help me see how calibre would be useful

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by bounce

@speakingtohe Thanks for the detailed response and you've convinced me to give it ago with some of my collection. I think you misread where I wrote it's 250 gb not 25 gb though

@betterred kiwidude plug-ins I'll look into those

@unbogling that is a massive post, bookmarked and I'll dig into it later for sure.

I guess my situation is that I have a large list (48pages) in simplenote of books prioritized by what I want to read next and if it's not high priority it's sorted by subject. From here, I just use "everything" to quickly search that next book on Win or spotlight on Mac, so it hardly matters I have a sorted file system or proprietary software. I know there are times when an author pens under different genres like Iain Banks, but I don't know that use case is gonna come up much for me. I basically know what I want to read and already spend practically no time just going to the next book in my list which I prefer over situation where i'm herding. I know Calibre is far more than this though and curious to see what I can do with it, so I will try it out!

One thing I'd like other than my sequential list is someway to inject some serendipity into what I read next and maybe I can figure out a way to do that with Calibre or a plug-in. Thanks for the opinions so far

Eek 250 GB. Still not a lot in todays storage standards IMO.

There is a random book selector function in calibre, although I have never used it. 2/3 of the books I read are series and I would just as soon read them sequentially although I rarely read two in a row.

My serendipity (if I am understanding correctly) is by having the books in collections by series or authors on my readers and picking a collection kind of randomly (I may start at the beginning or the end or somewhere in between and pick a collection to open) As I try to have books on my readers that I want to read, 9/10 times I will just start the top book although occasionally I am in a more specific mood for or against.

Helen

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by bounce

@betterred kiwidude plug-ins I'll look into those

See attachment for the optional PI's I use - kiwidude is Grant Drake

You can't beat owner operated bookstores as a place for discovering books you never knew existed - especially those specialising in used books. I'm fortunate enough to live within a walking distance of a couple, and a 10 minutes Sunday morning bike ride from another 3-4.

FWIW - I take the results of a search (Windows, Recoll, FileLocator etc - I'm an agnostic), massage it into a CSV and read that into Import List to create readings lists, add Tags etc.

BR

[Adoby]

How big are the books? How many books are there in those 250 GB?

A typical size of a epub book, in my library, is a few 100 KB. Maybe 200 - 300 KB. If there are images or fonts embedded that may increase to a few MB. 1-4 MB.

PDF:s with a lot of images, like magazines, can be a few 10 MB. Maybe 15 - 30 MB. PDF:s consisting of mainly scanned images can be bigger still.

Since you have scanned the books yourself, I assume that they can either be fully OCR:ed, and comparable in size to a small epub, or depending on the images and format, very big.

I have my entire library of around 3800 ebooks, a mix of epub novels and PDF textbooks and documents, available on my Android tablet, using less than 10 GB. And the library is easily accessible using the metadata stored in the books. Metadata that I have modified and normalized using Calibre. I expect that the library can keep growing, but that I will be able to buy new reading devices with bigger capacities faster than my library grows. Currently I have 32 GB storage available on my device. In practice maybe 20 GB considering other uses. So my current library could grow at least twice as big using my current hardware.

No silly "A novel" or series information in the title of a novel. Series information goes in the series fields, and also in the filename to allow duplicates of books that are part of more than one series. All authors in the form LN, FN. And no different variants with or without initials or punctuation in the names. All books in a series use the exact same name of the series. All books by the same author have the exact same spelling of the name of the author. Books that are part of more than one series are typically duplicated. All of this was easy to fix using Calibre.

My books are also stored on my Android device in 54 different folders, loosely based on subject and language. I have all books on computer languages in one folder. Linux books in one. Historical crime novels in one, alternative history SF in one, and so on. I sometimes refine this when I think there is too many or too few books in each folder. Easy to do using Calibre. I just modify a field, and when the books are saved to device, from calibre, they are automatically grouped in different folders.

Since the metadata is normalized I can use my reading app to group books for instance by genre, author, title, series or folder.

If I decide that some other structure is needed, for instance group books by author inside each genre, or by genre under each author, or in folders based on series, that can be easily and quickly done by changing the save template in calibre and sending the books again.

Since the books have tags, and the reading app I use allow me to search using the tags, I can easily find books with special content, if I have tagged them. For instance prehistory books can belocated by searching in the folder "prehistory". Or "ancient Rome". Or "aliens". Or "supernatural". Or "Standard Library". Or "Cats". Or "Read!". Or other things that I have tagged for in order to help find books. I use calibre to maintain, remove, modify, normalize and add tags. Never ending job, but makes finding specific books very easy, both in calibre and on my reading device. For instance books that I am especially curious about and want to read soon. Too many of those...

[kacir]

Originally Posted by bounce

Would Calibre have any advantages for me?
...
On an external hard drive I have the books organized in nested folders and I connect this to a PC or Mac which I side load into my Kindle or Dropbox for Marvin. I'm fairly quick at navigating the current file structure for books.
...
I'm curious about how I'd go about using the "portable" calibre hosted on dropbox for a collection this size?

Previous posters pointed out many advantages, I will add some more.

If you have a neat and well named structure of nested directories with books and can write a script or two in your preferred environment, then you can import books to Calibre in bulk, not just one-by-one manually. I did this by writing a script to "collapse" the path, so that the filename contained all the info that was originally stored in the path system (such as series and author or genere info) and set up Calibre to parse the filename to get the info. For this there is beautiful support of Regular Expressions in Calibre "Adding books" setting. Use the "quick preferences" plugin to choose between your crafted regular expressions when importing files named using various systems.

When you add the books, you can normalize metadata - use unified author and series names, and so on as previous posters pointed out. Calibre has *very* powerful tools to help you with this, including filters, bulk rename (again with Regular Expression support), and absolutely wonderful plugin for locating duplicates.

You can ask Calibre to download from Internet (or extract from book files) covers and metadata, including series, publication date, description... . Again, everything is highly configurable.

Calibre has its own content server, so your collection can be used from any device that has browser and can open linked file, if you can access the IP where your main PC with your monster collection is residing.
Also look up opds file:

Calibre2opds can generate OPDS and HTML catalogs from the metadata of the Calibre e-book library manager. These catalogs can then be used both to browse your e-book library online and also to download books on demand.
http://calibre2opds.com/about/

One of my numerous personal favorite features, that haven't been mentioned yet, is "create catalog". I have some metadata where I indicate how high on my "to be read" list the book is. So I can select a [large] group of books, export them to directory (or device or wherever) and then I create a catalog of those books. A catalog is a nice e-book (or cvs file, everything is configurable) with hyperlinked authors, series, book titles, covers, lists by author, lists by series, lists by genere that covers the books you have on device or in a given directory. Then, when you want to select a book to read, you can browse this nice document instead of searching through subdirectories.