Is there a limit to the number of books Calibre can handle?

[audeojude]

I'm not sure if the pack rat tendency will over my lifetime be a net negative or net positive thing.

However my 10 and 13 year old daughters are starting to have wide ranging interests and hobbies and we are finding many of the reference's and interest books in those fields coming into play. So I am hoping that my multi generational hopes for my collection are coming true. All the massive effort to collect them would be such a waste if after I'm gone my family just donated it to the library to sell at a library sale or turf into a dumpster. I would turn in my grave lol

I'm hoping by the time I pass that one of both the children will feel possessive over the collection. I could see my wife being overwhelmed and just wanting to get rid of most of it.

actually even the digital collection though it takes up no space is going to require someone technologically oriented enough to keep it backed up and accessible through the years moving it from computer to computer. I am virtualizing most of my hosted services such as plex, calibre, audiobookshelf, game servers, etc.. So that the upgrade path hardware wise is easier, BUT, the level of technical ability needed to deal with virtual infrastructure is fairly high. As well as managing fairly massive NAS devices holding data from movies, music, audiobooks, digital books, photos, home movies, and a life time of scanned documentions such as medical records, local state and federal taxes, manuals for products we own and use, books i have been writing, art I have created as well as my family's art that we have scanned and saved.

Passing stuff like this down is either a rich mans game to pay people to manage it or a passing down generation to generation the technical skills to manage it.

Its actually a very interesting topic all in its own. Even as a IT professional of 30+ years I have data sitting that I can no longer access without absolutely massive effort to pull it out of one format and move it to something currently accessible with modern software. Everything from stuff stored on old tapes that are probably no good anymore as they do degrade and in data formats of software I don't even remember the name of that ran on windows 3.11 or windows 95 or mid 90's versions of software in linux.

[Sirtel]

I have no children and no one in my family reads ebooks (or is much of a reader at all), so no doubt my ebook collection will die with me one day. My paper book collection is relatively small and also of no interest to anyone in my family. I'm sure it will be thrown out by my relatives after my death, but hopefully I'm past caring by then.

I've always been the only avid reader in my family. My maternal grandmother did read books, but not so passionately as I do. My parents didn't read books, my sister rarely does and her children and grandchildren almost never do.

[audeojude]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I have no children and no one in my family reads ebooks (or is much of a reader at all), so no doubt my ebook collection will die with me one day. My paper book collection is relatively small and also of no interest to anyone in my family. I'm sure it will be thrown out by my relatives after my death, but hopefully I'm past caring by then.

I've always been the only avid reader in my family. My maternal grandmother did read books, but not so passionately as I do. My parents didn't read books, my sister rarely does and her children and grandchildren almost never do.

Thats sad not to be able to share that passion with anyone in your family...
My mother was a reader and all three of her children, Brother, Sister and I are massive readers. My wife says she is a reader but really, other than for work as a teacher, she probably only reads at most 4 or 5 books a year if that. My children on the other hand though not the readers we are, seem to be trending towards reading a lot. Lol they certainly loved other people reading to them. They are now very fluent readers with a very above average vocabulary. Something I found very helpful in making them read more fluently and faster was subtitled anime. They love watching with me and now on their own. Their preference would be the dubbed versions but so much isn't that they have had hundreds to thousands of hours of watching subtitled shows that force them to read as fast as you can to keep up with the show. They have gone from very unhappy with subtitles to now after a show, asking was that subbed or dubbed as they thought it was in English, but they were reading the subtitles so transparently that they didn't realize what they were doing. It's not something I ever thought about but when they ask, I sometimes give the wrong answer as I will think it was in English also, when I had been reading the subtitles. Weird psychological quirk?

[Sirtel]

As a native Estonian, I've watched foreign-language movies and TV series with subtitles since early childhood. I've also read everything I could get my hands on since I was 3 years old. But my reading speed has never been faster than a bit above average (in Estonian or in English) - I've never been a speed reader who devours a book or two a day. Such speed reading seems to be a genetic gift, as I could hardly have practiced more in my childhood - I read basically every free moment I had.

[audeojude]

Hmm... maybe.... my sister reads about as fast as I do I think. I know my brother is very decent but I don't think he reads as fast as us. I think it would take a much larger sample size to start to really understand it. Wonder if that has been done before?

ok..I did a quick search and one of very first results was a scientific paper specifically on this topic.

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...g_Difficulties

another paper
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10348696/

I saw another one authored earlier by the group that did the 2023 paper in 2021 however it was behind a paywal. It's looking like you are probably correct or that it has a very large effect if not the only one Sirtel.

here is the conclusion of the first paper.

This chapter has demonstrated that several dimensions of reading such as reading
sub-skills, reading brain areas, functional neuroplasticity (of reading), the dyslexic
brain, positive affect and cognition are effected in the brain as neurobiological
8 Genetics of Reading Ability and Its Role in Solving Reading …133
dispensations caused by genetic underpinnings of individuals. Therefore, reading
must be viewed in its totality as a genetic ability that causes inter-individual dif-
ference in learning ability. Such a view is a prerequisite to understanding differing
reading environment needs for dyslexics and healthy learners with differences in
gene expression. A great deal of evidence pointing to neurobiology and genetics of
reading ability suggests the direction of personalized learning that reading class-
rooms must take. Only a holistic approach to reading and switching to personalized
learning methods will help us effectively tackle the inherent learning gaps between
individuals

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by audeojude

I have thought about using Calibre to index physical books but it just seems complicated to me.

