Getting organized!

[pwalker8]

One organizational note that I failed to mention is that I like to keep the originals of all the ebooks that I purchase (or download for the Gutenberg books) in a directory structure separated by where I got them from. Thus for me, I have a directory structure with the root directory being ebooks, then subdirectories for kindle, sony, baen and Gutenberg. I keep that directory tree archived so it's pretty easy to find the original in case of a problem. I also keep my calibre directory structure backed up.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

One organizational note that I failed to mention is that I like to keep the originals of all the ebooks that I purchase (or download for the Gutenberg books) in a directory structure separated by where I got them from. Thus for me, I have a directory structure with the root directory being ebooks, then subdirectories for kindle, sony, baen and Gutenberg. I keep that directory tree archived so it's pretty easy to find the original in case of a problem. I also keep my calibre directory structure backed up.

You could of course add a custom column to Calibre to record the original source. (I know that you know this, but people new to Calibre may not ).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Moving to a Kobo ereader, you might also want to consider using FlightCrew and EpubCheck to error check your ebooks before sending them to the ereader (well, those without DRM). One item Kobo's software does not do well is deal with non-standard compliant ebooks. While either can be used standalone, my personal choice is Sigil with both installed as plugins so I open the epub in Sigil, run FlightCrew and EpubCheck on epub2 or EpubCheck alone on epub3 format epubs. If either does not return no problems found!, time to locate and correct the errors.

While the situation has improved with most publishers, there have been times when looking at the structure of an epub was enough to make me want to discuss standards compliance with the person who produced the ebook (or the software author ). By preference, the discussion would involve something lingering and amusing along the lines of boiling oil or molten lead.

It's actually easier to use Calibre's eBook editor. You get to validate and to be able to fix all in one and if Calibre is used to manage the library, then it's easier then firing up Sigil since it's an all-in-one solution.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

One organizational note that I failed to mention is that I like to keep the originals of all the ebooks that I purchase (or download for the Gutenberg books) in a directory structure separated by where I got them from. Thus for me, I have a directory structure with the root directory being ebooks, then subdirectories for kindle, sony, baen and Gutenberg. I keep that directory tree archived so it's pretty easy to find the original in case of a problem. I also keep my calibre directory structure backed up.

I do that too, but not the exact originals, as I will strip DRM. But I do have a second Calibre Library where my originals are kept. From there, I'll copy them to my main library. That way, I don't have multiple versions of the same type per book in one library.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Put everything into Calibre. I've been accumulating ebooks for 20+ years now and Calibre is great for organising things.

I agree with HarryT and the others. Calibre is great at organizing books in one common place.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You could of course add a custom column to Calibre to record the original source. (I know that you know this, but people new to Calibre may not ).

Actually it isn't so much to keep track of where the book came from, but rather to be able to make it easier to back up the books, and reload if I need to. It was also a way to make sure that I hadn't forgotten to any books.

It was also handy back before the various Calibre plugins came around. It allowed me to set up scripts to remove the DRM for Kindle and Adobe back when Sony was still selling and had a few books that Amazon didn't. Also, it's pretty handy with Baen books since their monthly bundles tend to have a lot of duplicates. It was real handy when Sony shut down their ebook store and I was checking to make sure I had downloaded all the books that I had purchased.

So there were originally different reasons for different ebook stores and once I started doing so, I just kept it in place.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by HarryT

And add your books slowly to Calibre, correctly setting the metadata for each book as you add it. It's effort that pays rewards in the longer term.

Nah. Import them all at once, into a "Dump" library. Trash all the tags, publisher, ISBN, etc... everything, except the author name and title. Run the Modify EPUB plugin to remove as much junk as possible.

Then find all books by one author (the one author you have the most books of, or the one you like reading best), and move them to a "Work" library. When there, set the author name correctly, for all books at once. Then run through the titles, metatags, covers, "Edit Book" (removing all errors and such), one by one, etc... and do everything you want done to the book.

Then move those books to the Main library.

Next author...

I've organized my library in this way, and it works well. You can just do a few books a day. Even if you only do 5 a day (which won't take you more than about 20-60 minutes after some practice, and depending on how precise you are and how much data you want to be in the metadata), you'll be done with 1000 books in 200 days, or a bit more than half a year.

[FizzyWater]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Nah. Import them all at once, into a "Dump" library. Trash all the tags, publisher, ISBN, etc... everything, except the author name and title. Run the Modify EPUB plugin to remove as much junk as possible.

