choosing 8 genres/categories for sd cards

[jeffery]

If you had a huge library and needed to divide it among 8 memory cards, how would you group them so that you could have a rough idea where to go when interested in a particular book or genre of book.

I use calibre and am thinking of exporting my library into 8 parts. but I am at a loss as to how I could group them.

I won't be including romance or erotica type books, nor magazines or periodicals, just books for fun and reference.

I will include science fiction, science fact, fantasy, alternate history, childrens fiction (too many great books in that to ignore even as an adult), modern fiction, classics, textbooks and other educational/informational/reference texts, biblical, etc...

[frahse]

Originally Posted by jeffery

If you had a huge library and needed to divide it among 8 memory cards, how would you group them so that you could have a rough idea where to go when interested in a particular book or genre of book.

I use calibre and am thinking of exporting my library into 8 parts. but I am at a loss as to how I could group them.

I won't be including romance or erotica type books, nor magazines or periodicals, just books for fun and reference.

I will include science fiction, science fact, fantasy, alternate history, childrens fiction (too many great books in that to ignore even as an adult), modern fiction, classics, textbooks and other educational/informational/reference texts, biblical, etc...

Divide them by subject: See how many categories you have. Then group them "somewhat" equally weighted by size into 8 large groups.,

Buy 8 cards that are at least twice as big as the largest group.

(I would not get cards less than 32GB each.)

Have a second set of cards for backups.

I don't do what you are planning, preferring instead to use 1 or 2 TB external drives that I have 2 of for each "large" category. I have 2 so that at any time, 1 can be a backup.

1 copy is always in a "fireproof" place, like a safety deposit box. The other is also protected but less vigorously.

[Dopedangel]

Originally Posted by jeffery

If you had a huge library and needed to divide it among 8 memory cards, how would you group them so that you could have a rough idea where to go when interested in a particular book or genre of book.

I use calibre and am thinking of exporting my library into 8 parts. but I am at a loss as to how I could group them.

I won't be including romance or erotica type books, nor magazines or periodicals, just books for fun and reference.

I will include science fiction, science fact, fantasy, alternate history, childrens fiction (too many great books in that to ignore even as an adult), modern fiction, classics, textbooks and other educational/informational/reference texts, biblical, etc...

I now use calibre companion so folders are not required but I have used hierarchical genres for my books in calibre for a long time. So I get a lot more options than eight. Like Scifi will be further divided into Mystery|Soap Opera etc or Fantasy into Urban|Romance|Epic etc. As it is my library I just nuke all the genre tags that come with the books and set them with what I feel a book or series belongs to what genre.

[svenlind]

Originally Posted by jeffery

If you had a huge library and needed to divide it among 8 memory cards, how would you group them so that you could have a rough idea where to go when interested in a particular book or genre of book.

I use calibre and am thinking of exporting my library into 8 parts. but I am at a loss as to how I could group them.

I won't be including romance or erotica type books, nor magazines or periodicals, just books for fun and reference.

I will include science fiction, science fact, fantasy, alternate history, childrens fiction (too many great books in that to ignore even as an adult), modern fiction, classics, textbooks and other educational/informational/reference texts, biblical, etc...

I do not have any ideas about how to group them, but if I was going to do something like this I would start by making several Calibre libraries.

I have a main library for most of my books and a library for purchases from Delphi Classics and also a library for manuals, users guides and such.

It is very easy to copy between the libraries.

[fjtorres]

It's going to be a function of your tastes and how you spread your money around. What works for others may not work for your collection.

I'm heavy into SF so in my case, my top level categories are SF&F, Non-Fiction, Gutenberg, and General Fiction (everything else). Then each category is organized alphabetically by author/series/title.

As is, SF&F is by far the biggest despite non-fiction including a lot of technical PDFs.

As for backups, I maintain two external drives (one at my mother's house) and a live set on my home server.

[jhowell]

My suggestion is to consider again why you want to take the approach of splitting your library into multiple pieces that live on different memory cards. It seems to me that you are just making more work for yourself.

Are you in an area with limited connectivity? No access to cloud storage services?

I much prefer having the bulk of my library "in the cloud" available for download on demand with a small subset on my devices.

[barryem]

Personally I wouldn't divide by either subject or genre since there will be a lot of books that will fit in several groups and you have to decide now which group to put them in and next year you'll have to remember which group you assigned them to. You could avoid that problem by putting each book in as many groups as it might fit but then, after you read the book, you might decide it belongs somewhere else. Either way you have a management nightmare or a sloppy system.

