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Folder/file name structure for eBooks (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 11 hours ago* by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 8 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

I've been using Grimmory for nearly a year now and it's been great at organising and applying metadata to my poorly organised collection. I dumped all my books into it and let it structure and order the directories. There was a little work to do to verifying the metadata it pulled, but I now have my whole family using it to find and read ebooks.

Its OPDS support also lets me use Moon+ Reader on my phone to browse and read my collection.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 9 hours ago* (2 children)

    Grimmory sounds like a new kid on the block, and indeed, it is. I've looked into it, and here's what I've come up with:

    • initial commit: March 2026 --> very young project, blazed through 24 releases already
    • 165 contributors, but upon closer inspection, it relies on only two frequent contributors --> if they lose interest, the project might fall dormant or die entirely
    • as per its AI policy, the project embraces AI as a tool, but expects contributors to understand what they're committing, and reserves the right to throw out blatantly vibecoded contributions. --> Whether two people can actually enforce this policy when getting firehosed with AI contributions remains to be seen.

    With all that in mind, I think I'll give this project a pass for now. Like you said, it's some work that goes into curating a library and making sure the metadata is correct, and if that locks me into a project that may or may not exist several months or years from now, I'll probably stick to one of the more established projects with a higher likelihood of long-term maintenance.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

    It's a fork of a Booklore which was closed back in March. Grimmory is the spin-off by a group of the original developers. So while the repo and project are relatively new, the codebase and lineage is not. I've found it to be stable and reliable since I switched from Booklore.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 7 hours ago

    A Booklore fork! Yes, that does make sense, since Grimmory's commits oddly start with v 2.x.x

    It does not, however, change my outlook much. Booklore, too, was a very young project (initial commit: March 2025) and heavily vibecoded by a handful of people.

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