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by kirion25 2683 days 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.
2 comments
kps 2683 days 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.

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ohithereyou 2683 days 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.

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GrinningFool 2683 days 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...

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kirion25 2683 days 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.

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