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.

[esther_asphodel]

I use the virtual library, and it should work fine for what you want. It keep the files and tags totally seperate.

[ratcreature]

That's good to know. So I should also be able to import the folders where I saved the fanfic en masse so that they are all automatically tagged as fanfic and added to that new virtual library, right?

(The ebooks I have in Calibre so far I've mostly added as I downloaded them, so I've used the invidual adding, not the one where you import a folder with very many.)

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.