Manage your e-book collection

I am currently playing with this e-book manager called calibre. It's freeware, available for Windows, OS X and Linux.

I don't know if it has been posted here already - I couldn't find any posts on it. From what I have seen so far it seems like a cool program with many nice features that comes in handy if you have a large collection of e-books.

The only drawback I've found so far is that it renames the e-book files when you're building your library: [title] - [author].ext (where "ext" is the original extension: pdf, chm etc), so I haven't decided yet if I should start using it. There's no option to alter the way it stores your collection One solution (if you want to keep the filenames) would be to keep two separate identical sets of books. The directory structure is

Code:

Library
 - Author
    - Title
       - [title] - [author].ext
       - cover.jpg <-- separate cover image is optional

the default location of the library is in Documents and settings\[username]\Calibre library\ but this can be changed in the settings.

Give it a try if it sounds interesting

 

Thank you, there are not much free alternative at this software category.

 

Check out Mendeley:
http://www.mendeley.com/

Mendeley is a free app for Win/Linux/Mac that not only organizes your PDF's
but also interfaces with research sites for easy citations and much much more.

I have around 5 gigs of PDF's and they are tagged and organized by Mendeley.

There are a few occasions where Mendeley doesn't recognize the PDF in my folders because it uses services like Google Scholar to identify them but it wasn't much of a problem becuase you can add your own tags and PDF info as well. Viewing PDF's in Mendeley is nice as well. Check it out and let me know what you think.

 

Thanks for the suggestion!
I will have a look at it.

The main advantage with calibre is that it can download metadata for an added book automatically (publisher, synopsis, etc), and for me the main disadvantage is the way it rename the actual files (pdfs, chms etc). Afaik there's no way to prevent calibre from doing that, and kinda becomes the deal breaker for me.

When I read about Mendeley it reminded me a bit of Evernote (haven't tried it, but they sound similar?).

If someone knows of other alternatives in terms of ebook management, please let me know. TIA

regards
/T