After broadly explaining the virtues of digital organization, let’s discuss the practical example of eBooks. I’ve moved from allowing a single platform (e.g. Amazon Kindle) to dictate how I organize my eBooks to making sure I own and manage the system myself. You should too.
Making this switch wasn’t trivial, and for many people it may not be clear why a platform’s existing solution isn’t sufficient. Again, the key words are organization and ownership. I want a system I can manage, that lets me find what I’m looking for quickly, and I want to own my eBooks in a way that lets me treat them like physical books.
In my experience, Kindle and its nominal competitors Kobo and Nook are all woefully unprepared to handle anything more complicated than read status. The default categories on my Kobo are “Unread”, “In Progress”, and “Completed”. In general, all the sorting you get within any view is based on the date it was added to your library, or alphabetical by either title or author.
This is a logical choice for day-to-day use of a reading device or app: you want to hop in to see whatever you’ve read or added recently, and that’s enough. However, this moves you very far away from experiencing your list of books as a library, where genre, format, and other random bits of data my matter. If you have books from multiple sources1In my case, I switched from Kindle to Kobo, but wanted to bring my Kindle books along. You can also find eBooks for older books past their copyright date or, less commonly, eBooks on platforms other than the three mentioned above. it’s nice to have a common repository for them. While you could reformat some of those eBooks and get them onto your reading device of choice, you’re still stuck in the same situation with minimal choices for organization.
Far be it from me to even imply that it’s technically possible to get an eBook off your locked down account with Amazon and into some third-party tool. But let’s assume that may be true. Or, again, maybe you get eBooks from other sources. In that case you should look closely at the wonderful and terrible piece of software that is Calibre.2Is it pronounced “Caliber”, or “Cuh-Libre”? Who knows? It’s old and janky, but it does what it’s meant to do: keep track of your eBooks as a proper library with sorting and filtering options for any piece of data you wish to manage.
There is a lot that I am not using right now in Calibre. I don’t currently manage tags or genres, and I haven’t gotten in the habit of rating books.3I like reviewing things. I’m very bad at rating them. Yet, knowing that all these books are in a single source, and that I own that location4Did you know that if deactivate your Kindle, you can no longer download any of your Kindle books from Amazon? is refreshing.
One neat feature is its ability to convert files either individually or en masse between common reading formats. Whether that’s ePub — the standard outside of Kindle — the Kindle-compatible MOBI format, PDF, even RTF or TXT, you have so many options for accessing and sharing these books that you own5I don’t say this ironically; just like you can share your physical books, you should be able to do the same with your digital books. with others.
Now, here’s the tradeoff: Calibre is a tool that is truly a digital analog to a library. Just like a library doesn’t organize itself, neither does your digital catalog of books. Different books will come with metadata in differing formats. Find an approach that you can maintain. For me, that’s adding any new books that I’ve accrued to Calibre once every month, updating them in the appropriate manner,6For example, making sure the “Sorting” title is correct. I want “The African Trilogy” sorted as “African Trilogy, The”. then leaving it be until I need to open it up again.
Some day I aspire to combine Calibre with some documentation of the physical books I own, but that’s a project for when I have the time and space to go through all those books. For now, I enjoy using Calibre as my source of truth, and I encourage you to do the same. Take care of the books you’ve purchased, let them be something you own and can share and pass on.
- 1In my case, I switched from Kindle to Kobo, but wanted to bring my Kindle books along. You can also find eBooks for older books past their copyright date or, less commonly, eBooks on platforms other than the three mentioned above.
- 2Is it pronounced “Caliber”, or “Cuh-Libre”? Who knows?
- 3I like reviewing things. I’m very bad at rating them.
- 4Did you know that if deactivate your Kindle, you can no longer download any of your Kindle books from Amazon?
- 5I don’t say this ironically; just like you can share your physical books, you should be able to do the same with your digital books.
- 6For example, making sure the “Sorting” title is correct. I want “The African Trilogy” sorted as “African Trilogy, The”.