Beyond Reality discussion

Do you have a system for organizing your bookshelves? Please share it. Do you stick with it?

...sort of? We've got an insane number of bookshelves and they've gotten pretty disorganized over the years. In theory, my favorite comfort reads are on the shelf in my bedroom - our SF/F, literature, and children's books are in our great room - nonfiction, cookbooks, and general non-genre fiction in our living room - some overflow in David's office ... but when my kids were little they loved pulling books off of whichever shelves they could reach, so they got all messed up and I haven't had the energy to re-organized.

Well, I guess that would depend.

Are we talking physical books?
Hmm . . . physical books . . . organization
*spends the next 20 minutes laying on the floor and laughing*

I have books stacked up in every room of the house. There are books under the bed. There are books in all bathrooms. I have a few books on the floor in the back seat of my car. If there is a nook or cranny of my house, there is likely a book of some sort in it.

Now if we are talking ebooks, I have a very specific structure. Once I buy a book, the very first thing I do is grab it and fix the tags. I have noticed that publishers seem to try to use tags for marketing purposes and not informational anymore. If a cat crosses the street in chapter 6, this is not an event that needs to show up in the tags. Serious.

I then fix the author name(s), series name and number, etc. You would not believe how often publishers screw this up. I also fix titles, removing things like series name and putting the series name where its supposed to be.

Back to tags, my husband and I have setup a system where we tag based upon genre alone. Well with an exception that we will also tag omnibus editions. Well if it was just me I would not, but he insists. I don't see the point. I have never in my life thought to myself "I want to read an omnibus". I think "I want to read this series" and "oh there's an omnibus of the series, I'll just buy that".

Anyway, so ebooks are tagged by genre. And then they are organized in the file system itself based upon genre.

So first divided by Fiction and non Fiction. And then there will be subdirectories of the various genres under those. We don't get too specific into it. There's a "Science Fiction and Fantasy" and we don't break down any further into sub genres for example.

Then under the genre directory, there are directories for each Author (lastname, firstname). In those directories we will have each stand alone book as well as sub folders for series.

Books of short stories from multiple authors will be filed under the editor's name.
Anthology series have their own subfolder called _Anthologies (underline is for sort purposes) instead of by Author and go in there by series name.

Any subfolders from there will depend on the series. The Forgotten Realms books have a number of levels of subdirectories for sub series and series groups.

In cases where books have multiple authors, both authors are credited in the ebook. The Author folder in this case is both author names. For example: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett is under the directory name of "Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry".

So physically I am a disorganized mess. Digitally I am ultra organized. :D

Oh, and to show just how much of a nerd I can be, my ebook reader allows me to sort books by Directory structure. So when I look at the books, I can see them as how they might be sorted on book store shelves.

Oh to add to the above . . .

I've always felt that the place a physical book belongs is the last place it was left.

My husband feels the same way about his ketchup bottle.

I used to the whole alphabetical order thing. Now it is just space on the shelf. I have been culling the collection, sort of. Whenever I duplicate a physical book with an ebook. I do this when they are on sale I remove it from the shelf.
It does make it hard to find books sometimes.

My books are roughly organized by age level and genre. So I have the picture books, kids chapter books, middle grade, YA and adult mostly in their own space. I haven't been too serious about being super organized with them since the children came along. They are very good about randomly reorganizing shelves. I do try to keep books by the same author together, especially series. But mostly, to be honest, it's a mess. But a beautiful mess.

Nonfiction has a few shelves to itself, organized loosely by topic.

The vast majority of our print books are fiction and are simply arranged alphabetically by author last name, all genres mixed together. Within an author, books are arranged chronologically by publication date, but I bend that rule by keeping books from a series together.

Ebooks are arranged by however the app chooses to arrange them. The Kindle app uses alphabetically by author, iBooks seems to use a mix of alphabetically by author or title, and the other apps don’t have very many books so the organization doesn’t matter to me.

I have a spreadsheet (Google Sheets) that lists all our books and tells if they are hardcover or paperback (meaning they are physically on the bookshelves) or eBooks (and which app they are in). If we owned a book but then donated or sold it, it’s marked “Gone” but I don’t delete it because otherwise I might buy it again!

@Kathi, I like your idea of the spreadsheet for tracking the books you own. Especially marking them as "gone". I don't know how many times I've ended up with a duplicate, or one I've already read and disposed of.

@Kathi A Spreadsheet for the physical books and for the Gone books is a very good idea. I organize mine as fiction and non-fiction shelves and I have more non-fiction than otherwise. I have accumulated too many fiction in the last years though and I plan to donate some away but for this I have to read them as I don't like to donate unread books. So I have three TBR shelves to tackle.

Leticia wrote: "@Kathi A Spreadsheet for the physical books and for the Gone books is a very good idea. I organize mine as fiction and non-fiction shelves and I have more non-fiction than otherwise. I have accumul..."

Ha! I can't give away my unread books either!

My Kindle is quite full since I can't pass 0,99 priced books I'm interested in. At least too many ebooks don't bother me as much as too many physical books. As audiobooks go I canceled my Audible subscription because they were starting to accumulate and they are too expensive for that.

