Howdy self-hosters!
I’ve got a huge pile of eBooks flying around here: poetry, scientific literature, magazines, comics, teaching materials, RPG rule books - it’s a wildly mixed bag. I’m still looking for a self-hosted solution to make it more accessible and get an overview of what I actually have. (Calibre looks promising!)
My question here is not about software, though, but about organisation at the filesystem level: what folder and file name structure have you established for your eBooks? Do you just dump everything into one single folder and let the software do the rest? Do you create sections by genre (“Crime”, “Fantasy”, “Young adult”, like the libraries do it) or application (job-related, hobby-related, cooking, …)? Does it matter at all?
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I don’t organize by folders, I use tagging so a single book can be in multiple categories at the same time.
That sounds reasonable. So you’re essentially throwing everything into one folder and let software do the rest? May I ask what software you’re using, and how it stores your tags? Does it use metadata files or a database?
Forget about folders. Use a good metadata schema.
Naaaah… Bad long terme advice !
Feel free to elaborate. ;) I don’t mind ditching folders. The question is: how do I get at said metadata with the least amount of manual effort, how do I make sure that it’s accurate (sifting through thousands of files is not fun), and how is the metadata stored - particularly so that does not lock me into one application that can only understand its own metadata scheme, and once it dies or I want to switch to a different one, I lose all the work I’ve put into curating my collection. That’s why I was considering folders as an option: they are a software-agnostic way of organising my library.
Same as I do for music. I use Calibre and do a lot of manual organization. My tree looks like this:
King, Stephen/
Christine/ Christine.epub Dark Tower, The - 01 - Gunslinger, The/ Dark Tower, The - 01 - Gunslinger, The.epub Dark Tower, The - 02 - Drawing of the Three, The/ Dark Tower, The - 02 - Drawing of the Three, The.epub Needful Things/ Neefdul Things.epubOf course, most of my books are fiction so I don’t use genres, but now I’m rethinking that lol.
I use calibre Web automated (CWA). I don’t concern myself much with the filesystem level structure, but it’s author/work + metadata for other details.
If you start making the fs the sorting mechanism, you end up with books that don’t belong anywhere or have too ma y categories. I"be been down that road.
Skill issue ! There’s a good balance between the 2. If you only rely on one organization logic you will later regret it ^^.
Putting everything in one folder/directory and let the metadata speak for itself is just calling for a nightmare later one (same goes for folder/directory structure without metadata!).
Putting everything in one folder/directory and let the metadata speak for itself is just calling for a nightmare later one (same goes for folder/directory structure without metadata!).
I am not doing that. I’ll guess here that you aren’t familiar with the way calibre Web and CWA work?
I just use directories but yeah it would be good to have some kind of metadata repo. Calibre is ok if you sit around curating it. Trouble is a lot of my downloads are arxiv PDFs with nuneric filenames and cataloguing them would take some effort. Meh.