What virtual libraries do you have?

[ownedbycats]

Mostly just out of curiosity.

I have seventeen.

Four for reading status: Currently Reading (includes the immediate TBR list), Pile of Shame (yearly backlog), Unread, and Read.

I have five more for the type of book: Fiction, Fanfiction, Nonfiction, Magazines & Publications, and Documentation & Manuals. I used to have one for Comics, but later merged it (first into magazines, then into fiction).

Then I have:
- Series
- eBooks
- Physical Books
- Purchases
- Loans (I don't keep the books myself, just records)
- On Device

Then the last two are Recently Added (in the last 30 days) and Cleanup (mostly used as intake, but sometimes older books get flagged and end up here until I fix various issues).

A lot of my VLs also have an associated View Manager views because I use a lot of custom columns for different purposes:

[Wiggo]

I have seven: Annotations, Read 2023, Read 2024, Reading Currently, ReadCount >=2, Read non-fiction, Read

I also have a lot of saved searches, but I only convert them to VLs when I get really annoyed that they're not VLs.

Edith: View Manager too

[Bookstooge]

I have "Currently Reading", "TBR" (to be read), "Comic" and then All Books.

[Karellen]

I have none.
I just use the tag browser to filter what I need and the view manager to set what is displayed when Calibre starts up.

[theducks]

To Read
Have Read
To Be Edited (my way AKA TBE )
Formats None or Poor. None is my Wishlist or only in dead tree. Poor ha major defects that a simple touchup (TBE ) is not gonna cure.

[DNSB]

I have no virtual libraries and 2 physical libraries (Intake and Main). I'm not big on having a mass of custom columns so try to keep them to a minimum.

Series: either books have a series/series index or they are not in a series. No custom column needed.

ebook vs pbook? There is a column for that though the pbooks list is shrinking as they are replaced with ebooks.

On device? Nope since I have multiple devices. The only one that has all my ebooks is a Clara HD with a 128GB µSD card. Others just go by what shows up when I connect the device to calibre. I have no real interest in knowing which Kobo, Kindle or Tolino ereader I have a book on.

Purchases vs. loans? Purchases have a book file, loans just have the metadata. No custom column needed. A search for empty formats and not pbook works just fine the few times I want to check.

I do have the custom columns populated from my Kobo ereaders for reading percent/finished, Kobo Last read date, etc. Mostly used when I do a factory reset to restore reading status. Ditto for word and page counts.

As for most of the other information some people find important? To me, they are cold pancakes and no honey? Reviews, ratings & other social information that adds nothing to my enjoyment of the book? Author biographies? A hierarchical imprint list? Fugget it.

[Sirtel]

I don't use virtual libraries. I have a couple of saved searches (Kobo - books that are on my Kobos and TBR - books I want to read in the near fufure; the latter is a small subset of the former, which in its turn is a small subset of my whole library) and that's it. For most other things, I use tags or custom columns. I use temporary tags pretty often for some task or another (those get deleted after the task is done).

I'm not big on organizing my library by every tiny detail, mostly because I just have far too many books. I clean up the metadata, assign a genre and some custom tags/columns, edit the css and that's it. Next, the book either gets sent to my Kobos or relegated to the rest of my library.

I don't keep records of my paper books in my calibre library, or any documents/manuals; I keep the latter in my Dropbox documents folder. I also don't read library/subscription books.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by DNSB

ebook vs pbook? There is a column for that though the pbooks list is shrinking as they are replaced with ebooks.

Originally Posted by DNSB

Purchases vs. loans? Purchases have a book file, loans just have the metadata. No custom column needed. A search for empty formats and not pbook works just fine the few times I want to check.

I use 0-byte dummy format for both - PAPERBOOK and OVERDRIVE.

[Katja_hbg]

For fun I have one VL supported by view manager and searches to find the oldes not readed book of each favorite authors.

[iakrus]

oh interesting, i seem to be an outlier with my 33 virtual libraries!
i have two seperate main libraries, my fanfiction one which i have been building for 5 years and has 17k works, and my brand sparkly new books and comics one which i have only just started adding to.

i only make a virtual library for a fandom that i have a significant (maybe 100? im not exact) amount of words in, so my list of collections is much higher, but a few have 1-3k works in them.

im someone with pretty low standards (i'll read anything, i respect the effort fanfic authors make when putting their work out there for free) so when i find a new interest i kinda go buck wild. also im too disabled to be able to work, so i have a lot of free time.
between march 2019 when i got calibre, and the end of 2020 i manually inputted my word count into a spreadsheet and had read 69 million words, i almost dont want to know how high it is now!

also excuse the messiness of the naming conventions- i would always forget if i was using acronyms or the full names for my collections and ended up with a mishmash. i'll get round to sorting it eventually!

[ownedbycats]

I see both Elder Scrolls and Mass Effect. I approve.

[rantanplan]

I have just started using virtual libraries. Still figuring out where it brings value to me. I have VLs for the reading status and for book series / book universes for now. The most useful it feels for the Cosmere and treklit as these are meta-universes.



It's probably also useful to separate the Star Wars legends EU and the SW "canon" EU. But that's a rabbit hole that I don't want to go down just yet.

[Desertway]

Just fiction, non-fiction, and magazines.