Folder management best practices

[Buhaj]

With around 50 books on the device at the moment, I split them into folders sorted by the author's name. I tried nested folders with the first letter of the author's name on top, but I found such setup inconvenient.

How do you manage folders on the device when you have several hundred books? I am considering throwing all books into a single folder and relying on metadata search to identify books, but then I am not sure if that is really convenient with a huge library.

[MJV]

I only use a folder (books) to have all epubs. I have c. 550 books in it and totally rely on metadata (author, title, tag) for search. No problems so far.

[jlinear]

I make no pretense that this is a "best practice" but this works for me using Calibre to transer ebooks to my devices:

In Calibre my metadata "Author(s)" and "Author sort" is Lastname, Firstname.

I use "korbooks/{author_sort}/{title:shorten(50,_,0)} - {authors}" as my send template to keep file names a reasonable length.

All ebooks go into the same folder. My "Home" folder is therefore sorted by author Lastname, Firstname with ebooks in their appropriate author folder.

I use filtered Categories to separate epubs from pdfs, etc. My collections appear to "Arrange" properly by either "Authors" or "Title."

[Moonbase59]

I use a folder structure under Books. The main folders are thought of "Collections", since not all readers support these the same way, and I wish to separate Fiction, Non-Fiction, News and Tests. "Ohne Sammlung" ("No Collection") is used if #collection is empty.

Under these, I use

Author sort - Title sort (Publishing year)

because I sometimes have the same book in more than one edition.

Series (for each "collection") are in a subfolder "Serien" ("Series") with the series name as folder name. Inside those, I use

Number in series - Title sort (Publishing year) - Author sort

In series, the sequence is more important, so it is upfront. Multiple authors can write in a series, so the author is also included.

I have a #collection column in Calibre, and my output template is

{#collection:ifempty(Ohne Sammlung)}/{series:|Serien/|/}{series_index:0>4s|| - }{series:'test($, '', sublist(field('author_sort'),0,1,'&'))'|| - }{title}{pubdate:| (|)}{series:'test($, sublist(field('author_sort'),0,1,'&'), '')'| - |}

Have been using this scheme for >5 years now, and it works nicely with all devices, Android, Tolino, Pocketbook, KOReader, etc. I embed the metadata in all EPUBs, so that reader software can use it.

The Tolino shown has 1268 books, my Pocketbook ~1800.