Hi. I've spent the last week organizing my ebook collection using calibre (on my PC/Windows 10) and calibre companion (on my new ipad air 2). I can't believe how great it is! Previously, I used calibre to create ebooks for sale, but I never thought to use it to organize my collection. It's so much better than ibooks or kindle or anything else I tried. I'm in OCD heaven! Everything has worked great for me -- the sync between the two devices is super easy. I was able to find a tutorial online to add my custom "genre" column to CC.
But I'm now trying to fine tune various components, and I have one issue that I can't resolve. I have nearly 2000 ebooks in my collection. I created a hierarchical "genre" custom field in calibre. I sorted all my books into various genres. For example, "Thriller/mystery" or "mf romance.fantasy". It works great.
Here's the issue: Many books I put in multiple categories. For example, one book might have this genre field: "mf romance.contemporary, mf romance.christmas, mf romance.occupation.cop, mf romance.heat.2". That works great in Calibre, because the one book will just show up in all those various 'bins' in the hierarchical genre structure. The problem comes when I send it to CC.
Instead of having that one book appear in multiple bins, what I get in CC is a brand new bin under "Genre" that is this: "mf romance.contemporary, mf romance.christmas, mf romance.occupation.cop, mf romance.heat.2" (all those together). That bin has 1 book in it. And worse, that book then does not appear in the simpler "mf.romance.contemporary" genre bin when I tap on that.
As a result, my CC "Genre" tab is a mess with way too many entries. And it's difficult to find anything because my "contemporaries" are now in like 50 separate bins.
It seems like there is no way to "combine" the items under Genre. So my thought was to go back in Calibre and reorganize everything, this time only having ONE main genre and putting the other identifiers in tags instead. (I chose not to use Tags initially because tags are downloaded with metadata so there are a lot of preset ones that I'm not interested in. But I can work around that.)
This isn't an ideal solution, because some books really are 2 genres -- like Contemporary and Christmas. But barring a fix from CC, it seems like my best option. However, an addition problem is that, once I change a book in Calibre to point to only ONE genre, putting other things in Tags, and then reupload it to CC, the old multiple-genre bin in CC does not vanish! That 'bin' is still showing in the list, only now it's empty. That behavior is inconsistent with Calibre where, once you remove the last item in a Genre identifier, that identifier vanishes too. So, that doesn't help me clean up my list at all. It's super annoying tapping through all the bins trying to figure out where the books actually are.
Anyone have a suggestion for me? Is there a way to a) tell CC to only take the first "genre" in the genre field, and/or b) delete genre list items that are empty?
Thanks in advance!
Jane
But I'm now trying to fine tune various components, and I have one issue that I can't resolve. I have nearly 2000 ebooks in my collection. I created a hierarchical "genre" custom field in calibre. I sorted all my books into various genres. For example, "Thriller/mystery" or "mf romance.fantasy". It works great.
Here's the issue: Many books I put in multiple categories. For example, one book might have this genre field: "mf romance.contemporary, mf romance.christmas, mf romance.occupation.cop, mf romance.heat.2". That works great in Calibre, because the one book will just show up in all those various 'bins' in the hierarchical genre structure. The problem comes when I send it to CC.
Instead of having that one book appear in multiple bins, what I get in CC is a brand new bin under "Genre" that is this: "mf romance.contemporary, mf romance.christmas, mf romance.occupation.cop, mf romance.heat.2" (all those together). That bin has 1 book in it. And worse, that book then does not appear in the simpler "mf.romance.contemporary" genre bin when I tap on that.
As a result, my CC "Genre" tab is a mess with way too many entries. And it's difficult to find anything because my "contemporaries" are now in like 50 separate bins.
It seems like there is no way to "combine" the items under Genre. So my thought was to go back in Calibre and reorganize everything, this time only having ONE main genre and putting the other identifiers in tags instead. (I chose not to use Tags initially because tags are downloaded with metadata so there are a lot of preset ones that I'm not interested in. But I can work around that.)
This isn't an ideal solution, because some books really are 2 genres -- like Contemporary and Christmas. But barring a fix from CC, it seems like my best option. However, an addition problem is that, once I change a book in Calibre to point to only ONE genre, putting other things in Tags, and then reupload it to CC, the old multiple-genre bin in CC does not vanish! That 'bin' is still showing in the list, only now it's empty. That behavior is inconsistent with Calibre where, once you remove the last item in a Genre identifier, that identifier vanishes too. So, that doesn't help me clean up my list at all. It's super annoying tapping through all the bins trying to figure out where the books actually are.
Anyone have a suggestion for me? Is there a way to a) tell CC to only take the first "genre" in the genre field, and/or b) delete genre list items that are empty?
Thanks in advance!
Jane