What Customs Columns do you use in your Calibre Library?

[Inukami]

Hi Everyone,

I don't think anyone has posted on this before, closest was this post, and there a bits and pieces everywhere so...

Apart from the default columns, what custom columns / columns made from other columns (it would be useful if someone could make a calibre tutorial on columns made from other colums with some examples as only small paragraph in manual on this) do you use in your calibre library? I'm finally at the point of finalising my library and just interested to know what everyone else has customised for their own libraries and wondering if there would be anything else useful to me. I know everyone has very different libraries depending on each individual, but I would be interested to know, so please share. What sort of custom columns (information/metadata) do you use/keep?

I use the following:

• Library/Type - Ebook, Paperback, Manga etc...
• Price AU
• Price JP
• Source (Kindle, Apple, Author etc...)
• Subscription - YES/NO - If I have a subscription to an authors newsletter.
• Review
• Word Count & Pages (Use Count Pages plugin)
• Genre (not sure if I need this, tags may be enough)
• Read - YES/NO

Thanks,

Inukami

[latepaul]

I have the following:

• in progress - a Yes/No column which I set to yes when I started reading, and No when done. It allows me to create a virtual library. Not sure it's as useful as I thought it was going to be. The virtual library allows me to quickly go the book I'm reading if I've left the main library sorted in some way that doesn't leave it near the top.
• type - this is a fixed list of things like "novel", "short story", "play" etc. i.e. it's about the form not genre.
• category - this is genre I guess. As you say sometimes I think tags would be a better way to do this as many books defy genres, cross them or occupy more than one.
• words - filled in by the count pages plugin
• pages - also filled in by the count pages plugin (based on an estimate of 2150 chars/page). Sometimes I overwrite this with the actual page count from a paper copy. TBH I don't pay much attention to it. I mainly look at the word count.
• price - in £
• read - Yes/No for whether I've read it or not
• date read - when I finished reading it (for the first time). Some of these dates for older books are estimates. If the date is 1st of the month, or 1st of Jan, it usually means I couldn't remember the exact date
• notes - I don't use this much but I added it with the idea I might want to add my own notes, separate from the comments field which I leave for a book description usually from the metadata plugins

Making this list reminded me that I have a "Koboshelf" column which used to get filled in by a plugin-board. I've kept the same library format for a long time but I have re-install Calibre a few times and the formula for this has been lost. I don't miss it to be honest. So I've deleted it just now

The issue of whether something is better as a tag is interesting. I have virtual libraries for read, unread, in progress and started-but-not-reading. These match my Goodreads exclusive shelves. The last of these is based on a tag rather than a column. I could've added another Y/N column but it would clutter up the interface. OTOH for e.g. read, it's much quicker to change the visible Y/N column than it would be to add/remove a tag.

I think you find out over time which columns you use and which you don't really. I could probably get rid of a few of these. OTOH it's no huge hardship to keep them. If I ever do want to see if I'm reading more short story collections than novels I can see that quite quickly.

[sjfan]

I use tags for most content-type questions. There are almost always multiple genres: e.g. "Fiction, Science Fiction, Mystery" for a sci-fi mystery, or "Nonfiction, Cooking, Thai" for a Thai cookbook. And there are format tags (nothing for novels, but I have Short Story, Anthology, Poetry, Manual, etc tags). And there's a "Trash" tag for the handful of books I never want to see again.

I have a few virtual libraries: The main one, which excludes books in the others. I'ts essentially all adult fiction. There's a separate one for Children's/YA books. There's one for Recipes/Cooking. One for other non-fiction. And one for Manuals (every time I buy a new TV or blender or printer or whatever, I snag an electronic copy of the manual and put it here).

The tags column is sync'd to shelves on my Kobo reader. I do not sync series to shelves, as it creates way too many shelves to be useful (Kobo shows the series anyway, so I can use that to read the next book in a series).

I realized I never looked at word counts, so I got rid of that custom column.

So I'm left with only 3 custom columns.

• Page count (Uses the Page Count plugin)
• Read (Yes/No) (managed manually)
• Annotations (syncs with kobo annotations using the Annotations plugin)

[ilovejedd]

I don't have custom columns for my "normal" library. The built-in columns work quite well for that.

