organizing ebooks and fanfic

[ratcreature]

I currently use Calibre to organize my ebooks, and I wonder if it would work out to use it to backup and keep track of the fanfic I downloaded on my tablet as well.

I do not want both mixed up, because the fanfic would totally drown out the books by an order of magnitude, and also the tags I want to use for both are very different. I've seen an option in Calibre to create virtual "libraries", but I wonder whether that is really good for keeping things separate. Has anyone experience with using Calibre for both? Or a better system?

I'm a bit wary to import hundreds of stories into my Calibre Library only to find out it would be a mess I'd have to clean up manually...

Comments

[bluemeridian]

I use Calibre to upload and download fic to my Kindle and, in those terms at least, it works quite well. I haven't tried the virtual library option, although now I'm curious about it - the Kindle has a non-existent tagging and almost no filing system, all of which is rather weird for an ostensible eReader.

[ratcreature]

It's like they don't expect people to have many books. Which is bizarre, because people with a lot of books are much more likely to own an ereader. (Though I think I read some statistic somewhere that the majority of people own less than fifty books, while less than ten percent own more than 250, which I find astonishing.) I mean if you only had a hundred books obviously you don't need much organization, so maybe they think their usual customers don't have more than a shelf full rather than thousands.

My android app has tagging, but I don't really use that, because that would mean tagging in yet another interface on top of my pinboard bookmarks, so right now I find things with search, which is not great. And the automatic backup stuff is only a feature in the paid version of the reader, which I've been too cheap and miserly to get, so I make backups by hand every now and then, but synchronizing via Calibre might be easie, I hope.

And with Calibre you can at least mass edit tags, which would make having some sort oof organization eventually easier. What I would really like is for Calibre to recognize AO3 tags or something, like it does with book tags from databases. Of course then I would end up with plenty of tags I don't use, but that would be better than not having any automatically.

[bluemeridian]

Man, I still have hundreds in storage despite the dust mite purge! A good portion of which should be donated so they're doing someone some good, but that would require digging them out...

For the most part I've just been keeping things on my Kindle temporarily until I've read them, so there's comparatively little to remember, although I still end up opening fics just to figure out what's what. Kindle basically offers you the cover, period, and not even a title and author, which I find bizarre. I mean, it's full color with back light and came at a great price, but wtf? How do you pare down the library interface of a thing marketed as an ~ereader~ that much and think it's a good idea?

Even with the temporary thing, though, the Calibre side of things is growing, so I should probably add tags. I know I tried it before and they worked well enough in the computer side of things, if that helps.

[ratcreature]

The kindle app for android at least offers you an alternative list view where you get the cover, title and author displayed for sorting. So a real Kindle doesn't even have that?! And you can do something called "collections" to make subsets, but I don't think they quite work like tags.

[bettina]

I have a Kindle Paperwhite* and it does show you the title and author of the book or fanfiction, if you for instance download the file (mobie) from AO3. As far as fanfiction goes, I guess it's a metadata thing. If the fanfic for some reason doesn't have that, it wouldn't show it to you on the Kindle. But you can always add it with Calibre.

You can create collection on the Kindle. I just use general collections, like books read and unread, fandom, etc. But other people have a lot more categories, like author collections or series collections, etc.


*Actually I have several Kindles, an old one, Paperwhite and a Fire and all of them always show title and author.

[ratcreature]

So does a Kindle recognize the meta formats Calibre uses (like say its tag fields)? Or the AO3's tag fields? I would really love a way not to have to categorize the same things again and again across devices.

[bettina]

Kindle doesn't do tags. All it ever shows you is title and author on the screen. Depending on if you've chosen list view or cover view, it also shows you the cover of the book (or fanfiction if that one has a cover).

The closest thing to tags are collections. You can have a book in more than one collection, though. And the Kindle synchronizes your collections across all your Kindle devices.