What I think I'd do is something like put books who's primary author's last name falls between A and E on card 1, F to I on card 2 and so on, of course first counting how many authors last names begin with each letter to determine the proper mix.

Then, a year or two from now you'll always know exactly where each book is. No management problems and no confusion.

I do realize that seems less artsie. But it's a heck of a lot more practical.

It doesn't give you the satisfaction of having done something amazing. It just simply works. What fun is that?

Barry

[dwig]

Originally Posted by jeffery

If you had a huge library ...

You must if you really need to divide it into a separate libraries. Based on my personal Calibre library, a single 64gb card should hold around 30,000-45,000 ebooks. 200 or 256 gb cards would push that to a significantly larger number of ebooks.

...
I will include science fiction, science fact, fantasy, alternate history, childrens fiction (too many great books in that to ignore even as an adult), modern fiction, classics, textbooks and other educational/informational/reference texts, biblical, etc...

It is quite impossible to come up with any senseable division of a library based on genre. Way, way too many books will span multiple genres. Personally, I have many books that span 2 or more of the Science Fiction, Fantasy, Alternate History, YA, Children's, Modern Fiction, and Classics classifications. Add that I have numerous anthologies which contain Science Fact along with SF of one type and/or another.

I can't think of any way to divide a library other they alphabetical, either by primary author or by title. Perhaps you should reconsider the desire, or perceived need, to divide the library and look for storage solutions that will support the library in one piece.

[jeffery]

my aura HD can take microSD cards and it would be nice to divide up the library so that they could be kept with me on the cards.

I've done a similar thing with music. I keep a credit card sized holder that carries up to 8 cards with my music and audio books on them. handy when going on trips.

I'd like to do this with my books.

[Tarana]

Depends on how many you have of your favorite genres. Currently, I could split this way:

Science Fiction
Fantasy
Crime/Thriller
Mystery
Horror
Non-fiction, humor & western
Adventure & Romance
Fiction <---everything that doesn't fit in the other categories)


This is based on what I have. I don't tightly categorize. I don't separate out classics or YA - they just go in their expected categories in a subcategory. I happen to read very little non-genre fiction, so general fiction is pretty much limited to historical fiction (Sharpe's Rifles, The Australians).

Hope this helps. I personally wouldn't go to your extent for trips. Whatever is on my ereader is enough for me. But, I know people who store their cards for tablets at their cabin and they can be used by multiple family members.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by jeffery

my aura HD can take microSD cards and it would be nice to divide up the library so that they could be kept with me on the cards.

I've done a similar thing with music. I keep a credit card sized holder that carries up to 8 cards with my music and audio books on them. handy when going on trips.

I'd like to do this with my books.

This makes some sense with audio files as they are somewhat large, but ebooks are quite compact. Unless you have a massive 20,000+ library, I don't see how you need to split the library across multiple cards.

My somewhat modest 1800 book library (~3.5gb with many books in multiple formats and with Calibre's extra copy of the cover) can easily fit on a modest sized cards several times over. It would be easy to use Calibre to export sets of books by genre and allows multi-genre books (e.g. SF & Classic, SF & Fantasy, Mystery & Classic, ...) to be exported multiple times, once for each tag set, and still put all of the exported "library sets" on the same 32gb card given that Calibre's extra cover would be omitted and only one format included.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by dwig

I can't think of any way to divide a library other they alphabetical, either by primary author or by title.

Dewey Decimal Number and Library of Congress Catalog Number are two immediate options that spring to mind.

Amber

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by dwig

This makes some sense with audio files as they are somewhat large, but ebooks are quite compact.

Wondering how that 2,112.4 MB CBR in my Calibre Library can be described as "compact".

jonathon

[dwig]

Originally Posted by Fiat_Lux

Dewey Decimal Number and Library of Congress Catalog Number are two immediate options that spring to mind.

Amber

These, particularily DDN, are not good ways to divide most reading libraries as personal preference for genre will tend to put most book into closely grouped numbers. A balanced division would be somewhat clumsy. Also, extremely few people would be able to know which card to use to access a particular book without some cross reference (aka card catalog).

[dwig]

Originally Posted by Fiat_Lux

Wondering how that 2,112.4 MB CBR in my Calibre Library can be described as "compact".

jonathon

Yes, CBR and CBZ are bulky and in some ways are more fittingly lumped with videos in a "visual media" class rather than being grouped with text based books. A classic case of items belonging to multiple classes.