For my fanfic library:

• status (text:tag) - in-progress or complete
• modified (datetime) - date last updated
• chapters (int)
• words (int)
• pair (text:tag) - pairings
• char (text:tag) - main characters
• tropes (text:tag)
• txtquery (comments) - placeholder for MultiColumnSearch TXT regex query results for metadata extraction
• tmptags (text:tag) - placeholder for tags (pair, char, tropes) prior to standardization/clean-up
• state (text:tag) - for tracking the status of ebook metadata processing and clean-up

I just use the built-in Tags column for tagging the fandom.

Honestly, I haven't used Calibre in years. I just download epub directly from Archive of Our Own and save to Dropbox (all done on the iPad/iPhone). Alas, that has resulted in ~4K fanfics inclusive of dupes which I'm now trying to beat into some semblance of order.

[fidvo]

I have several libraries with different custom columns, but these are the columns I have in every library because they're so useful:

Path: A hierarchical column that I include in my Save to Disk template. Since I grew up with hierarchical file systems, I can't quite force myself to abandon them entirely. It allows me to use the tag browser to mimic the behavior of Windows Explorer. Most of my virtual libraries are based upon the top level of this hierarchy.

Title ID: Maybe I'm just OCD, but sometimes the built-in Title column just doesn't work for what I want to do, for example sorting or saving to disk. So I created a second title column to use as the file name in my Save to Disk template. Sometimes it's virtually identical to the Title column, but if the book is in a series, I usually begin the Title ID with the series index so that when I save the books out to disk, they're in order. The Path and Title ID columns complement each other, just like the folder and file name for a file on disk.

Subseries: A lot of book series are divided into two levels of series. I use the main Series column to store the major series, and the Subseries column to store the series-within-a-series.

OK: A yes/no column to keep track of whether the book's metadata is correct. I also have a "To Fix" virtual library based upon this column. When I import books, this column is not set, so they're automatically included in the virtual library. I'll then go through each book and clean up the metadata, then set the OK column to Yes. This way, I can keep track of which books I need to deal with. Other people accomplish much the same thing by using a separate intake library, but when you have several main libraries with different custom columns, having a duplicate of each structure is too unwieldy. A single custom column in each library works better for my work flow.

[Inukami]

@latepaul, @sjfan, @ilovejedd & @fidvo - Thanks for your comments.

Originally Posted by sjfan

And one for Manuals (every time I buy a new TV or blender or printer or whatever, I snag an electronic copy of the manual and put it here).

@sjfan - This is a good idea. I have heaps of manuals in my kitchen drawer. Maybe I should just digitalise all of my manuals.

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

• state (text:tag) - for tracking the status of ebook metadata processing and clean-up

Originally Posted by fidvo

OK: A yes/no column to keep track of whether the book's metadata is correct. I also have a "To Fix" virtual library based upon this column. When I import books, this column is not set, so they're automatically included in the virtual library. I'll then go through each book and clean up the metadata, then set the OK column to Yes. This way, I can keep track of which books I need to deal with. Other people accomplish much the same thing by using a separate intake library, but when you have several main libraries with different custom columns, having a duplicate of each structure is too unwieldy. A single custom column in each library works better for my work flow.

I note you both use columns to keep track if a books metadata/formatting is correct/complete although you tackle the information differently. I think I may add this column as it may be helpful to know if the metadata is complete and also if the books TOC is correct/up-to-date.

@ilovejedd - What tags do you use exactly?

Originally Posted by latepaul

I have the following:

• price - in £

@latepaul - Do you export the price values to get the TOTAL price? Why is price so important to have for you? You like to see how much you spend?

Inukami

[ilovejedd]

My state tags are quite specific to my fanfic library. I'm currently using pair done, char done and tropes done. The other cc are easy to populate (I've got saved S&R regex for the other cc which I apply upon import) but those three are a rat's nest requiring lots of elbow grease.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by Inukami

What sort of custom columns (information/metadata) do you use/keep?

• Journal
• Volume
• ISSN
• Extra Author Details
• Title: Part Two
• Pages
• Index
• Bibliography
• References
• ISBN
• Subject Heading # 1
• Subject Heading # 2
• Subject Heading # 3
• Subject Heading # 4
• Subject heading # 5
• Library of Congress Classification Number
• Dewey Decimal Number
• LCCN
• PCN
• DOI
• Call # 1
• Catalog # 1
• Call # 2
• Catalog # 2
• Edition
• License
• License URL
• Class
• Course
• Copyright Year
• Copyright Status

Ideally, that information is added before I need to find and cite the material. However, I usually add it only after reading it.

