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

[featherwizard]

I use Calibre for basically all my fanfic needs now. Making a second library for fanfic works great. If you use the FanfictionDownloader plugin the site metadata comes with the fic, which helps a lot in sorting.

Calibre has 2 separate library functions - virtual libraries and an actual separate library that uses its own folders. I don't bother with virtual libraries - they still have your regular books and fanfic mixed into the same folders. Instead, I have an actual second library with its own set of folders.

How to make a separate library (in case you haven't done it before):
1) Click on the Library button at the top of Calibre (should be between the Recycle button and Save to Disk).
2) Select Switch/Create Library at the top of the dropdown menu.
3) Pick wherever your fanfic library should be saved.


My setup:

Calibre Portable (the better to copy onto a backup drive)
3 Libraries: Books, News, Fanfic
Plugins: FanfictionDownloader (so Calibre can download stories straight from fic sites)
CountPages (Adds a page number and word count metadata to downloaded stories)
EpubMerge and EpubSplit (to put together converted epubs from webpages or to split up a file with multiple stories)

I also have extra columns to the Fanfic library for Genre (action, mystery, etc) and Fanfic Trope (teamfic, bodyswap, time travel, etc) and Fandom.

Every site has their own way of handling metadata so things don't line up exactly, but it's still a lot better than having to enter all the metadata myself. I've been saving fanfic for decades and this is the easiest it's ever been. I'm not nearly as focused on the organization now since Calibre's search function works pretty well.

Kobo ereaders can work with Calibre metadata iirc, and I know that the Android app FBReader uses Calibre metadata. There's also an app called Calibre Companion that's supposedly useful, but I've never tried it.

The main Calibre forums are http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166 and are a good resource for any Calibre specific questions. MobileReads in general is a pretty helpful place when it comes to getting and managing eBooks.

One problem I have had with Calibre is that it sometimes loses books - reportedly this was a bug that was fixed, and I haven't seen it for quite a while, but I always export a book shortly after I import it so that I have a backup copy if anything goes wrong again.

[ratcreature]

Thanks a lot for all these tips!

I have found that Library button in the meantime and am using that now too, and figured out to use a download plugin to get the meta data, which is also useful for updating WIPs (though the one I downloaded is called FanFicFare). And yeah it is much easier than saving and organizing by hand! I hadn't realized the possibilites for making extra columns though.

Too often in the last years since social bookmarking I've just bookmarked stuff without saving, because I am actually not a big re-reader (whether original or fanfic), but every now and then I do, and then find out that an awesome fic has vanished. And sometimes I loose stuff even though I was sure I had it saved. Just now as I imported fanfic into Calibre I found out I accidentally saved some sort of server error document instead of the fic for one WIP a while ago, and when I checked again the author has not just discontinued but pulled the thing. Even though unfinished the worldbuilding was so awesome, that it had totally been worth reading. I don't understand this impulse to delete stuff. :(

To hear that Calibre is sometimes loosing books is disturbing. How do you even notice a file goes missing?! Unfortunately I can't even use the newest Calibre since the 2.x versions of Calibre won't run with the versions of the necessary system libraries on my Linux distro (still using Ubuntu 12 longterm support version on my laptop rather than the newest Ubuntu 14), so I'm stuck on Calibre 1.45 as the newest I can install manually (the version that comes pre-packaged with my distro is even further behind). Though I'm planning on getting a new laptop soon, and to install a newer Ubuntu, so maybe the newer Calibre will run on that.

[featherwizard]

I noticed because some books I'd just downloaded were not in Calibre, but were in my Kindle history. I think it was version 1.18 that had the problem. I'll try to find the bug report. Regardless, I just changed my workflow to Import -> Tweak metadata -> Export to have backup copies of anything as soon as I get it.

I've never understood the urge to pull fic either. That and a flaky internet connection is why I started saving things. If you have the link, archive.org can really help.

It bemuses me that fanfic authors think they should have more privileges than published authors. Can authors who sell books pull those books from people's shelves on demand? No. But apparently many fanfic authors think they should be able to not only control whether their work is published but also control the behavior of anyone who has copies (all of those authors who pull their fic and ask others to stop reccing or spreading it).

[ratcreature]

Unfortunately it was on AO3 and that excludes robots for stories. Actually when you try it archive.org gives an archived not found error page from AO3, presumably because once the story was gone and the robots followed links to it, and then got the error, which they could archive unlike the story itself. Kind of sad.

I think how people conceptualize fanfic isn't uniform. Like, some see it as a more ephemeral thing than published fic, more like oral conversations rather than print. Which I can kind of see if it's your not!fic chat that used to be in some meme comments, but not quite as much with fic that you uploaded to an archive. And I kind of get not wanting old or unfinished stuff that now embarrasses you or whatever to still be showcased, but otoh every fanfic *reader* understands how much it sucks to loose your favorite fic, so the authors know that yanking their stuff will do that to others, and it's not like people are just going to forget you stopped updating that awesome WIP they liked, and will like you better for vanishing what was there on top of it.

[ratcreature]

Also this CountPages plugin sounds super useful. I will have to get that. I have been frustrated by the file size as indication of length, because it's basically useless with all files under 100kb. I mean, I'm still good at estimating length from kb for basic text files back from my old-school fanfic reading days on mailing list and early archives, but not if the program rounds them all as less thsn 0.1mb.