I am organizing my e-books. I want a smallish number of broad categories. Some are easy, like “children’s fantasy”. I have a lot of those, and it’s a fairly cohesive group, even if it ranges from “Harold and and the purple crayon” through “half magic” and “the book of three”. There will probably be a little overlap with “fantasy” (I’ll probably tag “the Hobbit” as both fantasy/sci fi and children’s fantasy, for instance) but mostly it’ll be a pretty clean group.
But then i have books like Hawking’s “a brief history of time”, or Gould’s “bully for brontosaurus”, or Gonick’s “the cartoon history of the universe”, or Graeber’s “the dawn of everything”, which maybe i could broadly call “history” (hey, natural History is history, right?), but I’d like to include Graeber’s “debt” in the same bucket, i think. And i don’t have a ton of books like that, so i don’t really want to break it into finer categories.
I’ve only read one of the four, but based on a quick review, I’d probably name it “Musings of Great Minds”, or possibly “Thoughts on Humanity and the Universe”.
Alternately, and darkly cynically, it’s “We’re all DOOMED!” category - you know, entropy always increases, history ends, and well Debt is certainly a prime cause of doom!
Which I would distinguish from “reference” which would be things like a dictionary or bird guide, or “cooking,” which is obvious.
That works for me, because almost all of my ebooks are fiction or RPG manuals.
I guess you could do “non-fiction, history” and “non-fiction, science”. Of course there can be overlap, so maybe Debt goes in both “non-fiction, history” and “non-fiction, economics”.
And I’m a little bit envious that you’re organizing e-books. I’m a dead-tree traditionalist, and obviously I enjoy that overall, but I’ve commented before that I’d need seven-dimensional bookshelves to properly organize them. With e-books, though, that you’re sticking tags on, you can (effectively) achieve that.
Kinda. I’m sticking to metadata my kobo can read, so really, the organization is only so-so. Maybe someday I’ll use an android-based e-reader and have more choices of organizational software.
The kobo is a lot better organized than the Kindle, though.
And science popularization isn’t right. Some of the books i want in this bucket are straight-up history.
To me, these seem like a pretty good set. I might just keep it as “history”. I don’t see a reason to be more specific.
Unless you have the categories “science” and “finance” as dedicated categories (I.E., if you have more books specifically in these categories together in a group already). If any of the above lean rather to science or finance than merely “history” and provide specific facts about those subjects, I would put them into that dedicated category should you already have it established for your other books.
History isn’t science? I mean, there’s some grey area there, but you mentioned Graeber, who is an anthropologist, and that’s certainly science, so I’d expect his books to be more on that end of the spectrum.
Regardless, pop/popular/popularization belongs in there. These aren’t general academic works or textbooks or reference volumes. They’re written for a lay audience and all have that same fluffy nature that you get in that category.
Yeah, but i want to put the Muqaddinah and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the same bucket. I suppose you are right, all these books were written for the general public, and not for academics. But that’s true of all my books except some of the physics texts, so it’s not very descriptive. (For my library.) And i once read a book about marriage in medieval England that kinda was written for academics, and if i had an electronic version, I’d group it with these, too.
Ok, I guess I don’t know exactly what categorization you’re going for then. I think books by Hawking, Gould, Dawkins, Taleb, Diamond, Graeber, Harari, Dubner, etc. all fall into a similar pop science/history/economics bin, which I’d just call pop science. But your additional examples don’t really fit.