12 ms·

Maybe I'm old school, but I don't understand the concept of a "library". I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories, and amazingly power

by haspok 8y ago

Maybe I'm old school, but I don't understand the concept of a "library". I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories, and amazingly powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). Why would an ebook reader even try to do the navigation for me? It should display an ebook, and I'll take care of the rest. If it's showing me the file system, it's redundant. If it's showing me the "library" according to its own logic, then it breaks the consistency. And it makes my life so much harder (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). I hate Calibre for the exact same reason.

bayindirh 8y ago
I can understand you. However, libraries are hard to understand until managing your collection creates a lot of overhead. A good library can find something from a sizeable collection in a second or two. Calibre is perfectly capable in this regard. Also metadata is something really powerful. However, you need a lot of it (in this case books) to reap its benefits. Calibre doesn't obfuscate / embed the book files. They copy under a folder with Author's name. You can pretty easily access the original file pretty quickly. Maybe you can configure Calibre to use your directory structure without modifying it.
- pmontra 8y ago
  I can't say I have a large collection of ebooks (just checked: 54) but I won't use a file manager to handle it. I use Calibre because it's much easier to convert between formats, edit metadata, edit the ebook, add a cover page. Basically that's it and Calibre has many more features that I don't use (the reader among the others). I'm sure there are separate programs that do all I use Calibre for, but it's much easier in this way. BTW, I don't understand the use case of reading ebooks on a desktop or laptop instead of on a phone or tablet (or eink reader.) Is this really common? I can imagine reading some technical ebook at my computer while working at my desk, but not fiction or anything else.
  - bayindirh 8y ago
    > BTW, I don't understand the use case of reading ebooks on a desktop or laptop instead of on a phone or tablet (or eink reader). Unfortunately, not everyone has all the screens, and not all phone screens are big enough to read novels and such. I'd rather read a book in my bed on my laptop screen and take notes quickly rather than an older phone and try to write on its keyboard. Also, e-ink readers' screen refresh rate prevents taking extensive notes on the books. You can underline just fine, but longer notes are a bit hard. Last but not the least, comic books in CBZ/CBR format really begs for a quality color display, since colored comics is half the fun in the comics. :D
PurpleRamen 8y ago
> I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories Your library. > powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical views and don't integrate well with filetypes. Namely, they usually don't extract data from files, like metadata, covers or previews. Though, filemanagers have started to do that to some degree. But they still lack the "alternate view" on your library. Those Walled Garden-Apps that work with librarys are more like a relational database, offering flexible selections and content-optimized views that filemanagers are normally lacking. The major difference is really just if you want a static and inflexible organization, or something dynamic. And usually with heterogeneous datas, the dynamic approach is better for consuming beacuse it allows you to break through the hierachy. > (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). > I hate Calibre for the exact same reason. Just select your books and export them. Calibre can export to a device, but also just a local directory. Calibre in that regard is one of the better gardens. Very flexible and powerful. Just the UI sucks.
- chme 8y ago
  >> I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories > Your library. Yes, its already there and quite organized in directories. Now ebook readers came along and pressed those hierarchical data flat, with long waiting times, because it needs to index first. >> powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). > Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical views and don't integrate well with filetypes. Namely, they usually don't extract data from files, like metadata, covers or previews. Though, filemanagers have started to do that to some degree. grep and find works quite well for most work loads and are fast, why not enhance (or fork) them to support ebook formats? Instead ebook readers came along and reinvented filesystems, because users cannot be trusted to organize their book collection themselves. > But they still lack the "alternate view" on your library. Those Walled Garden-Apps that work with librarys are more like a relational database, offering flexible selections and content-optimized views that filemanagers are normally lacking. And at the same time omit very useful information that normal file managers show. (File creation/write/access time, size, full file name, etc.) > The major difference is really just if you want a static and inflexible organization, or something dynamic. And usually with heterogeneous datas, the dynamic approach is better for consuming beacuse it allows you to break through the hierachy. As I said, with long indexing times. I had ~50000 books on a ebook reader once and that broke it. Just because there are files stored, that should not slow down the system or even make it completely unusable. Instead they should just access the filesystem directly, then those problems don't even arise. >> (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). > I hate Calibre for the exact same reason. > Just select your books and export them. Calibre can export to a device, but also just a local directory. Calibre in that regard is one of the better gardens. Very flexible and powerful. Just the UI sucks. Calibre is a pretty big application and they are not an ebook reader primarily. Their main feature is the library. And they spend many man years of development to improve that and it does work quite well. But very few ebook applications and handheld readers have the same resources to implement a similarly powerful library functionality. Instead they have half backed solutions that make finding and organizing the library more difficult then if they would have simply used a standard file manager and grep/find/... IMO an application that lets you just open epubs and other ebook formats and render them correctly just like so many pdf viewer do, without any half assed library functionality duck taped on to it, is highly sought after.
anc84 8y ago
How would you handle books with multiple authors? Symlinks would not be an option as they are way too nerdy for common users.
HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
Metadata. The same way you might group music files per artist or per album or per genre or in playlists but the filesystem only allows for 1 type of grouping without duplicating the files or some weird shortcut kind of thing. You can group per author or per genre of ebooks or whatever. Granted it's less useful compared to music but it does make sense and I prefer media to be displayed as a library myself.
- FabHK 8y ago
  Exactly. I am a big fan of Calibre for books, iTunes for music (granted, iTunes is mediocre monolithic software), and generally software (adapted to the specific media type) that manages the library and metadata, so I don't have to touch the filesystem. How are you going to play music you've added in the last three years, but not heard for a month, from the "Latin" genre, with two or more stars, using only the file system? With an iTunes smart playlist, it's trivial. In Calibre it's trivial to sort the books by Title, Author, or (my self-defined and filled) Genre column. How would you even start to manage photos in the file system? By name?
  - HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
    >How would you even start to manage photos in the file system? By name? Photos is actually an exception for me due to the personal nature of them. I group them in directories based on date ranges and events. I don't want to upload them to some webapp or cloud storage for privacy reasons.
  - enriquto 8y ago
    > In Calibre it's trivial to sort the books by Title, Author, or (my self-defined and filled) Genre column. honest question: why would you ever like to do that? I find calibre unusable because of these things. I just have one epub file and I want to read it. However, the damn program forces me to "initialize my library" and other bullshit.
  - tbe 8y ago
    > How are you going to play music you've added in the last three years, but not heard for a month, from the "Latin" genre, with two or more stars, using only the file system? BeOS actually solved this 20 years ago with its file system BFS. Haiku is an open source reimplementation of BeOS that recently progressed from (high quality) alpha releases to its first beta.
wp381640 8y ago
books are more than just files and contain a lot of additional data. how do you filter by publisher and then sort books by publish date in mc? I'm sure there's a "dropbox is just rsync" type answer, but this is for regular users
- IanCal 8y ago
  Honest question, is this a common use case for regular users? To get a book by publisher and date? I have no idea who published most of my books, let alone the date.
  - weehobbes 8y ago
    I don't think this is a common case for "regular users" but in my library of coding books, I find both very useful. For example, O'Reilly has a very different style/quality compared to Packt. And it's helpful to know when the book was published to know it's recency and whether it may be outdated.
    - IanCal 8y ago
      Is that something you want to know after selecting a book, or for finding one?
Vaskivo 8y ago
Absolutely. I hate library/playlist oriented stuff. I have everything organized in folders and files, with good filenames. Since I have in my collection a lot of unkown, old or rare media, most programs are not able to find out what it it or even tag them wrong! I still use foobar. On my kodi setup, I navigate almost everything via file browser. I spent a lot of time finding a decent folder oriented audio player for android.
GuB-42 8y ago
Call it a database if you wish. In fact it is probably sqlite running behind the scenes. It is a relational model, a different way of organizing things compared to the hierarchical model of the filesystem. There is probably enough literature about that to fill your ebook library ;) I suppose that the "library" model is what most people prefer since most modern media apps use that in some form or another. Or maybe it is because of Steve Jobs reality distortion field ( https://oleb.net/blog/2012/06/steve-jobs-on-the-file-system/ https://oleb.net/blog/2012/06/steve-jobs-on-the-file-system/ ). Still, I hate all these apps attempting to hide the filesystem from me.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
Not to mention the directory is easy to scan, rsync, backup & so on without having to worry about breaking consistency in some database. A filesystem is perfectly fine, if used correctly, for the average ebook reader use-case. If you have 10 million ebooks and need to run 100 complex searches per second then you need an RDBMS.
kirion25 8y ago
With a file manager, you'll probably only be able to find a book from its author, and title. If you have a small collection, this is fine. When your collection grows though, issues start to show up. Being able to sort, and find a book based on other information becomes much more useful: date of publication, genre, custom tags, etc... While you could always integrate these in your filename/directory structure, with the help of symlinks, it's very cumbersome to manage and use.
- ohithereyou 8y ago
  >it's very cumbersome to manage and use Maybe if you just dump a large number of unsorted files in place and do nothing with them. With a decent file manager and an hour or so, you can add many books and symlink them to the metadata directory with no issue.
  - GrinningFool 8y ago
    > aybe if you just dump a large number of unsorted files in place and do nothing with them. With a decent file manager and an hour or so, you can add many books and symlink them to the metadata directory with no issue. Alternatively you can use a program's built-in library with no time cost to yourself...
  - kirion25 8y ago
    > With a decent file manager and an hour or so An hour? You've made my case. It takes at most a couple of minutes for importing hundreds of books in Calibre. Metadata retrieval is automatic (from the file itself and/or online). Everything happens in a few clicks.
- kps 8y ago
  > Being able to sort, and find a book based on other information becomes much more useful: date of publication, genre, custom tags, etc... Yes, and I want to be able to do that with all my books, not just the ones that the ebook reader can handle.
nickjj 8y ago
You're not alone. I have about 75 ebooks organized by a few directories depending on what type of book it is. I just move around my file system like normal and then open them in light weight readers like Zathura. Browsing is the same as any other directory, the files open immediately, it works offline and it's easy to sync between devices. I apply this same strategy to MP3s too.
jdietrich 8y ago
I don't particularly like Calibre's library implementation, but a generic file manager just isn't a very good way of managing documents. Metadata like bookmarks, references, excerpts and annotations are a really important part of an effective reading experience.