No, not really. You can use add from ISBN then just leave the formats empty or add a dummy .paperbook file.

[Sirtel]

Yeah, dyslexia is definitely genetic, and so it stands to reason that the opposite end of the scale - the ability to read much faster than most people - is also at least partly genetic.

[theducks]

I used a Keyboard Wedge scanner. This is simply an alternate keyboard. You put the (cursor) Insert point where you will type.

I used the Add Books: Add from ISBN to add most (some were so old, no barcode OR ISBN)
Calibre is not a 'Lending Librarian' (no checkout). Partly because of Copyright difficulties.

[audeojude]

No I realize you can add physical books to calibre but at a minimum you would need a custom field indicating its a physical book so you could have a virtual library you could display them in and search on. mixing it up with digital would be a bear if all i want to look for was paper. However with reader ware and a scanner it has a scanner add books function that you can scan a batch and then add them and as part of the adding double check they are adding correctly or select ones that didn't work correctly and pull them as part of the process to do over or manually over ride. I did thousands of books. if I had had to do them one at a time I would have just quit.
I'm pretty sure I could save the isbns that been scanned into readerware and import them into calibre.. except there are more than a handful that the isbns are bad or don't exist at all.

calibre is for me way more about reading the metadata of the digital files and importing stuff in. Batch imports in calibre generally has massive amounts of errors in the import process with no ability to validate them before they are added to the database. So you then have to go back and look through everything and edit it to fix errors.

Readerware is designed literally as a library management system with built in checks and balances for non standard add in books and batch adding of physical books. It is a much slower process even with batch scanning books in but it forces you to validate as part of that import process. There are a lot of literal real world libraries that readerware is their full managements system for books and customers/clients. Totally different customer base than calibre with a totally different design philosophy. Functionally there is a huge amount of overlap and because at the base of it they are both databases with the ability to create custom fields and such you could warp either of them toward the functionality of the other for some stuff, but not for all of it.

calibre has device import/export features for books. As well as importing of books and automatically adding them to the underlying filesystem. Readerware has check in and check out functionality. Calibre had built in ereader and editor. Readerware does not. You could add digital works to readearware with links to a specific file on the file system but its at least in the version im using a manual operation. I'm one behind so no telling if they have added more digital functionality in. It would be awesome if you could merge all the features of both into one program but kovid would kill us lol. I'm pretty sure you build in a lot of the functionality into calibre through plugins. Just someone would have to be capable and willing.

Though..... im not sure plugins would work for at all for multi user client/server features. That is backend database design to allow for locking and editing by multiple people simultaneously.

Though you could say the content server at least for read only operations gives full multiuser functionality.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by audeojude

No I realize you can add physical books to calibre but at a minimum you would need a custom field indicating its a physical book so you could have a virtual library you could display them in and search on.

You don't need anything custom.

Included in the zip file is a 0-byte dummy.paperbook file that I add to every physical book in my library.

[audeojude]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

You don't need anything custom.

Included in the zip file is a 0-byte dummy.paperbook file that I add to every physical book in my library.

I know you can do this and it would work perfectly fine. In practice though its a 1 book at the time. Add the book and then manually create all the information of the book. name, author, comment, image etc.. if your lucky it has an isbn you can put in and calibre will add all that. My library that would work for 98 percent of all the fiction and about 85% of the non fiction, then there are the ones that have isbns but wont correctly pull the data with the given isbn. at over 10,000 books one by one.. i would be growing old by the time I got it finished. its horrible enough doing the batches of 20 or 30 books at the time and validating them. They have to be entered into the database perfectly. You can do a computer scan of a the physical books to find one that some of the info is wrong like author or title etc.. at least in calibre you've got filename, title and author fields, crazy amount of tags etc.. even if it imports wrong and isn't sorted correctly a quick search by keywords will pull even most of those books that didn't import totally correct up. I don't worry supper hard about everything importing correctly in calibre and have days were i go back and correct stuff. In calibre the database and the actual books are almost one and the same. You search and see some books that don't look right at all. you open file and see what it actual is and make an edit.

contrast a physical library... you would have to go through the library one by one and do a complete physical inventory book by book. But that doesn't tell you if books are missing and you didn't find them. That would require you to do a second full inventory and look books up in the software and comparing if its on the shelf. Maybe it is and is out of order? digital books are so much easier than physical even when they have messed up metadata. The messed up metadata is still attached to the book file which you can double click on and open up and go.. "hey thats not the right book."

my head hurts.

at the end of the day scale and design philosophy makes calibre hard to use for physical books and reader ware hard to use for digital.

[audeojude]

LoL point for calibre.. your library will never get anything but better over time as you clean up the metadata.

physical library never gets any thing but worse as people use the books and forget to bring them back or re-shelves them in the wrong places.

you left looking at the database going "it says I have this book!! where TF is it!!!! I can't find it!!!!"

calibre it says you have the book and you double click on the entry and it opens the book

[theducks]

Add from ISBN allows all those to bear a Tag of your choice:
<In Paper Library> is what I set. No other special treatment needed. A simple Empty Book
The Tag also allows for there to be other formats (A lot of mine we Baen Book and the had many of these on the CD's or Free Library).

Back to the Limit Question: Yes, a Single one might reach a limit (Single includes VL's), But How many disks can you attach to your PC? AFAIK, the only 'Library' rule is it must fully be on a single drive (nothing stops you from having more than 1 on your 12T drive