finally taking the plunge

[alexxx]

After years spent in maintaining in parallel
1) my "books" folder with a large number of subfolders for genres and subgenres
2) my wonderful calibre database

I feel I'm nearly ready to get rid of 1)
(whoever is curious about the differences between 1) and 2), a google search about tagging vs folders in calibre will provide you with hours of fun)

... but I feel there are still two remaining stumbling blocks, at least for me:

the first is psychological, but I'd like to have some kind of "kill switch" so that, in the unlucky event that something happens (e.g. Kovid sells himself to the forces of evil :-) ) and I'm forced to rebuild some kind of folder structure, I can do it: there is, as an example, some plugin able to create a folder structure from the tags, and to save the books there? A biunivocal relationship is impossible of course, but a mapping of some kind should be possible.

the second stumbling block: I really, really need some way to add to a <book> in calibre additional files - it is not sufficient for many books I have to "add it as if it were another format" (from https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...php?t=165332): there is some progress there, or it is not even considered?

Come on, help me leave hierarchical folders for your beloved tags ;-) !

alessandro

[BetterRed]

You can add 'foreign files' e.g. FLV, MP3, XLS, EXE... via Add Books->Add files to selected book records (Shift/A), you may need to adjust the file type selection in the open filke diialogue.

Calibre wont process the files in any way, but it will record their existence and keep them in the folder if the books are moved to another library, or the author or title is changed etc. You can open them in the designated program via the Book Details panel, or the Open With plugin etc, or in the Edit Metadata dialogue

But you can only have one file of each type. I get around this limitation by keeping 'foreign files' in a single 7z archive when there's more than one of any type.

Can't help you with the other issue.

BR

[Adoby]

Calibre has a save to disk feature that allows you to quickly restore your beloved tree structure with an intricate hierarchy of folders/directories.

However it is not easy to do this directly from the tags. Instead you could use some extra field/column like genre, and use that to help create the directories to use when saving the books to disk.

You can also easily use series information to create the paths to use when saving books. So you could for instance group books in a series together in a directory.

This directory tree structure, populated with books, exists outside of calibre, but you can use calibre to remove, change and add books to it. Especially if you instead of saving to disk connect to the directory as a device, and use the send to device system instead of send to disk. Works the same, but you can add/remove selected books easily from calibre.

I use this technique to save most of my books, the ones that have metadata and covers fixed and I might want to read, to a directory tree based mainly on genre. I also add series information to the start of the filenames, so books in the same series will automatically sort together in directory listing and folder views.

I then have a copy of this whole directory tree on my reading device.

So I mainly use calibre when I add new books, remove duplicates, fix metadata tags and covers, convert and then save all the books (at least the ones that are fixed) to disk and copy (sync over wifi really) them all to my reading device. I currently have around 4 000 books on my tablet, and room for at least 4 000 more. Mostly epub, but also some pdf. I do the same with my backup reading device, but fewer books. I have two virtual libraries that contain the books in each device. I use two custom fields for that purpose. So it is easy to update each device as needed.

The app I mainly use to read, Mantano, actually has some of the same abilities that calibre has, so the directory structure really isn't used that much. I can sort and group on folders, metadata like author, title, series, added, read/unread, tags and so on. So I don't really browse or search for books using the directory structure. But I could if I wanted to.

Here are some nice examples of how the save to disk feature can be used:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=118563