- enriquto 8y ago
  The reading experience starts when you open the book with the reader program. If you want a library, use a library program. Those should be completely orthogonal concerns.
hombre_fatal 8y ago
Incredible. Top HN comment is wondering why anyone uses UI software to manage a library instead of the filesystem. I'm not even sure where to start. But that you can't even envision a few reasons why someone would use something is very limiting. At least on an empathy level but probably on a professional product-design level as well. I can certainly appreciate your point when the software's backing database is unusable and human-unfriendly, and this is supposedly the reason why you hate Calibre, but the folder that Calibre stores my 12k books in and it's nicely organized. The other day I even Airdropped it to my friend where he imported it into macOS' Books.app.
- skillachie 8y ago
  Find it incredible as well. The average user finds Calibre to be too complex. With that said, I would be happy if you could take BookFusion for a spin and let me know if you have any feedback. Our users have libraries with over 30,000 eBooks and as a result we will have no issues with your collection. BookFusion allows you to easily upload, organize and read all your eBooks regardless of format on iOS, Android and Web enabled devices. More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library BookFusion also has a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your eBook collection. https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre PS: I am the founder of BookFusion and would be happy to hear any feedback that you might have
  - dustinblake 8y ago
    I went to check out BookFusion, which at first glance, seems like an interesting idea. Unfortunately, I could not find anywhere on your site that indicated the cost associated with an individual user account. (Free to signup, of course, but how long is that trial, or what limits will I face? and then how much money will this subscription service cost me?) End-users have serious account fatigue, and I seriously debated whether I should bother signing up for the site and create yet another login to a web app I might or might not want to use. Please, just be up front about pricing, free trials, limitations, requirements, etc. If you have a 7-day free trial and I'm currently busy, I won't have time to kick the wheels before I'd need to pay. If you instead limit the number of books or the storage space I can use, just tell me so I can decide if it's worth bothering to test it out. As far as I can tell, you might or might not have a limit for a new/free user, but no idea what that is. Finally, I see in the settings that you offer an early bird subscriber deal, at $4.99/mo (vs $9.99/mo) and $39.99/yr (vs $60/yr), for unlimited storage. I think you might have better luck with a tiered setup. Someone with a lot of ebooks might find $40/year to be a great deal, but most users likely don't have that large of a collection - they're looking for more of an ease of use and convenience factor. Take advantage of that, and then allow them to move up and give you more money once their collection grows. $10/year = 4GB storage or 2000 ebooks? (count # of books, and not storage, to make it seem less technical?) $20/year = 8GB storage or 4000 ebooks? $40/year = 20GB storage or __? $60/year = unlimited or $10/$30/$60 year, with 2000/10,000/unlimited? and only allow monthly payment as an option for the $30/$60 levels? at $10/year, it would be an impulse buy for most readers, and then you not only have a paying relationship with them right away, you have a whole year to demonstrate the ease of use and utility of the product.
jxdxbx 8y ago
I remember having this argument with people who couldn't understand why I preferred using iTunes (Swinsian, these days) to organize a collection of thousands of albums, with automatic sorting based on metadata. File systems just don't expose what is relevant in a music context and re-sorting huge batches of music based on changed metadata is too difficult.
boomlinde 8y ago
> I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories, and amazingly powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). I think that the problem is that a file system typically represents a single type of hierarchy. Maybe you have your books in the file system arranged by topic->author->book, but other arrangements like topic->year->book, book->year (for editions) or author->book->author->book->... (for citations) can be useful. Maybe you want to list books that relate to a set of multiple topics written by either of two specific authors. In Unix you can solve this by using symbolic links, which may become tedious to maintain (but less so by using automated tools). Generally, you can sort of address it by including meta information in the file names (like the warez scene does), but that is tedious when you have a lot of potentially relevant meta information. The benefits of throwing all the information into a relational database and querying into that instead of a regular PC file system is that you can define the desired hierarchy and what meta-data is important on the fly and effectively create a file system (in the pre-computer sense) and perform a search at the same time. I haven't looked closely enough at this software to say that its "library" actually addresses these concerns, but for large libraries there are obvious benefits to 1) Using multiple hierarchies or faceted classification for information query 2) defining such hierarchies or sets of classifying categories on the fly. These aren't new solutions, and fundamentally the organization of information in a library is not a new problem, so I wouldn't call your position old school.
- swebs 8y ago
  A faceted classification system sounds pretty unnecessary in this context. I'd like it if I were looking for a new book to buy, but I really can't see ever using it on my existing library. At that point I already know the specific book I want to read and just want to find it.
  - boomlinde 8y ago
    > A faceted classification system sounds pretty unnecessary in this context. If by "this context" you mean exactly the use case you describe, then yes. If you are always looking for books you already know of and can name, there is little point in further classification. Another potential use case is that I have tens of thousands of books and I am looking for English-language fictional books about scientists and monsters by authors born in the 18th century. Again, I haven't looked closely at the app and chances are that it doesn't really help in that use case either, but I meant to explain the concept of a "library" to someone who did not understand it, and why a simple hierarchical file system may be an insufficient abstraction for library classification in general.
