Calibres library management, what advantage over a detailed file structure?

[bounce]

I use Calibre for converting books and will continue to do so, so what I'm curious about is what advantage does its library management offer over a well maintained file structure of folders? Thanks

[avantman42]

For me, the advantage is that I find it easier to find what I want. I can use series, author, book title or tags to find stuff. A file structure would only be able to have one of those at the top level.

[bounce]

Appreciate the reply. I use xplorer2 which you can use to tag files so I guess I'm not missing too much in the organizing area.

[speakingtohe]

Advantages for me (I have a lot of books many public domain or scanned im my younger days)

All of the metadata functions particularly downloading and the ability to send books to your device with the series info embedded leaving the calibre copy untouched.

The ability to have consistency in authors names, series and tags fairly easily. Nitpicky of me but I hate 6 different ways of listing the same author.

Custom columns allow me to tell easily what I have read and also what I think I want to read the most. Also allows me to flag books for formatting problems which I am not into dealing with immediately.

Very easy to limit the view in the GUI to a subset of books which I often do.

Plugins allow you to bulk check for duplicates, missing covers etc.

Easy to set up for use with multiple devices. I have 5 plus I manage my mothers kindle.

When I got my first reader I found calibre and started using it just for conversions. I was saving to disk, naming books author-title-series or some other convention I made up or came across. After about 500 books I started to get confused and frustrated with the results. I think I was saving each authors books in a folder but books with multiple authors, psuedonyms etc. had me stymied. After 1000 I actually spent some time putting all the books back in calibre and as calibre was a lot more basic at the time I had to rename most of them manually. Now it would be pretty easy.

Calibre is an excellent conversion tool, but it really shines at library and device management.

My advice (unasked for I know) would be to use your current folder system as you are happy with it, but leave the books in calibre at the same time. You will thank yourself one of these days and disk space is cheap.

It is easy to see the books in added order so you usually don't even have to look for the books you are converting.

Helen

[wallcraft]

I used a file structure to manage my ebooks for many years. Only using Calibre from the command line for format conversion. It works well enough, particularly on ebook readers (now rare on mainstream EInk devices, still available in some apps) that explicitly supported folder navigation.

When I switched from an ePub reader to Kindle I started using Calibre as a library, initially only to do bulk converts to MOBI. But I found it could do much more. For a Kindle 3, the collections plugin can completely automate collection management and sending new ebooks to the device is simple with Calibre. There are more things to fuss with in the library, like covers and metadata and accurate series info. They take a while to get right for large libraries, but they are well worth the effort. This does not take long when adding new ebooks, but it is a time sink if you switch to the Calibre library with an existing set of ebooks. This is all optional, but (for example) searching book description metadata, what Calibre calls comments, is very helpful once you have good book descriptions.

I still maintain the ebook file structure separately (as speakingtohe suggests), and sometimes it is the easiest way to check on a particular ebook, but I find I am using it less and less. I still do my initial ebook conversion from the command line, because I have various chapter detection options ready to go if needed. Even this step is probably just as easy from within the library though.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by bounce

... so what I'm curious about is what advantage does its library management offer over a well maintained file structure of folders?

Calibre is a powerful database disguised as a nice GUI. So you can make more complex searches than with manually maintained structure of folders. You can have saved searches and you can do many compex things just by clicking.
Wherever possible Calibre authors have given us possibility to fully harness the power of underlying Python interpreted language, so in many places you can use powerful Regular Expressions instead of simple strings.

When you change author name in Calibre it adjusts its folders and metadata. In file structure you have to do all that change manually.
In calibre you can do complex replacements using Regular Expressions - extremely powerful tool.

Calibre can download metadata and covers automatically from the net. This is wonderful functionality. And you can search using those tags and metadata.
You have "cower flow" browsing, using covers automatically downloaded from the net. It is like browsing covers in a shop or library.

You can select any number of books using various criteria and have Calibre to make "Catalog" of those books. Catalog is a very nice e-book listing authors, titles, series, tags, covers, metadata, all very nicely hyperlinked against each other. You load those books to your e-book reader and then load the catalog, so you have a VERY nice catalog of your books available on your device.

You can use "export to directory" function and have Calibre to create almost any imaginable file and directory structure. You can use "plugboards" to perform many things on exported books.

You can use Calibre built-in web server and browse your entire collection from a netbook, pda or e-book reader with WiFi within your LAN. If you have static IP you can browse your collection from any Internet connection.

Then there are Plugins. Do have a look. Using plugins you can do many things automagically. You press a keyboard shortcut and a browser opens one of many sites that can be used for looking up details about an author or book title or cover or whatever with all the data filled in. There are also unofficial plugins, not available for download through Calibre interface, that can be used for example for removing DRM (strictly for archiving/backup purposes )


There are many other interesting features, but you asked specifically about Library Management.

[bounce]

"My advice (unasked for I know) would be to use your current folder system as you are happy with it, but leave the books in calibre at the same time. You will thank yourself one of these days and disk space is cheap."
_________
Sometimes unsolicted advice is the junk mail of life but I appreciate yours because I was actually asking and you were helpful. My library has many many work related files (300gigs), so having 2 sets is kind of taking up a lot of room, but I may just do that. thanks for the reply

______
"You have "cower flow" browsing, using covers automatically downloaded from the net. It is like browsing covers in a shop or library."

I liked this but tried it and it felt like my library is just way too big for it to work right, maybe if I use a visual filter to filter out work stuff this would be cool.

________
"You can use "export to directory" function and have Calibre to create almost any imaginable file and directory structure. You can use "plugboards" to perform many things on exported books.

When you change author name in Calibre it adjusts its folders and metadata. In file structure you have to do all that change manually."

"You can select any number of books using various criteria and have Calibre to make "Catalog" of those books. Catalog is a very nice e-book listing authors, titles, series, tags, covers, metadata, all very nicely hyperlinked against each other. You load those books to your e-book reader and then load the catalog, so you have a VERY nice catalog of your books available on your device."
________

First sounds very interesting, I'll look into it. Second, I'm trying to think of a time I've needed meta-data of a book when searching books (search title then read). Third, sounds great but I can't really add those catalogs to the Kindle Touch if what I read about it was correct (still a tempting idea just to have collections for when that is supported). Maybe my library is too big to utilize Calibre right, or maybe that's the precise reason I need to use it. Thanks for the responses

[avantman42]

Originally Posted by bounce

I liked this but tried it and it felt like my library is just way too big for it to work right, maybe if I use a visual filter to filter out work stuff this would be cool.

If you do decide to use Calibre, it may be worth having two libraries: one for work stuff, one for personal stuff. You can quickly switch between libraries, but each one has it's own set of tags, series, authors etc.

[kacir]

One more thing ...

Calibre has a very powerful tool for identifying duplicates. It lets you search for duplicate books and has many interesting options, including fuzzy searches, soundex searches ... . In some cases the duplicates it finds (or mis-identifies ;-) ) look like found by a black magic. Plus you can mark similar, but not duplicate books as "not duplicate" so when you search for duplicates again they do not come up. As I said, very powerful tool. You will be surprised how many duplicates you have in your database.