Darkness At Sethanon.mobi
-- 02 Empire Trilogy (DIR)
-> Book 01 - Daughter Of The Empire.mobi
-> Book 02 - Servant Of The Empire.mobi
-> Book 03 - Mistress Of The Empire.mobi
-- 03 Krondor's Sons (DIR)
.
.
.
-- 09 Demonwar Saga (DIR)
.
.
.
-- 10 Chaoswar Saga (DIR)
-> Book 01 - A Kingdom Besieged.mobi

Enable the Preference for Hierarchical usage in Series

Then you enter the next level after the dot
Riftwar Cycle.Demonwar Saga

Calibre will only number the second part (the book number in this case):
Riftwar Cycle.Demonwar Saga[#]

This is the way I do this kind of series

[Agama]

Originally Posted by princektd

I prefer not to have 2 copies of the files, one for calibre library and one for my custom arrangement.

Calibre becomes your librarian and copies all your books into its own folder structure. You can then delete your books outside of this structure to avoid having 2 copies. This may seem a bit restrictive at first but in practise it's no problem. Calibre is such a powerful library manager that you can sort and filter in many different ways. It also supports multiple libraries and has good support for series and tags.

Why not download it, copy a selection of books and see how you get on? Just don't delete your originals until you make the switch to calibre.

[fidvo]

As Agama said, the best way to learn how to use Calibre is to download it and give it a try. Import some of your books then pretend your old directory structure doesn't exist. Use Calibre exclusively for a week or two. And NEVER peek into Calibre's directory structure. Only access your books through Calibre's interface. If after that time you're a believer, import the rest of your books and delete the originals if you don't want to maintain two copies. If you don't like Calibre after a couple of weeks, no harm done. Uninstall it, delete your imported library, and go back to the way you were doing it before.

Now for some more specific advice. These are just suggestions and you may not need or want to use them all, but I've found them all useful in my own library.

1. You can sort in Calibre by any column just by clicking on the column header. You can sort by multiple columns by clicking on the headers in order from most specific to most general (I know this is counterintuitive, but once you get used to it, it's no big deal). Learn to use this feature to look up books. Learn to love it.

2. Create a custom column, called Subseries. Set it up as a Series-like column (with name and number).

Using Riftwar as an example, fill in your series and subseries as so:

Magician: Series=Riftwar [1], Subseries=Riftwar Cycle [1]
Silverthorn: Series=Riftwar [2], Subseries=Riftwar Cycle [2]
A Darkness at Sethanon: Series=Riftwar [3], Subseries=Riftwar Cycle [3]
Daughter of the Empire: Series=Riftwar [4], Subseries=Empire Trilogy [1]
Servant of the Empire: Series=Riftwar [5], Subseries=Empire Trilogy [2]
Mistress of the Empire: Series=Riftwar [6], Subseries=Empire Trilogy [3]

And so on. This even works for series where the suggested reading order has you jumping back and forth between several subseries, like Pern or Witch World.

3. Set up an Author Lookup field. Use the Author field to store the actual author(s) of the books, and use the Author Lookup to store the primary author of the series, or some other identifier if there isn't a primary author.

So for example any book in the Riftwar series would have "Feist, Raymond E." in Author Lookup no matter who wrote it, and any book in the Wheel of Time series would have "Jordan, Robert" in Author Lookup, even the later books that were written by Brandon Sanderson. You could put "Warcraft" in the Author Lookup for any Warcraft books.

The benefit of this is that you can sort in the following order: Author Lookup, then Series, then Title. That will put all the Riftwar books together and all the Warcraft books together. Other books by Raymond E. Feist not in the Riftwar series would appear just before the Riftwar books, in alphabetical order by title.

4. Download the View Manager plugin. Use this to set up a default sort by Author->Series->Title, and any other arrangements you might find useful. Then, getting back to the default view after playing around with sorting is just two easy clicks.

5. Set up a Save-to-Disk template that will allow you to re-create your previous directory structure. This will help with the transition, because you'll know that even if you later decide you don't want to use Calibre to manage your library, you can always export the whole thing out to the way it used to be. You may need to add other custom fields in order to store the necessary information to make this possible.

6. (I haven't tried this one myself, but your mention of chronological/reading order made me think of it) Create an Alternate Order series-like column. Use it to store the alternate order for series where there are two schools of thought on the best order to read them, like Narnia, Darkover, or Pern.

I hope this helps!