Calibre Book Sorting

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The Other Half and I have a huge collection of E-books now.

Over 14 thousand books at last count, many of which I (or we) have never yet read.

November was already crazy busy, what with

– trying to leave comments on 1,427 blogs – which is 47.5 comments each day if I want to finish this commenting challenge

– walking 5km every day on my borrowed treadmill

– chicken chores, house chores, cooking, general life duties

Somehow we have decided that now would be a good time to sort through these books! We’re using a free program called Calibre which allows us to grab metadata from the web for each book to make sure the info is correct, plus you can choose from different covers if the book had several different covers over the years.

Deleting A Book.

How do I make a decision to delete a book I have never once read? This is a tricky one, but the answer is actually quite simple on some occasions and within 5 seconds of loading the book, I say delete – if the other half has not already hit the key. Here are my rules for deleting a book.

– If the cover involves a bare male chest, delete.

– If the cover has a half naked lady, delete.

– If the cover has both a bare male chest and a half naked lady, delete.

My sister reads a lot of erotic fiction and somehow we’ve ended up with all of it in our collection.

So if a book survives the cover inspection?

Is it a book I have heard of? If no, then –

Is it an author I have heard of? If no, then –

A quick read of the book summary can usually tell me everything I need to know if I will like this book. Hey, I’ve known me for 39 years now, so I know what I like.

I like mysteries. I like books with medical examiners, detectives, police officers, investigators of some kind as the central character. I like airplane stories, zombie stories, stories of surviving an apocalypse of some kind, I love everything from Jane Austen to Stephen King via Jodi Picoult plus Tom Clancy. I *love* an autobiography. Overall my tastes are wide and varied and I’ll give most things a try.

Right now I am reading The Skin Collector by Jeffrey Deaver which is another Lincoln Rhyme book – you may remember The Bone Collector which was a movie with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie – there is a series of 12 books with those characters.

Yesterday, I was reading Hard Choices by Hilary Clinton. Last week I revisited Lizzy and co in Pride and Prejudice. Before that I checked in on Tom Ripley. Did you know there were 4 more Ripley books after The Talented Mr Ripley?

Physical Books

A few years ago I did go through and put in all my actual books into Library Thing. You can see them here. However I have probably added 50 or more new physical books, plus some books that I got in e-book version I took to the second hand bookstore and traded for new books.

Over To You –

How many e-books do you have?
How many real books?
Have you switched to an e-book reader and if yes, do you prefer it?

Similar Posts:

About Snoskred, books, e-reader, NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo 2014

14 thoughts on “Calibre Book Sorting

    • I still love my physical books, but I find at night the e-book reader is more convenient. I like to read for an hour before going to sleep – The Other Half likes to go to sleep right away, and this used to be an issue when I was reading physical books. :)

  1. I was just deleting a bunch of books (and I have nowhere near 14k of them on my Kindle). I deleted books that I didn’t like, primarily. I have found that nearly all books that cost $0 (with the exception of classics) are worth what you pay for them. Out they went.

    Since you have such eclectic taste, I recommend you try the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde. I will be shocked if you don’t love them. Start with the Eyre Affair.

  2. I still love my physical books, although I have downsized quite a bit after moving several times over the last 10 years and not having the space for them. Usually, I will either give them away to friends that would like, to a used book store, or to charity. Have a few e-reads but find it hard to sit at the computer and read a book that way…still don’t have a kindle or e-reader.

    • I’d say pick up a cheap android tab let and use it just for book reading. Mine had a bunch of games and other things on there which chewed the battery – I just did a reformat and now I can get days upon days out of a charge, before it was half a day at most. :)

      I just finished The Skin Collector and switched to a recent e-book purchase – The Dead Zone by Stephen King. I’ve had that on my want list for ages as it is one of my all time favourite books, and it was so wonderful to open it up and read it electronically. I still have all his books physically and I don’t think I will ever part with those. Some I have owned since I was a teenager. The Stand is probably the one I am most happy to have electronically because that physical book is *heavy* to read.

  3. I love my real books, but prefer my kindle when on the bus, it’s much lighter and holds so many books. It’s nowhere near full and still has 1555 books, down quite a bit from the 1800+ I started with. I delete them as I finish and if I start a book I don’t like I delete it straight away. They’re all still in my computer files so if I want to I can reload the ones I liked best.
    I gave away many of my real books when I moved here as the flat is too small to have more than a couple of bookshelves, one is built-in behind the bedroom door and one I brought with me after giving away five.
    The thing I like best about the kindle is I can alter the font size; if a book has very small print I will enlarge it for more comfortable reading.

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