Then find all books by one author (the one author you have the most books of, or the one you like reading best), and move them to a "Work" library. When there, set the author name correctly, for all books at once. Then run through the titles, metatags, covers, "Edit Book" (removing all errors and such), one by one, etc... and do everything you want done to the book.

Then move those books to the Main library.

Next author...

I've organized my library in this way, and it works well. You can just do a few books a day. Even if you only do 5 a day (which won't take you more than about 20-60 minutes after some practice, and depending on how precise you are and how much data you want to be in the metadata), you'll be done with 1000 books in 200 days, or a bit more than half a year.

I don't use the intermediary Work Library, but otherwise, this is what I do too.

[Tarana]

I do the same thing as Katsunami, although I did have separate libraries for Kindle, B&N and Kobo and Small Publishers to keep track of prices AND that I actually download everything.

I just wanted to add that you should create a SOURCE folder. Hold on to your original sources until you have actually read the ebook and that everything works. It's way easier to reformat a book from the original source as well.

[Hemmi]

I remember when I first started using Calibre and I only had about 200 ebooks. Such a chore to get them in there but so worth it. By the time I was up to 500 ebooks I realized some stuff didn't have descriptions so I went back and added it all and now I just do it as soon as I buy an ebook. Into Calibre it goes so that the DRM can be stripped and everything tagged how I want it with series info with a pretty cover and description. Makes me so much happier!

[BookCat]

I offload books I've read or uploaded onto my ereader by putting them into a 'My Books' file on an external hardrive and deleting them from my pc.

[HappyMartin]

I feel totally inadequate now. I had the digital equivalent of boxes of books moulding in the basement before I bought a kindle. Now it's all on Amazon servers I am told. I back up nothing. I strip no DRM. I hope Amazon lasts longer than I live. That's my plan. My girlfriend asked if I could try last another 30 years and I said I would give it a go. Perhaps I should write to Mr Bizos and ask if he could please promise the same with Amazon.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by HappyMartin

I feel totally inadequate now. I had the digital equivalent of boxes of books moulding in the basement before I bought a kindle. Now it's all on Amazon servers I am told. I back up nothing. I strip no DRM. I hope Amazon lasts longer than I live. That's my plan. My girlfriend asked if I could try last another 30 years and I said I would give it a go. Perhaps I should write to Mr Bizos and ask if he could please promise the same with Amazon.

Hum, good luck with that.

[HappyMartin]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Hum, good luck with that.

So far so good.

[radius]

I am one of the few here that doesn't appear to use Calibre. One option you could try is just dumping everything into Google Play Books and trust Google to keep improving their sorting and searching features. That is their core competence after all.

Last year, I merged a couple of old Calibre libraries, my Sony library (and new Kobo-ified epub version of that Sony library), along with thirty years of collected text and HTML.

I just use the basic file system on my Mac for categorization and metadata. At the top level, I have my libraries broken into read, unread, and uncategorized folders about 1300 and 900 books respectively right now, but I still have a bunch of read books that I haven't added to the library yet. Then I break down by author surname. The way I find things is by using Spotlight to look for a title, author or tag. I only wish Spotlight was able to look into epub contents too. Oh well.

I started off by putting one source of books into my uncategorized folder and then I just methodically moved one book at a time into the appropriate place. This is the time I harmonize author, sorting and series information as best I can. The way I do it is to use Spotlight to find that author or that title and see how many copies I have, then try to decide on a definitive copy to keep. If I was unsatisfied with that definitive copy, I also did a quick search on Mobileread and Gutenberg for a cleaner copy (and maybe even with illustrations nowadays).

I try to keep my archive copies as epub because that seems the most future proof to me. I do have some books left over as LRF (Sony format) because they were left behind in the Sony->Kobo store transition or because I had downloaded them from Mobileread and there was no epub version. In my spare time I occasionally convert these to epub, but as there is so much hand coding involved, I only do it if I'm really bored or motivated to re-read.

For books I have in HTML (like some early Baen webscriptions prior to epub) I usually do a quick and dirty epub version.

For books in text I do an epub version if I'm motivated or just keep text if I'm not.

The folders that I store the books in are a) backed up to my server in the basement, and b) synced to my private cloud so that the books are available over the internet to all my devices. I don't use a public cloud like Dropbox because I can't be bothered encrypting all my books on client side and I am not guaranteed to have the tools to do the decryption on all my possible clients (e.g. e-book readers!).

When I want to read a book on my Kindle, I run it through Sigil to make sure it has text encoding set and maybe adjust the margins and fix the cover etc, then hand generate the mobi using kindlegen.