Our digital library managed with Caliber (II)

We have already spoken in Todo eReaders of Caliber's core functionality to achieve an acceptable quality in our e-books, but it is not only important to get quality books, but we are also interested in having a library organized in an efficient and practical way. For this, Caliber is one of the most powerful tools that we can use today, with the undeniable advantages of being multiplatform and free.

Obviously not everyone is interested in managing their library effectively, but if you are one of those who get sick when books are not where they should be or how they should be, that Metadata, tags, plugins and filters they will become your best friends.

First of all the Metadata, in which all the information of the file is included: title, author, series, publisher, and a long etcetera. This metadata will allow Caliber and our reader (or the program that we use to read on our tablet or PC) handle the book correctly. What I mean by this? Simply that, by checking those metadata that may not seem important to us, our reader places the book in the correct folder and in the order that we indicate, which will help us when choosing our readings.

For example, if our reader is able to manage collections correctlyYou can do so when we indicate in the metadata which collection the book belongs to and what place it occupies in it. But they are useful even when your reader does not manage collections or ignores most of the metadata that is provided.

We must bear in mind that, apart from the metadata that Caliber collects by default, we also have the possibility of Customize them adding extra information depending on our needs.

It is true that entering the metadata is a little annoyance and extra work when we add our books but, in the long run, it will make things much easier for us. But even that's what Caliber thinks about and, for those moments when we don't feel like it, he has introduced the button Download metadata that, connecting with various databases (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, FictionDB, etc.), fills in the main fields so that we only have to make slight modifications.

The same goes for the labels, which will help us organize our readings. Some readers, for example the Sony PRS-505, apart from classifying the books according to the collections we have established, read the labels we have assigned (which are nothing more than metadata) and group the books depending on those genres. Therefore, a good selection of labels will be very valuable when it comes to keep our library organized and it will make it easier for us to read.

The most common is to make a gender classification: historical, police, fantasy, essay, theater, etc. This allows us to select more easily when deciding what we want to read.

So far we can say that we have talked about information that we add to each of the books we read so that Caliber and our reader can handle them in the most appropriate and pleasant way for us. However, when we talk about plugins and filters, we talk about the elements that Caliber has to to improve management and our access to the books that make up the library.

There are numerous plugins that we can add to Caliber to modify its behavior and adapt it to the way we want to manage our library, they are some of the elements that make Caliber into such a powerful and versatile program. Apart from the functionalities inherent to the program, the plugins allow us to add new and very diverse options: search for duplicates, create reading lists, extract the ISBN, and much more. I encourage you to investigate to find the ones that interest you the most and, in this way, configure Caliber to your liking, but one day I will tell you in more detail about my favorites.

We can take a quick look at the filters and searches. The search is easiest way to set a filter fast, with the advantage that it allows us to save them so that, in the future, we do not have to search again for that set of books that we wanted to filter but that in a couple of clicks we have them at hand.

However, if we have taken the trouble to set metadata in detail, the filters are more likely to give us the result we wanted. An example:

not authors: »= Isaac Asimov» and not series: »= Jack Ryan» and tags: »= Cop» and not tags: »= Crime novel» and not tags: »= Mystery»

With this we will be able to select in our library all the books of the detective genre, that are not by Asimov or the series "Jack Ryan" and, in addition, from those that are labeled as "Police" exclude those that are also labeled as " Intrigue "and as" Noir novel. " That means that, as you can see, in a well organized library Out of 5469 books, he has selected only 240.

Later we will delve more into some of these aspects but, for now, I can only encourage you to try, tinker and gradually discover everything that Caliber can do to manage your library.

More information - Our digital library managed with Caliber (I)