How large is your Calibre library?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Wow. I've been buying ebooks since 2002, and I only have 3875 bought books in my calibre library.

Perhaps you might have a minor ebook buying addiction, rather than a hobby?

I started out documenting my paper Library (900+ empty books), Then I added the Baen Free Library and CD's (~50% overlap). Then came the e-books
The count does sneak up pretty fast. But I will agree that if those were recen acquisitions, the OP might want to visit the local chapter of BA

[kim67255]

Wow I thought I had a lot. I only have 41,800. My last computer deleted my calibre. So I'm reloading it. Still going through my stories. I've gotten most of my stories from ffn also. I'm big into crossovers and twilight. I've gotten my stories from all kinds of sites.

Off the subject. This new version of calibre is a pain though. I have a column for page numbers. The new version doesn't have it. I don't like to mess with the recipes to get them back or if I even could. Do we know if there is going to be a n update to add it back in?

[pdurrant]

Calibre has never had a default page count column. It's always been necessary to add it as a custom column if you want a page count.

[theducks]

I agree with Paul. You need to configure Calibre (add columns) for use with many plugins.
In 40 years of using personal computers, I have never had on just up an remove a single program.
Damage files, Oh Yes!
Had Drives up and fail (quickly): That also.
Had the stupid user ( Me ) format the wrong (non-system) drive : wall:

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by theducks

Had the stupid user ( Me ) format the wrong (non-system) drive : wall:

Glad to hear I wasn't the only one.

[aisg]

Originally Posted by calibrejunkie

Hello all,

Just curious, how many books do you guys have in your libraries?

Thanks

At this time I have a library with 218,321 books in it . It is or working library. We use it to both get covers a cull books that do not meet the standards of the main library. I also have our main library with 1,253,450,243 book in it. Or main library is on a 10 TB portable Western Digital drive.

[pchobby]

I use to have about 100,000 files on a seagate external. It kindof crashed. The device manager sees it but it doesn't bring up the files. ((.

So now I have about 30

[aisg]

Originally Posted by calibrejunkie

Hello all,

Just curious, how many books do you guys have in your libraries?

Thanks

I have 3 library's the main one has 2 million books, I have one that has 1 million books, and one that has over 500,000 books. But I have found that the more books in a library the search is slowed.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by aisg

I have 3 library's the main one has 2 million books, I have one that has 1 million books, and one that has over 500,000 books. But I have found that the more books in a library the search is slowed.

How the heck did you get 2,000,000 eBooks?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by aisg

At this time I have a library with 218,321 books in it . It is or working library. We use it to both get covers a cull books that do not meet the standards of the main library. I also have our main library with 1,253,450,243 book in it. Or main library is on a 10 TB portable Western Digital drive.

Originally Posted by aisg

I have 3 library's the main one has 2 million books, I have one that has 1 million books, and one that has over 500,000 books. But I have found that the more books in a library the search is slowed.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

How the heck did you get 2,000,000 eBooks?

I have a bit of trouble reconciling @aisg's posts. In their first message, they have 2 libraries, one that sounds like the equivalent to my Intake with 218,321 books and the other with 1,253,450,253 books. The library with 1.25 billion books is stored on a 10TB external WD drive. A bit of quick math gives an average of 7,977 bytes per library entry (ebook, cover image and opf file) which strikes me as being a rather unrealistic size.

In their next message, they have 3 libraries, the main one with over 2 million books, another with 1 million books and a third with 500,000 books for a total of 3.5 million books.

Sorry, Jon, but I think that a certain amount of doubt exists about those numbers. Probably around the level of screw making machine suddenly churning out a cash register complete with all electronics and a printer.

BTW, in my main library, the average entry size for ebook, cover and opf averages out to 663.9KB for the 12,320 ebooks I've collected over the decades. Multiplying by 100,000 to get the number of books into the same order of magnitude, I would need ~800TB of storage.

