this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
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Howdy self-hosters!

I've got a huge pile of eBooks flying around here: poetry, scientific literature, magazines, comics, teaching materials, RPG rule books - it's a wildly mixed bag. I'm still looking for a self-hosted solution to make it more accessible and get an overview of what I actually have. (Calibre looks promising!)

My question here is not about software, though, but about organisation at the filesystem level: what folder and file name structure have you established for your eBooks? Do you just dump everything into one single folder and let the software do the rest? Do you create sections by genre ("Crime", "Fantasy", "Young adult", like the libraries do it) or application (job-related, hobby-related, cooking, ...)? Does it matter at all?

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[–] grillgamesh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

I highly reccomend using calibre.

bonus points if you use a self hosted LLM to auto catalogue and apply metadata to the file before importing into calibre.

the recent openweight models are surprisingly good at reading files, pulling info, and doing simple monotonous tasks thousands of times without failing.

[–] LewdLemon@sh.itjust.works 3 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Hi there,

thanks for not staying true to your username. ;)

[let the LLM] apply metadata to the file

How does this work in practice? I've got a bunch of .pdf, .epub, .txt, even some .doc files lying around in a folder. What would an LLM do to them? Write a bunch of .xml files with a file name identical to the corresponding book, or what?

[–] grillgamesh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I've not personally tested such stuff (as my setup is complete and I did the metadata all by hand before the age of LLMs), but to my understanding; the LLM is able to write opf/XML/whatever files you want for metadata, or even edit the file directly to add metadata. epubs and PDFs support author/title/etc tags iirc, so its not too hard to get the LLM to apply those after ingesting the text and searching online for matches.

I shitpost a lot in comments, making shitposts is lame and for losers. better to actually say meaningful things with a post rather than a nothingburger shitpost xD