@Hampton yeah right? I often cringe when people get rid of huge stacks of unread books in yt videos. Why did they buy them in the first place?

I often suspect they buy those things just so they can make youtube videos of them decluttering. :D

I organize my bookshelf by author and then title in alphabetical order. With series, I use the title of the series and then place the books in series order.

I stay as accurate as possible, although my personal bookshelf has uneven shelving, so taller books have to be placed on specific shelves - which I find triggering if I stare at my bookshelf for too long. LOL

As for my ebooks, I used to create collection folders for them, but I don't anymore. They are as they are. My Kindle seems to automatically group series now, making me happy.

Nyssa wrote: "As for my ebooks, I used to create collection folders for them, but I don't anymore. They are as they are. My Kindle seems to automatically group series now, making me happy."

I'm the same way with my kindle. My old (pretty ancient) one had a bunch of collections on it, but when I replaced it with a new Paperwhite, it didn't seem necessary because it was much easier to search and such.

Shel wrote: "I'm the same way with my kindle. My old (pretty ancient) one had a bunch of collections on it, but when I replaced it with a new Paperwhite, it didn't seem necessary because it was much easier to search and such."

Exactly!

I'm ready to upgrade again, but I wonder if I should wait. I have a 2015 and a 2018 model. I think the most recent one on Amazon (when I last checked) was 2021 - but I wonder if they'll be releasing a newer one for the holidays.

Nyssa wrote: "…my personal bookshelf has uneven shelving, so taller books have to be placed on specific shelves… "

I just tip the taller books on their side (spine up instead of facing out) when that happens. Yes, it makes for a less-than-ideal look to the shelves, but that bothers me less than having books out of order. 😁

In the Kindle I have collections for my favorite authors or by genre too.

We move every 1-3 for my career reasons, so I have the "opportunity" to rearrange my bookshelves with each move. (I actually save this until almost everything else is unpacked as a reward for all the work.) Right now, I have 7 bookcases, with books separated by genre (SFF, YA/middle grade, non-fiction, fiction/mystery, children's, reference) and then organized by author. I also have a couple of shelves set aside for special editions, mostly illustrated or leather-bound. One of my bookcases is dedicated to Star Wars; those are arranged in internal chronological order. Those are just my books; my kids and spouse have their own, which is around 4 bookcases' worth.

I'm thinking of rearranging my shelves next time to be more mood based (light, medium, heavy).

Nyssa wrote: "As for my ebooks, I used to create collection folders for them, but I don't anymore. They are as they are. My Kindle seems to automatically group series now, making me happy."

We've been collecting ebooks since the early/mid 90s, so our books come from a multitude of locations. There's Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Baen's own store (they'll even sell advanced reader copies if you absolutely can't wait), Fictionwise (was absorbed by Barnes and Noble), ebooks.com, Smashwords, Humble Bundle, Project Gutenberg, Standard eBooks, and similar over a span of almost 30 years.

At over 1500 ebooks and counting across multiple vendors, organization of files becomes vital. Otherwise its too easy to loose track of what you have.

For any interested, I highly recommend Standard Ebooks for public domain books.
https://standardebooks.org/

For software, I use Moon+ Reader for the Android platform. Its an excellent and feature rich piece of software and highly customizable.
Now if only I could convince the author to put in support for the Author Sort and Title Sort fields (anyone feel like guessing how many of those 1500+ books starts with 'The'?). Which reminds me, I'm overdue for my yearly feature request nag. :)

I use SMBSync2 to sync the entire library from the internal file server to my Android devices. I also currently sync reading positions on Google Drive so I can swap between tablet and phone if I really want to. I find my tablet is just too large for comfort for extended readings sessions, so honestly its mostly just my phone.

I used many, if not most, of the sites you listed. I discovered the program Calibre for converting and organizing. However, I became overwhelmed with the amount of content I had access to. Managing my kindle felt like a full-time job.
I stepped back from it for a while and eventually opted to stick with Amazon.

I also use Calibre, which has the ability to adjust the metadata to tell it how you'd like each book alphabetized. It also lets me put in series names and organize by including that. I have a Sony Reader, although I read ebooks on my laptop or phone more often these days. Since the software for that is now obsolete but my ereader is still functional, Calibre is a great option.

I use a basic TXT document to track my physical books
I use Calibre for my ebooks.
I tend to download all my books and store them locally. I noticed a few issues with losing books on my Kobo account. I also strip DRM, while I dont pass the books around I dont like having them under control by another entity

I don't use Calibre to organize ebooks, but I do use it when I process those books. Like Ken I have to admit I do strip DRM out along with fixing the tags, author, title, and series fields. This is primarily so I can use whatever software I want to use to read my books instead of being forced to use the book seller's app. This gives me the flexibility to purchase from any vendor I choose at a given time.

I don't share books, its just me and my husband as it would be otherwise. But doing it this way means I can have everything in one place and that a seller can't remove the book from my library. Not something that happens often, but there have been cases of this in the past.

Processing is the simple case of loading into Calibre, fix tags, author, title, series, etc as needed, then saving to file and placing it in the appropriate directory on our file server. The most difficult part is often figuring out the correct genre(s) for a book you have not yet read. I have been known to process books a second time after reading to adjust the tagging. :)