Organizing Ebooks

If you're like me, your hard drive contains all sorts of ebooks spread all over the place, with varying degrees of organization. It can be a real challenge to locate a particular text when I want it, simply because the ebooks are sitting in a deep hierarchy of directories. Luckily there is a nice solution to help get this mess organized and make it easy to find a particular ebook when I want it - a program that handles all sorts of digital texts - designed for Linux.

Calibre can not only import your ebooks in a wide variety of formats to a central directory, it allows you to modify information about the text and add tags to make it easy  to categorize your collection.

In this view, you can see a portion of my partially loaded collection, with some tags added. By default the program will bring up the listing of everything in the collection. On the left side of the program are some of the criteria selections that can be used to find texts within the collection. Since the system supports using multiple tags for each book, the system can act like a huge index of your collection, making it easy to find a book no matter how you have it tagged. When you add a book to the collection, the program actually makes a copy of it in the main directory and creates a separate directory structure based on author.

The tagging feature is what this system so useful to me, as I have a large number of texts that could easily be categorized in numerous ways. Most of the books I can catalogued so far are actually PDF format, but the system can also handle many other formats as well, such as Word files or OpenOffice files.

This screenshot shows a tagged selection of the collection, pulling up only those books with one particular tag. By selecting any work shown, I can easily open the book using the View button at the top, or modify the listing further with the Edit Meta Information button.

Though the program also has the capability of converting ebooks to other formats, I'm mostly interested in using it to get my unwieldy collection under control, and for that, it does a great job!