totony 8y ago
you might be interested in mupdf or mupdf-based viewers, it supports pdf and epub (but not mobi) and it very lightweight
virtualadmin 8y ago
You're not the only one. A lot of applications developed today do the same thing and it also frustrates me. I also dislike when a piece of software will outright modify/change/move the current directory structure to suit its own logic.
enriquto 8y ago
Yes, I hate programs that replicate my filesystem, slowly and badly! Please, give me an ebook reader that opens a single file and that's it. It cannot be so hard!
deleted 8y ago
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bloopernova 8y ago
You and I almost certainly aren't the intended users of such a feature. My mother in law knows that, conceptually and practically, when she taps the Kindle icon on her tablet she will open her collection of books. Within that full-screen app, she is intending to do one of several things: find a book to read, then read that book. She doesn't really like the filesystem on her imac. She much prefers that all the files associated with a given activity are readily available when she is doing that particular activity. Gallery -> Photos. Library -> Kindle. TV Shows -> Netflix. She doesn't really think about how each of those search and organization functions act differently between apps. We all do the same, to a great or lesser degree. Orgzly has my org-mode files right there. Microsoft RDP client beta has a group of all the RDP sessions I use right there. Outlook has all emails and calendar items. I absolutely suffer when my filesystem is chaotic, which it often is: but then again so is my job, doing systems admin, devops, code builds, puppet/ansible/chef stuff, etc etc. Being able to quickly find things in a freeform manner is very, very useful. (I use 'fzf' and zsh for commands and directories, and 'mdfind' (on mac) for its faster-than-grep file search)
criddell 8y ago
A file system isn't a good fit for a library of books IMHO, at least not as a view. What directory would I put my copy of Stephen King's It in? My Stephen King folder? My horror folder? 1986? Fiction? The underlying file system view really doesn't matter. It's the abstraction on top of that where all the interesting things happen.
nebulous1 8y ago
I think you're both right and wrong here. You're right that this often causes problems. Anybody who has tried to salvage an iTunes library can attest to that. However you're downplaying the positives to having a metadata database, and you're also ignoring the teeming masses who don't care about the layout of the file system as long as it's displayed in the app.
kingaillas 8y ago
I was like you, until my library grew to a certain size and I needed/wanted to organize it and display it better. Calibre lets me tag books, so I can pull them up by arbitrary categories which I can't EASILY pull off only using filesystem features. With Calibre I split my ebooks into two libraries (one for computer books, one for not computer books) and tag to my hearts content and requirements. I keep it simple to 2-3 tags for each book so I can later find my computer books that are "python, security" or my "reading challenge, crime/mystery, unread" books without dealing with extended attributes and the find command. Calibre also travels between linux, macos, and windows and so do the tags; unlike the filesystem where I'd get the joy of retagging all this stuff if I am on a different system (say, copy of my stuff on Windows means I have to retag with NTFS alternate data streams). Same thing with pdf's - I used to keep a bunch of docs in my own subdir, until it got to be 1000+ pdf's and I discovered Mendeley Desktop and its tagging feature. Now I can find stuff much faster. Same thing with my music collection, same thing my with photos. Your needs may be minimal enough and your computer skills sufficient enough so that you get by with the filesystem, but I would venture to say the average user is much better off with an app/library method of organization. e.g., I can't fathom organizing a non-trivial photo collection via the filesystem only. I know I'm better off with the app/library method of organizing data, something I came to realize after my initial resistance.
- skillachie 8y ago
  I would even venture to say the average user also finds Calibre complex. Would you mind taking BookFusion for a spin? We have uses with over 30,000 eBooks in their libraries and will be able to support your collection without issues. BookFusion allows you to easily upload, read and organize(tags and categories) your eBooks. Your entire Calibre eBook collection will be available across all your devices while keeping your bookmarks, comments, highlights and reading progress synced. More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library We even have a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your entire collection or only eBooks you are interested in. https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre PS: I am the founder of BookFusion
  - 8y ago
Notorious_BLT 8y ago
Someone call up every real-world library and let them know their catalogs are worthless, they should just be sorting their books onto shelves and letting patrons search them by hand.
- FabHK 8y ago
  > search them by hand No, come on, be fair, let's replicate the capabilities of the file system: You can sort them both by ISBN and by size.
burtonator 8y ago
The app I'm working on does the same thing: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It's very similar to Bookworm in this regard. The main reason we do it is repository integrity. We can replicate it easily with the cloud and enable real time collaboration. You can also keep the files on disk if you want and in their original directories as we use a hard link.
firexcy 8y ago
I think the library system does have good reasons to exist and whether to use it depends totally on your needs. Essentially, the library system and the traditional filesystem are the same, to the extent that they both filter and group files by a select group of criteria. In the case of the filesystem, the criteria are file path, sizes, date added, etc. In the case of a library system, the criteria are specific types metadata that are meaningful for the type of media it manages (genres and artists for music, publishers and categories for books, etc.). Their features do intersect, and you can have both worlds in one system with some hacks, but the convenience and design also matter. For me, I read ebooks but don’t hoard them, so I don’t need Calibre to manage my petite amount of epubs -- folders and filenames are enough. But I do listen to a lot of music, so I can’t manage efficiently without a music library software like iTunes. A person who is a voracious reader but rare listener, however, may have a choice just opposite to mine, which is also completely reasonable.

