Organizing E-Books
Posted on March 9, 2008
5 Comments
I’ve been picking up and reading e-books for many years now. I have all sorts of interesting stuff — some technical, some business and quite a bit of fiction.
My collection is finally getting large enough to cause me to ponder how best to manage it. Just tossing files into a directory isn’t quite sufficient any more. I lose track of books — I found a few today that I forgot I even had (and haven’t read yet, to boot!).
Seems like some sort of tag organization would be the way to go, perhaps? Tags by author, genre, file format (?), publish date and who know what else. The more the merrier though.
One option I’m mulling over is using Evernote or OneNote since both can support tags. I envision one [short] note per book (heck, I could even attach the book itself!) and then tag like crazy. This approach seems like it would work, but it also feels like pounding the square peg into the round hole. Perhaps there’s a better way?
Well wait a second. Since EN and ON both have such strong search functionality, I’m not sure that tags would even be all that necessary. Just dump the pertinent info into the note and let the search do all the work.
What do folks use who have thousands of e-books? Heh, I’ll confess that I did, back in the WinMX era, but I freaked out one day and deleted them all and vowed to keep my nose clean. Amazing what a single email can do… *cough*. But anyways, back then I just tried to organize by directories. It didn’t work well.
What about a spreadsheet? Columns for the key data and then use the built-in search and sort features? Or any similar single table database approach.
Text file?
Web applications? Seems like I’ve written about at least one book tracker but darned if I can recall the name… A wiki? Many of the Zoho apps? Hmm…
Tags: eBook, Evernote, library, onenote, tags
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5 Responses to “Organizing E-Books”
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When I get into the sort-and-classify-my-ebooks mood, I use tellico (a linux program, of course). The advantage of it is that I can keep both ebooks and paper books in an organized manner. The disadvantage is…well, you’ve seen the size of my ebooks collection…and I have over 3000 paper books…I’ve never ever managed to register all my books lol!
I use tag2find http://www.tag2find.com/ and are quite happy with it
I use directory by author and each author is in their section where I’d find them in a brick and mortar store. E-books are small so some authors appear in more than once place (Stephen King appears in Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.)
I’m finding on the apple that the desktop search thingee built into it (Spotlight or quicksilver) works for searching, I start typing and it finds the book title for me regardless of directory.
But I structure my folder named e-book library as I would in a book store. I don’t know that I’d tag books so much really. I haven’t felt a need to yet at least.
All good ideas and thoughts — thanks!
I also have a huge collection of e-Books. What I’ve done is to gather them in a structured hierarchy of directories. I’m using google desktop search for indexing them and search through their content. Both .pdf and .chm can be supported through plugins for the search engine. Works like a charm.