[haertig]

I have a bit of trouble reconciling @aisg's posts. In their first message, they have 2 libraries, one that sounds like the equivalent to my Intake with 218,321 books and the other with 1,253,450,253 books. The library with 1.25 billion books is stored on a 10TB external WD drive. A bit of quick math gives an average of 7,977 bytes per library entry (ebook, cover image and opf file) which strikes me as being a rather unrealistic size.

Your forgot metadata.db. Just my metadata.db file alone is 5587 bytes per book (highly variable of course, but I divided it's size by the number of books I have in Calibre as a rough estimate). So we're down to 7977 - 5587 = 2390 bytes per book. I doubt that's enough to even hold the one-page publication details and copyright statement of a book, much less the contents.

I'm sure they must have meant they have a 10 petabyte external drive and not just a mere 10Tb one.

[edit]p.s. - The Calibre library under discussion holds 5x the number of books in the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world. That is one mess of eBooks. I wonder where they all came from?[/edit]

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by haertig

Your forgot metadata.db. Just my metadata.db file alone is 5587 bytes per book (highly variable of course, but I divided it's size by the number of books I have in Calibre as a rough estimate). So we're down to 7977 - 5587 = 2390 bytes per book. I doubt that's enough to even hold the one-page publication details and copyright statement of a book, much less the contents.

I'm sure they must have meant they have a 10 petabyte external drive and not just a mere 10Tb one.

[edit]p.s. - The Calibre library under discussion holds 5x the number of books in the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world. That is one mess of eBooks. I wonder where they all came from?[/edit]

True. I left the metadata.db file out. On my Main library it's only 25,827KB or about 2K per book. I suspect that I store much less metadata per book than you do.

Snicker. We have a 1 petabyte array at work. Given it's cost and ongoing support cost (about $500,000 for the array and about $100,000 per year for the support contract), I can't see it in many people homes (not unless your last name is Bezos, Musk, Gates, Ellison, Allen, etc.). Hey, it's cheaper than a super yacht.

My personal opinion was that the posts by @aisg were figments of an overly active imagination. Partly for the same reasoning you had (the Library of Congress has ~39 million books/73 million manuscripts and over 170 million total items while the British Library has 25 million books and over 170 million total items. Both of those totals include philatelic, cartographic, music scores and sound recordings.) and partly for thinking about how long it would take to import those items, clean up the metadata, etc. for those books/etc. available in electronic form.

[haertig]

Originally Posted by DNSB

True. I left the metadata.db file out. On my Main library it's only 25,827KB or about 2K per book. I suspect that I store much less metadata per book than you do.

I'm not sure why mine is so large. I store each of my books redundantly - both in AZW3 and EPUB format. But that shouldn't effect the metadata, other than maybe adding an extra entry making it known that I have both formats. Book cover art is only stored either within the book itself, or in "cover.jpg" as far as I know. I do store the "comments" that Calibre fetches for me, and three tags per book. I don't store "language". "Series" name is stored if the book is in a series.

If there is routine maintenance (cleanup) of the Calibre database that is supposed to be done - well, I'm not doing that. So something like that could be the cause as well. Who knows - different people, different books, different ways of using Calibre, different computers (I'm on Linux - maybe the database itself is entirely different).

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by haertig

If there is routine maintenance (cleanup) of the Calibre database that is supposed to be done - well, I'm not doing that. So something like that could be the cause as well. Who knows - different people, different books, different ways of using Calibre, different computers (I'm on Linux - maybe the database itself is entirely different).

I'm not sure why the difference. My Main library does not get many changes since the ebooks are modified in my Intake library. The database code is the same for all versions of calibre so can't see being on Linux as causing any issues.

The first step in the Library maintenance => Check library routine does run a vacuum on the SQLite database so that might be worth trying to see if it shrinks your metadata.db.

[Sirtel]

My database is roughly 10 KB per book, but then I have many custom columns. I run the Library Maintenance regularly.