Amber

[ekbell]

My custom columns are read, date read, word count, collections and genre. The first three are obvious, collections tells me where the book can be found (my tablet, husband's kobo, children's kobo, physical location for pbooks....) and I added genre so that my husband's kobo could be better organized without overwhelming him with my tagging system.

I only add genre if when my metadata is otherwise up-to-date so it doubles as a have-I-checked-the-metadata reminder.

[Sarmat89]

Collection, Original title, Translator.

[jjquin]

I've been using Calibre for years to manage me 3k+ epub library, but just recently I found this forum! I can't believe how much I've learned over the last two weeks! I've been reconfiguring my whole library thanks to what I've learned so far. Here are my custom columns:

• Size KB: program: format_number(divide(booksize(), 1048), '{0:.1f}'), I only keep epub format and found it much easer to read in KB than MB since so many of my epub files are less that 250KB.
• Last Checked: This is a date field that has the last date I checked to make sure the metatdata is correct. Since I've been adding fields and changing the polish template I've found that a date field is better than yes/no. If I make a major change, I can tell by the date which books I have to go recheck.
• Pages and Words: from Count Pages plugin
• Genre: I moved this from tags and made the new field hierarchical.
• Contributors: I have a lot of books with secondary authors. In FBReader my author list was huge and many authors just had one book. This field allows me to store the secondary authors without them showing up in FBReader.
• Subseries: My wife loves romances and many of the books belong to more than one series.
• Notes: This is a long text field thats a catchall for any other info on the book. I prefer this to using the comments field since it gets replaced when you download metadata.
  
  I'm still learning. I've spent the last week going through and cleaning up the tags field, downloading metadata and basically learning this great program!

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by Inukami

@latepaul - Do you export the price values to get the TOTAL price? Why is price so important to have for you? You like to see how much you spend?

I think I added it because someone else talked about it on here! I do like to keep an eye on how much I am spending. Actually I don't do that as much as I used to. I used to feel guilty if I was buying new books (especially if they might later go on sale) when I had so many unread ones.

I actually run SQL directly against the calibre database to look at things like total price. I work in databases so it's pretty natural for me.

So I have a script called "mr_status", which if I run it now shows me this:

MR Report for Year beginning:    2018-01-01

title       num_books
----------  ----------
Read Books          8
TBR               560

title         num_books   total_cost
------------  ----------  ----------
Money Spent           4   £   14.85
Free Books            2   £    0.00
Cost of TBR         431   £  922.40
Cost of Read          7   £   16.65

NB: counts with prices may be out due to books with no price

So I've bought 4 books this year, spending £14.85. But I've read 8 which cost £16.65 - so that's good because I'm reading more cost-wise than I'm spending. So I've reduced that "Cost of TBR" figure a little bit.

I'm not too bothered by that by the way. It has built up over years. My spending on books is still less than on things like coffee.

You can also see that I read 8 books but only 7 appear in the price section. That's because one (Frankenstein) was a PD title that I got for free.

Actually I've read 9 books this year, but the other one was a re-read and my "read date" column only records the first read. I'm OK with that, particularly when looking at the price. Counting the full price as part of the read when I've read it before wouldn't be quite right.

[pdurrant]

I have:

• Parts: Comma separate text, giving the individual names for omnibus editions
• Subseries: Really handy for Raymond E Feist's works!
• Finished: The date I first finished reading the book. Left blank for books I finished long ago before I started recording info like this.
• Read: Yes/No. Blank for books I haven't read and don't intend to read, but keep around for reference or to avoid wondering what happened to that book.
• Price: Price paid in £. (Roughly converted from dollars for earlier books bought from Baen/Fictionwise.)
• Pages: integer. Number of pages in the ePub version of the book
• Shops: Where I bought the book. Comma separated text, as sometimes I've got a book from more than one place.

[nqk]

My library comprises of mostly translated books, thus, I need Translator and Original Title fields as custom columns.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by jjquin

[. . .]

• Notes: This is a long text field thats a catchall for any other info on the book. I prefer this to using the comments field since it gets replaced when you
  download metadata.

[. . .]

The other advantage of using a separate long text column for a Notes column, is that you can edit it from the book list via F2, I mask the column with an icon that's only shown if the book has a Note.

BR