by haspok 8y ago

bayindirh 8y ago

I can understand you. However, libraries are hard to understand until managing your collection creates a lot of overhead. A good library can find something from a sizeable collection in a second or two. Calibre is perfectly capable in this regard. Also metadata is something really powerful. However, you need a lot of it (in this case books) to reap its benefits. Calibre doesn't obfuscate / embed the book files. They copy under a folder with Author's name. You can pretty easily access the original file pretty quickly. Maybe you can configure Calibre to use your directory structure without modifying it.

pmontra 8y ago
I can't say I have a large collection of ebooks (just checked: 54) but I won't use a file manager to handle it. I use Calibre because it's much easier to convert between formats, edit metadata, edit the ebook, add a cover page. Basically that's it and Calibre has many more features that I don't use (the reader among the others). I'm sure there are separate programs that do all I use Calibre for, but it's much easier in this way. BTW, I don't understand the use case of reading ebooks on a desktop or laptop instead of on a phone or tablet (or eink reader.) Is this really common? I can imagine reading some technical ebook at my computer while working at my desk, but not fiction or anything else.
- bayindirh 8y ago
  > BTW, I don't understand the use case of reading ebooks on a desktop or laptop instead of on a phone or tablet (or eink reader). Unfortunately, not everyone has all the screens, and not all phone screens are big enough to read novels and such. I'd rather read a book in my bed on my laptop screen and take notes quickly rather than an older phone and try to write on its keyboard. Also, e-ink readers' screen refresh rate prevents taking extensive notes on the books. You can underline just fine, but longer notes are a bit hard. Last but not the least, comic books in CBZ/CBR format really begs for a quality color display, since colored comics is half the fun in the comics. :D

PurpleRamen 8y ago

> I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories Your library. > powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical views and don't integrate well with filetypes. Namely, they usually don't extract data from files, like metadata, covers or previews. Though, filemanagers have started to do that to some degree. But they still lack the "alternate view" on your library. Those Walled Garden-Apps that work with librarys are more like a relational database, offering flexible selections and content-optimized views that filemanagers are normally lacking. The major difference is really just if you want a static and inflexible organization, or something dynamic. And usually with heterogeneous datas, the dynamic approach is better for consuming beacuse it allows you to break through the hierachy. > (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). > I hate Calibre for the exact same reason. Just select your books and export them. Calibre can export to a device, but also just a local directory. Calibre in that regard is one of the better gardens. Very flexible and powerful. Just the UI sucks.

chme 8y ago
>> I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories > Your library. Yes, its already there and quite organized in directories. Now ebook readers came along and pressed those hierarchical data flat, with long waiting times, because it needs to index first. >> powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). > Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical views and don't integrate well with filetypes. Namely, they usually don't extract data from files, like metadata, covers or previews. Though, filemanagers have started to do that to some degree. grep and find works quite well for most work loads and are fast, why not enhance (or fork) them to support ebook formats? Instead ebook readers came along and reinvented filesystems, because users cannot be trusted to organize their book collection themselves. > But they still lack the "alternate view" on your library. Those Walled Garden-Apps that work with librarys are more like a relational database, offering flexible selections and content-optimized views that filemanagers are normally lacking. And at the same time omit very useful information that normal file managers show. (File creation/write/access time, size, full file name, etc.) > The major difference is really just if you want a static and inflexible organization, or something dynamic. And usually with heterogeneous datas, the dynamic approach is better for consuming beacuse it allows you to break through the hierachy. As I said, with long indexing times. I had ~50000 books on a ebook reader once and that broke it. Just because there are files stored, that should not slow down the system or even make it completely unusable. Instead they should just access the filesystem directly, then those problems don't even arise. >> (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). > I hate Calibre for the exact same reason. > Just select your books and export them. Calibre can export to a device, but also just a local directory. Calibre in that regard is one of the better gardens. Very flexible and powerful. Just the UI sucks. Calibre is a pretty big application and they are not an ebook reader primarily. Their main feature is the library. And they spend many man years of development to improve that and it does work quite well. But very few ebook applications and handheld readers have the same resources to implement a similarly powerful library functionality. Instead they have half backed solutions that make finding and organizing the library more difficult then if they would have simply used a standard file manager and grep/find/... IMO an application that lets you just open epubs and other ebook formats and render them correctly just like so many pdf viewer do, without any half assed library functionality duck taped on to it, is highly sought after.

anc84 8y ago

How would you handle books with multiple authors? Symlinks would not be an option as they are way too nerdy for common users.

HeadsUpHigh 8y ago

Metadata. The same way you might group music files per artist or per album or per genre or in playlists but the filesystem only allows for 1 type of grouping without duplicating the files or some weird shortcut kind of thing. You can group per author or per genre of ebooks or whatever. Granted it's less useful compared to music but it does make sense and I prefer media to be displayed as a library myself.

