How Do You Organize

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by blue_skies

Is there a Calibre plug-in you use for that?

There's EpubMerge.

Personally, I go the other way - I use EpubSplit to convert omnibuses into individual volumes.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by blue_skies

Is there a Calibre plug-in you use for that?

The actual merge is done with the EPubMerge plugin.
The process that automates the merging is something I wrote myself.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

There's EpubMerge.

Personally, I go the other way - I use EpubSplit to convert omnibuses into individual volumes.

I do this also.
Apache

[harriska2]

I use calibre. To track to-be-read I use the star rating column. I give it a star to-read and no stars otherwise. Super fast and easy. I just moved my collection (4000?) from pc to mac without issue. I use calibre for journal articles, manga, fiction, non-fiction, scanned books, textbooks, etc. Very much a workhorse. I pay Kovid $20 every so often because it is by far the best piece of software I’ve ever owned.

[Paperbackstash]

Originally Posted by haertig

I hate it when I buy something that I already own!

Amazon is quite good about telling you what you've purchased from them in the past, so you don't re-buy. That doesn't help you if you routinely buy from different sources though.

Just today, I went to buy a book and Amazon warned me that I had already bought it back in 2013. Today's trigger to purchase it was that it was $0.00. Why not "buy" a free book? I looked back at my old 2013 order, and sure enough, I had bought it for $0.00 back then. Once a cheapskate, always a cheapskate I guess. Maybe I'll get around to reading it before it goes on sale again for $0.00 in another decade or so - that way I might remember the name of the book and not try to buy it again!

Ah yes, Amazon has had to remind me too when I go to purchase. I think an issue is having such a huge wishlist over the years, and library, it all gets confusing on what's owned and when.

[DianaSmith]

I bought an ebook and I'm interested in reading it.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by haertig

Then I MANUALLY go and check their respective websites, Wiki, "Book Series in Order" website, Goodreads, and Amazon to see if they have released/announced anything new. This is a real pain for authors where I have a lot of their books already. I have to then go through my Calibre library again, and my print books, to determine if what I am looking at is a new book, or an old book that I just don't remember.

This is horribly tedious, and that explains why I rarely do it. Which just compounds this problem when I put off doing it.

Boy it would sure be nice if there was a website that listed just about every author known to man and all their books - arranged into series and then sorted into oldest to newest - with checkboxes by each title that I could click on and save.

WorldCat lists most books known to mankind. By playing with P-CIP/C-CIP data, you can sort by series and publication date. The gotcha is different formats and publishers play havoc with the publication date. In theory, the only P-CIP/C-CIP data that changes is year of publication, ISBN, and publisher. Occasionally, practice can be radically different.

Things that authors do, that make series numbering hard:

• Publishing a book as a prequel, then deciding that it is the start of a new series;
• Publishing a book as volume x, retracting it, and then publishing a different book/title as volume x;
• Publishing the same book with two, or more different titles;
• Changing the name of the series in mid-stream;

Things that the estate does, that makes series numbering hard:

• Completely omitting the name of the deceased author;
• Using the name of the deceased author as the secondary author;

Then there was the publisher who decided that an omnibus edition was desirable. But instead of combining the first few books, the order in the omnibus was the third or fourth last book, the third or forth book, the last book, and then the first book. An order that was neither chronological publication date, nor chronological written date, nor when events occurred in the series, nor anybody's suggested reading order, nor even the generally considered best books in that series.