Our digital library managed with Caliber (II)

We've already discussed Calibre's basic functionality for achieving acceptable quality in our e-books here at Todo eReaders , but it's not just about having quality books; we also want an efficiently and practically organized library . For this, Calibre is one of the most powerful tools we can currently use, with the undeniable advantages of being cross-platform and free.

Obviously, not everyone is interested in efficiently managing their library, but if you're one of those who get sick when books aren't where they should be or how they should be, metadata , tags, plugins, and filters will become your best friends.

First, there's the metadata , which includes all the file information: title, author, series, publisher, and much more. This metadata allows Calibre and our e-reader (or the program we use to read on our tablet or PC) to handle the book correctly . What do I mean by this? Simply that, by checking this metadata, which might not seem important to us, our e-reader places the book in the correct folder and in the order we specify, which helps us when choosing our reading material.

For example, if our reader is capable of managing collections correctly , it will be able to do so when we indicate in the metadata which collection the book belongs to and its position within that collection. But these metadata are useful even when your reader doesn't manage collections or ignores most of the provided metadata.

We must keep in mind that, apart from the metadata that Calibre collects by default, we also have the possibility of customizing them by adding extra information according to our needs.

It's true that entering metadata is a minor inconvenience and a bit of extra work when adding our books, but in the long run, it will make things much easier. Calibre has thought of everything, and for those times when we don't feel like it, they've introduced the Download Metadata button . This connects to various databases (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, FictionDB, etc.) and fills in the main fields so we only have to make minor adjustments.

The same applies to tags , which help us organize our reading. Some e-readers, such as the Sony PRS-505, in addition to classifying books according to the collections we've set up, read the tags we've assigned (which are simply metadata) and group the books according to those genres. Therefore, a good selection of tags will be invaluable for keeping our library organized and will make reading easier.

The most common approach is to classify books by genre : historical fiction, crime fiction, fantasy, essays, drama, etc. This makes it easier to choose what to read.

So far, we've discussed the information we add to each book we read so that Calibre and our reader can handle them in the most appropriate and user-friendly way. However, when we talk about plugins and filters, we're referring to the tools Calibre provides to improve the management of and our access to the books in our library.

There are numerous plugins that we can add to Calibre to modify its behavior and adapt it to the way we want to manage our library. These are some of the elements that make Calibre such a powerful and versatile program . Besides the program's inherent functionalities, plugins allow us to add new and diverse options: searching for duplicates, creating reading lists, extracting ISBNs, and much more. I encourage you to explore and find the ones that interest you most, so you can configure Calibre to your liking. Another time, I'll talk about my favorites in more detail.

Let's take a quick look at the filters and searches. Searching is the easiest way to set up a quick filter, with the advantage that it allows us to save them so that, in the future, we don't have to search again for that set of books we wanted to filter; we can have it at hand in just a couple of clicks.

However, if we've taken the time to define the metadata in detail , the filters are more likely to return the desired result. For example:

not authors: »= Isaac Asimov» and not series: »= Jack Ryan» and tags: »= Cop» and not tags: »= Crime novel» and not tags: »= Mystery»

This will ensure that our library selects all crime fiction books that are not by Asimov or from the "Jack Ryan" series, and that, furthermore, of those labeled "Crime," it excludes those also labeled "Thriller" and "Noir." This means that, as you can see, from a well-organized library of 5469 books, it has selected only 240.

Later we will delve more into some of these aspects but, for now, I can only encourage you to try, tinker and gradually discover everything that Caliber can do to manage your library.

More information – Our digital library managed with Calibre (I)