FabHK 8y ago
Exactly. I am a big fan of Calibre for books, iTunes for music (granted, iTunes is mediocre monolithic software), and generally software (adapted to the specific media type) that manages the library and metadata, so I don't have to touch the filesystem. How are you going to play music you've added in the last three years, but not heard for a month, from the "Latin" genre, with two or more stars, using only the file system? With an iTunes smart playlist, it's trivial. In Calibre it's trivial to sort the books by Title, Author, or (my self-defined and filled) Genre column. How would you even start to manage photos in the file system? By name?
- HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
  >How would you even start to manage photos in the file system? By name? Photos is actually an exception for me due to the personal nature of them. I group them in directories based on date ranges and events. I don't want to upload them to some webapp or cloud storage for privacy reasons.
- enriquto 8y ago
  > In Calibre it's trivial to sort the books by Title, Author, or (my self-defined and filled) Genre column. honest question: why would you ever like to do that? I find calibre unusable because of these things. I just have one epub file and I want to read it. However, the damn program forces me to "initialize my library" and other bullshit.
- tbe 8y ago
  > How are you going to play music you've added in the last three years, but not heard for a month, from the "Latin" genre, with two or more stars, using only the file system? BeOS actually solved this 20 years ago with its file system BFS. Haiku is an open source reimplementation of BeOS that recently progressed from (high quality) alpha releases to its first beta.

wp381640 8y ago

books are more than just files and contain a lot of additional data. how do you filter by publisher and then sort books by publish date in mc? I'm sure there's a "dropbox is just rsync" type answer, but this is for regular users

IanCal 8y ago
Honest question, is this a common use case for regular users? To get a book by publisher and date? I have no idea who published most of my books, let alone the date.
- weehobbes 8y ago
  I don't think this is a common case for "regular users" but in my library of coding books, I find both very useful. For example, O'Reilly has a very different style/quality compared to Packt. And it's helpful to know when the book was published to know it's recency and whether it may be outdated.
  - IanCal 8y ago
    Is that something you want to know after selecting a book, or for finding one?

Vaskivo 8y ago

Absolutely. I hate library/playlist oriented stuff. I have everything organized in folders and files, with good filenames. Since I have in my collection a lot of unkown, old or rare media, most programs are not able to find out what it it or even tag them wrong! I still use foobar. On my kodi setup, I navigate almost everything via file browser. I spent a lot of time finding a decent folder oriented audio player for android.

GuB-42 8y ago

Call it a database if you wish. In fact it is probably sqlite running behind the scenes. It is a relational model, a different way of organizing things compared to the hierarchical model of the filesystem. There is probably enough literature about that to fill your ebook library ;) I suppose that the "library" model is what most people prefer since most modern media apps use that in some form or another. Or maybe it is because of Steve Jobs reality distortion field ( https://oleb.net/blog/2012/06/steve-jobs-on-the-file-system/ https://oleb.net/blog/2012/06/steve-jobs-on-the-file-system/ ). Still, I hate all these apps attempting to hide the filesystem from me.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

Not to mention the directory is easy to scan, rsync, backup & so on without having to worry about breaking consistency in some database. A filesystem is perfectly fine, if used correctly, for the average ebook reader use-case. If you have 10 million ebooks and need to run 100 complex searches per second then you need an RDBMS.

kirion25 8y ago

With a file manager, you'll probably only be able to find a book from its author, and title. If you have a small collection, this is fine. When your collection grows though, issues start to show up. Being able to sort, and find a book based on other information becomes much more useful: date of publication, genre, custom tags, etc... While you could always integrate these in your filename/directory structure, with the help of symlinks, it's very cumbersome to manage and use.

ohithereyou 8y ago
>it's very cumbersome to manage and use Maybe if you just dump a large number of unsorted files in place and do nothing with them. With a decent file manager and an hour or so, you can add many books and symlink them to the metadata directory with no issue.
- GrinningFool 8y ago
  > aybe if you just dump a large number of unsorted files in place and do nothing with them. With a decent file manager and an hour or so, you can add many books and symlink them to the metadata directory with no issue. Alternatively you can use a program's built-in library with no time cost to yourself...
- kirion25 8y ago
  > With a decent file manager and an hour or so An hour? You've made my case. It takes at most a couple of minutes for importing hundreds of books in Calibre. Metadata retrieval is automatic (from the file itself and/or online). Everything happens in a few clicks.
kps 8y ago
> Being able to sort, and find a book based on other information becomes much more useful: date of publication, genre, custom tags, etc... Yes, and I want to be able to do that with all my books, not just the ones that the ebook reader can handle.

nickjj 8y ago

You're not alone. I have about 75 ebooks organized by a few directories depending on what type of book it is. I just move around my file system like normal and then open them in light weight readers like Zathura. Browsing is the same as any other directory, the files open immediately, it works offline and it's easy to sync between devices. I apply this same strategy to MP3s too.

jdietrich 8y ago

I don't particularly like Calibre's library implementation, but a generic file manager just isn't a very good way of managing documents. Metadata like bookmarks, references, excerpts and annotations are a really important part of an effective reading experience.

enriquto 8y ago
The reading experience starts when you open the book with the reader program. If you want a library, use a library program. Those should be completely orthogonal concerns.

