Comment on eBook Library Structure
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 months agoIf 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.