Physical book cataloging, design choices -- experiences? suggestions?

[lairdb]

(Yes, I've reviewed the dozen other threads; none of them go quite where I'm headed.)

I'm contemplating several different options on how to include my physical books in my Calibre catalog. FWIW, I already have good ISBNs for all the pbooks, along with some tags associated with each.

Some of the debates I've been having, that I'd be interested in experience, suggestions, etc:


Preserving the true ISBN is important to me, for the pbooks. For the ebooks, not so much. As discussed at some length by kiwidude here (updated link), Calibre does some aggregation/collation via Worldcat when updating metadata, and the ISBN in the ID can get updated (along, of course, with adding an ASIN that may or may not be the exact edition, etc.) I have experimented with adding my own identifier paper_isbn, and with adding my own custom column; I can argue both ways, though I'm leaning toward custom column.


More generally, is there a way to constrain the metadata updaters to be edition-specific? Ideally, I could set this based on a criteria, next best would be setting the settings and then updating just the pbooks. (For example, for ebooks, I just want a representative cover. For pbooks, I'd rather have no cover at all, if the exact edition cover is not available.)


I've gone back and forth twice on whether the same ebook and pbook should be one record or two. (And this is a sub-question of whether pbooks should be in their own Calibre library.) At the moment, I'm leaning back toward separate records in a single library.

(For example, I have two physical copies of Heinlein's Glory Road, which are distinct physical editions: 0425048659 and 0671877046. I also have an ebook, currently cataloged as 9780765312228. In my current thinking, these would be three rows, so that the two pbooks could have their own #pbookISBN column entry, and so that each could have its distinct _location_* tag.)

This does, however, make a hash of duplicate book detection, although I'm thinking that Virtual Libraries will help here. It also makes rating and marking as read (which I currently handle with a custom date column) a bit untidy. Very interested in thoughts on this.


Thanks.

[lairdb]

ETA: Also curious how anyone thinks this might interact with Goodreads, particularly the aspect of having multiple rows for a particular work.

[Sami]

I have found multiple copies to be a PITA when it comes to digital organizing. In Calibre empty records for the physical books tagged with do not update metadata and custom column for format, and virtual libraries used to keep e and p distinct can work. But it does make a mess of duplicates and searching and reading a series in order. All of which can be gotten around and I did this for years before going completely digital.

On Goodreads it's just a total headache, the library itself is not clean enough in my opinion (and I'm a librarian) to adequately keep control of multiple editions, especially when you have series, subtitles, multiple contributing authors and the like. Most of my librarian work consists of putting a single authors books all on one profile and putting the multiple editions all on one page. (Every edition of a book is added as a separate page until it's combined into another one and if it's done in a hurry you get a variation of the title for each edition until someone comes back and cleans it up.)

[lairdb]

I went ahead and merged my pbook records into my main library yesterday, and so far it's okay. For example:

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BR

LibraryThing has the concept of a "work", as a metaconcept to associate these records -- have you thought about a better scheme, or a way to implement a "work" concept within Calibre? These are all part of work 18721 at LT.

(For example, until I happened to look, I had different ratings assigned to the different editions: two 5s and a 4. Obviously, that doesn't make a ton of sense.)

Putting the multiple editions in some sort of structured data within a single custom field in a single record seems the obvious answer -- but that would break a fair number of Calibre concepts in the process.

[Krazykiwi]

GR essentially does the same thing, just not so visibly. As long as you use the ISBN, you'll get the exact info for that specific edition (other than the original publish date, which is set at the work level, but you choose which date you want in the plugin config, edition date or original).

The issue is that since anyone can add a book to GR, not everyone is rigorous in adding correct and complete info. Which is of course, the exact same issue on LibraryThing, and even Worldcat which you'd think would be better since it's populated by actual library catalogs, but the data there is often a complete disaster, format wise. It's usually accurate, but can be crazy messy.

However, you can turn off any overwriting the ISBN from the plugin, so in the absence of a LibraryThing or Worldcat plugin, GR is likely your best bet for actually getting info pertaining to your specific ISBN, no other, and not replacing your ISBN's.

ISBNDB is also a possibility, but it depends a lot on how obscure your collection is. I find ISBNDB is missing a lot of my books, so I'm not sure the source of their data - but the books they do have, the data is generally very clean.