Comment on eBook Library Structure
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Use something that supports tags properly.
It lets you handle fuzzy boundaries way easier. If something’s both fantasy and sci fi? Give it both tags. A book on the real science implications of some fantasy magic system, using actual quantum physics models? No problem. Give it fiction and non-fiction, and science and fantasy.
Then you can filter by tags to get all the books that fit what you want.
curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
That’s why I don’t separate out the fiction. But one giant library of books including fiction and non-fiction isn’t very browsable, just searchable.
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
I think it helps to think of browsing as a basic form of searching. Everything you can do in a browsing context, you can by definition do in a searching context…if the client doesn’t suck. The information needed to browse is embedded in the tags.
So this strikes me as entirely dependent on your client software. A good client should let you browse by tags. You could add Dewey numbers as tags to start with, so you can browse that way if you want, then add any other tags that might be useful (like genres, for example) on top of that.
The only difference with tags in this context is that books will appear in multiple places.
curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Most mobile clients you’re going to get your search and browsing through OPDS - so a library and a search function, but no tag support. Just (afaik) author, title, publisher, year, etc.
So that kind of fuzzy sorting is, at best, limited to the web interface for servers that support it (like Kavita). Which means browsing in almost any context native to a reader device/app is not going to support tagging.
If that changes, then sure, it could be plenty useful as a single giant list with neatly browsable tags. As of what’s out there now and usable (again, afaik) it is not.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
If it uses tags correctly you can just filter in and out what you want to see, then bunch by other common tags or whatever.
I have not reached the point of finding the right book hosting to properly self host my large collection of books, so I can’t really give a suggestion for a good browsing experience, but just generally speaking tags allow as much structure and organization as the front end wants to take advantage of. I’ve seen plenty of platforms that, once you pick your first tag, give a sorted list of other common tags you can dig down into, in addition to showing the list of content that meets the tag by whatever criteria you have. (An example I’m not sure exists, but very easily could, is to take the highest frequency set of tags with the least overlap (fiction/nonfiction/kids) and display them as titled shelves, then, once you click that, breaks down that group in the same manner until extra tags aren’t really useful.)
But in terms of the information they contain, the real world is fuzzy, so a method that allows for fuzzy buckets instead of strict ones is going to be more representative of the eventual content.
curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Kavita does that, which is what I use (though through the web interface, not using opds on an android app for example), but it would still make browsing just a giant single list.
And I agree, fuzzy has value, which is why I don’t want to separate major things like Science Fiction vs Fantasy. But there isn’t exactly going to be significant overlap between historical romance novels and an instructional book on erlang, so that book on erlang is just going to get lost in the library.
That’s why I separate, it’s just too much for a single large directory.