After using this for years, I now wonder if I am doing it wrong, or at least differently from most people.
I convert a book. I save the book to a file on my desktop. I then delete the file from Calibre.
I always get the " are you sure you want to delete this book from Calibre?" Am I not supposed to delete the converted book? If I don’t delete the book does Calibre keep a copy until I delete it? If I don’t save a book to my desktop file, does it stay inn Calibre? Do you save all your converted books in Calibre?
Calibre has it’s own ‘library’ where it keeps the original book and all converted versions. If you’re going to save the converted version elsewhere, it’s not necessary to keep it in Calibre as well. (But it only uses up a small amount of space, so it does no harm.)
Do you backup your books? I probably do overkill, I have them on my desktop, on thumb drives and in the cloud. I’m doing some half assed organizing of them now and I have over 11,000. I should have been keeping better track over the years.
I only keep them in the calibre library when they’re on my reader’s bookshelf or I’m editing a book I’m not reading (I like to add fan art or alternate covers, make my own dividers). I keep the bulk of them in documents->books and then organized in there.
My books are partially organized, but I always make sure that the author’s name as well as the title is in the file name.
I have an excellent instant file search program, and it makes it very quick and convenient to type in part of an author’s name or a book title, and find what I want in a few seconds.
That’s funny. I pretty much do the opposite. I use Calibre as my library management system and, once the book is converted and saved in there, I don’t care about the original. All my Kindle books are now stored as both EPUBs and MOBIs in Calibre without the DRM. That allows me to read them on any device I like. When I set up my new PC I only added the Calibre library to it and didn’t bother with the Kindle or Kobo files.
And Calibre has a terrific search function once you need one.
I also keep my books in Calibre, particularly since it has plugins for transferring them correctly to kobo e-readers, so that the reading order is preserved for books with right to left reading order. It also comes with its own webserver which means you can actually use it as your library over the internets. Although at one point I did use it to convert a book into another format, now I use it as the place to preserve my e-books.
No, what you save to your Calibre library is saved to your PC, but you can then set it up as server from your PC. It can be made accessible on your home network, or outside of your home with additional work. The process is described here: The calibre Content server — calibre 7.4.0 documentation
Also, I know this was not asked of me directly, but backing up your Calibre Library books is rather simple because they are saved on your PC in a folder structure, so you can just back up the directory that has the actual files. They are not tied to Calibre in any way that makes them unusable if you don’t have Calibre. In fact, that is how I get some of them to another device, I just browse the library folder using Windows Explorer (or the like) and just copy the book to another drive or device, you don’t need Calibre to do it, it just makes it easier to organize everything.
It’s certainly one way of organising your books, but I have a large number of books that I’ve never imported into Calibre or converted. So I find it more convenient to keep all my books in one place outside Calibre, especially since I don’t use Calibre to read books.