hombre_fatal 8y ago

Incredible. Top HN comment is wondering why anyone uses UI software to manage a library instead of the filesystem. I'm not even sure where to start. But that you can't even envision a few reasons why someone would use something is very limiting. At least on an empathy level but probably on a professional product-design level as well. I can certainly appreciate your point when the software's backing database is unusable and human-unfriendly, and this is supposedly the reason why you hate Calibre, but the folder that Calibre stores my 12k books in and it's nicely organized. The other day I even Airdropped it to my friend where he imported it into macOS' Books.app.

skillachie 8y ago
Find it incredible as well. The average user finds Calibre to be too complex. With that said, I would be happy if you could take BookFusion for a spin and let me know if you have any feedback. Our users have libraries with over 30,000 eBooks and as a result we will have no issues with your collection. BookFusion allows you to easily upload, organize and read all your eBooks regardless of format on iOS, Android and Web enabled devices. More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library BookFusion also has a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your eBook collection. https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre PS: I am the founder of BookFusion and would be happy to hear any feedback that you might have
- dustinblake 8y ago
  I went to check out BookFusion, which at first glance, seems like an interesting idea. Unfortunately, I could not find anywhere on your site that indicated the cost associated with an individual user account. (Free to signup, of course, but how long is that trial, or what limits will I face? and then how much money will this subscription service cost me?) End-users have serious account fatigue, and I seriously debated whether I should bother signing up for the site and create yet another login to a web app I might or might not want to use. Please, just be up front about pricing, free trials, limitations, requirements, etc. If you have a 7-day free trial and I'm currently busy, I won't have time to kick the wheels before I'd need to pay. If you instead limit the number of books or the storage space I can use, just tell me so I can decide if it's worth bothering to test it out. As far as I can tell, you might or might not have a limit for a new/free user, but no idea what that is. Finally, I see in the settings that you offer an early bird subscriber deal, at $4.99/mo (vs $9.99/mo) and $39.99/yr (vs $60/yr), for unlimited storage. I think you might have better luck with a tiered setup. Someone with a lot of ebooks might find $40/year to be a great deal, but most users likely don't have that large of a collection - they're looking for more of an ease of use and convenience factor. Take advantage of that, and then allow them to move up and give you more money once their collection grows. $10/year = 4GB storage or 2000 ebooks? (count # of books, and not storage, to make it seem less technical?) $20/year = 8GB storage or 4000 ebooks? $40/year = 20GB storage or __? $60/year = unlimited or $10/$30/$60 year, with 2000/10,000/unlimited? and only allow monthly payment as an option for the $30/$60 levels? at $10/year, it would be an impulse buy for most readers, and then you not only have a paying relationship with them right away, you have a whole year to demonstrate the ease of use and utility of the product.

jxdxbx 8y ago

I remember having this argument with people who couldn't understand why I preferred using iTunes (Swinsian, these days) to organize a collection of thousands of albums, with automatic sorting based on metadata. File systems just don't expose what is relevant in a music context and re-sorting huge batches of music based on changed metadata is too difficult.

boomlinde 8y ago

> I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories, and amazingly powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). I think that the problem is that a file system typically represents a single type of hierarchy. Maybe you have your books in the file system arranged by topic->author->book, but other arrangements like topic->year->book, book->year (for editions) or author->book->author->book->... (for citations) can be useful. Maybe you want to list books that relate to a set of multiple topics written by either of two specific authors. In Unix you can solve this by using symbolic links, which may become tedious to maintain (but less so by using automated tools). Generally, you can sort of address it by including meta information in the file names (like the warez scene does), but that is tedious when you have a lot of potentially relevant meta information. The benefits of throwing all the information into a relational database and querying into that instead of a regular PC file system is that you can define the desired hierarchy and what meta-data is important on the fly and effectively create a file system (in the pre-computer sense) and perform a search at the same time. I haven't looked closely enough at this software to say that its "library" actually addresses these concerns, but for large libraries there are obvious benefits to 1) Using multiple hierarchies or faceted classification for information query 2) defining such hierarchies or sets of classifying categories on the fly. These aren't new solutions, and fundamentally the organization of information in a library is not a new problem, so I wouldn't call your position old school.

swebs 8y ago
A faceted classification system sounds pretty unnecessary in this context. I'd like it if I were looking for a new book to buy, but I really can't see ever using it on my existing library. At that point I already know the specific book I want to read and just want to find it.
- boomlinde 8y ago
  > A faceted classification system sounds pretty unnecessary in this context. If by "this context" you mean exactly the use case you describe, then yes. If you are always looking for books you already know of and can name, there is little point in further classification. Another potential use case is that I have tens of thousands of books and I am looking for English-language fictional books about scientists and monsters by authors born in the 18th century. Again, I haven't looked closely at the app and chances are that it doesn't really help in that use case either, but I meant to explain the concept of a "library" to someone who did not understand it, and why a simple hierarchical file system may be an insufficient abstraction for library classification in general.

totony 8y ago

you might be interested in mupdf or mupdf-based viewers, it supports pdf and epub (but not mobi) and it very lightweight

virtualadmin 8y ago

You're not the only one. A lot of applications developed today do the same thing and it also frustrates me. I also dislike when a piece of software will outright modify/change/move the current directory structure to suit its own logic.

enriquto 8y ago

Yes, I hate programs that replicate my filesystem, slowly and badly! Please, give me an ebook reader that opens a single file and that's it. It cannot be so hard!

deleted 8y ago

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bloopernova 8y ago

You and I almost certainly aren't the intended users of such a feature. My mother in law knows that, conceptually and practically, when she taps the Kindle icon on her tablet she will open her collection of books. Within that full-screen app, she is intending to do one of several things: find a book to read, then read that book. She doesn't really like the filesystem on her imac. She much prefers that all the files associated with a given activity are readily available when she is doing that particular activity. Gallery -> Photos. Library -> Kindle. TV Shows -> Netflix. She doesn't really think about how each of those search and organization functions act differently between apps. We all do the same, to a great or lesser degree. Orgzly has my org-mode files right there. Microsoft RDP client beta has a group of all the RDP sessions I use right there. Outlook has all emails and calendar items. I absolutely suffer when my filesystem is chaotic, which it often is: but then again so is my job, doing systems admin, devops, code builds, puppet/ansible/chef stuff, etc etc. Being able to quickly find things in a freeform manner is very, very useful. (I use 'fzf' and zsh for commands and directories, and 'mdfind' (on mac) for its faster-than-grep file search)

criddell 8y ago

A file system isn't a good fit for a library of books IMHO, at least not as a view. What directory would I put my copy of Stephen King's It in? My Stephen King folder? My horror folder? 1986? Fiction? The underlying file system view really doesn't matter. It's the abstraction on top of that where all the interesting things happen.

nebulous1 8y ago

I think you're both right and wrong here. You're right that this often causes problems. Anybody who has tried to salvage an iTunes library can attest to that. However you're downplaying the positives to having a metadata database, and you're also ignoring the teeming masses who don't care about the layout of the file system as long as it's displayed in the app.

kingaillas 8y ago

I was like you, until my library grew to a certain size and I needed/wanted to organize it and display it better. Calibre lets me tag books, so I can pull them up by arbitrary categories which I can't EASILY pull off only using filesystem features. With Calibre I split my ebooks into two libraries (one for computer books, one for not computer books) and tag to my hearts content and requirements. I keep it simple to 2-3 tags for each book so I can later find my computer books that are "python, security" or my "reading challenge, crime/mystery, unread" books without dealing with extended attributes and the find command. Calibre also travels between linux, macos, and windows and so do the tags; unlike the filesystem where I'd get the joy of retagging all this stuff if I am on a different system (say, copy of my stuff on Windows means I have to retag with NTFS alternate data streams). Same thing with pdf's - I used to keep a bunch of docs in my own subdir, until it got to be 1000+ pdf's and I discovered Mendeley Desktop and its tagging feature. Now I can find stuff much faster. Same thing with my music collection, same thing my with photos. Your needs may be minimal enough and your computer skills sufficient enough so that you get by with the filesystem, but I would venture to say the average user is much better off with an app/library method of organization. e.g., I can't fathom organizing a non-trivial photo collection via the filesystem only. I know I'm better off with the app/library method of organizing data, something I came to realize after my initial resistance.

skillachie 8y ago
I would even venture to say the average user also finds Calibre complex. Would you mind taking BookFusion for a spin? We have uses with over 30,000 eBooks in their libraries and will be able to support your collection without issues. BookFusion allows you to easily upload, read and organize(tags and categories) your eBooks. Your entire Calibre eBook collection will be available across all your devices while keeping your bookmarks, comments, highlights and reading progress synced. More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library We even have a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your entire collection or only eBooks you are interested in. https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre PS: I am the founder of BookFusion
- 8y ago

Notorious_BLT 8y ago

Someone call up every real-world library and let them know their catalogs are worthless, they should just be sorting their books onto shelves and letting patrons search them by hand.

FabHK 8y ago
> search them by hand No, come on, be fair, let's replicate the capabilities of the file system: You can sort them both by ISBN and by size.

burtonator 8y ago

The app I'm working on does the same thing: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It's very similar to Bookworm in this regard. The main reason we do it is repository integrity. We can replicate it easily with the cloud and enable real time collaboration. You can also keep the files on disk if you want and in their original directories as we use a hard link.

firexcy 8y ago

I think the library system does have good reasons to exist and whether to use it depends totally on your needs. Essentially, the library system and the traditional filesystem are the same, to the extent that they both filter and group files by a select group of criteria. In the case of the filesystem, the criteria are file path, sizes, date added, etc. In the case of a library system, the criteria are specific types metadata that are meaningful for the type of media it manages (genres and artists for music, publishers and categories for books, etc.). Their features do intersect, and you can have both worlds in one system with some hacks, but the convenience and design also matter. For me, I read ebooks but don’t hoard them, so I don’t need Calibre to manage my petite amount of epubs -- folders and filenames are enough. But I do listen to a lot of music, so I can’t manage efficiently without a music library software like iTunes. A person who is a voracious reader but rare listener, however, may have a choice just opposite to mine, which is also completely reasonable.