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T'hain Esh Kelch

macrumors 604
Original poster
By now, I have a collection of several hundreds ePub (Primarily) and PDFs which I am slowly getting more and more annoyed over. In the past I had them sorted in iBooks, but after it became Books, I want to move on. iBooks was buggy but you could get around them, but Books is borderline useless when it comes to organizing stuff - I consider it Apples worst app now due to its uselessness for anything other than buying books!

So how do people organize their eBooks? I have a kobo ereader, and iPads, and would like an easy way to read my ebooks on them. I don't mind sideloading on a regular basis for the Kobo, but I do want a central place on my Mac to keep things organized, with proper metadata, and ways to sort things (Series, worlds, authors, genres, etc.) relatively easily. Sort of like iTunes, but for books (Which iBooks was, but Books is most certainly not).

I've looked at Calibre, but I would love to hear about something that looks and works a bit more nice if possible.
 
I agree that Calibre is "on the clunky side" for an app. But it does work.

I keep all my ebooks in a folder/file hiearchy of my own making, on my media partition.

Some are arrangements by author. Others (books in a series) by title. Etc.
 

When was it last updated!?

This is sort of wild to see on the About page
Screenshot 2025-09-26 at 11.37.21.png
 
As an ex-BookReader fan, I now use Clearview X.

For organisation Clearview relies on you organising books and folders in Finder. But you can then add those folders to your Clearview library.
 
I agree that Calibre is "on the clunky side" for an app. But it does work.

I keep all my ebooks in a folder/file hiearchy of my own making, on my media partition.

Some are arrangements by author. Others (books in a series) by title. Etc.
I have a very large collection of ePubs that is managed within Calibre — which it the best database tool available for this purpose. It is extremely powerful and customizable.

What I do is use Calibre as my main ePub "warehouse." All my books are organized by Author/ Series. From there I use the Meta Plugboard to ensure my books/series information appears as I want it before exporting ePub format only to a temporary transfer folder and then to the Book app on my Mac Studio. From there I import them into the Books app. Since the Books app uses iCloud to sync all my devices they appear on my iPad Mini 7 which I use an eReader.

If you are interested, here is the Metadata Plugboard string I use:
2025-12-28_03-54-57.png

In Apple Books the Title appears as:
2025-12-28_04-09-01.png

You can configure this to appear any way you want.


You can find more information on the powerful Metadata Plugboard syntax here:


I also have a Kobo Libra 2 and can transfer books directly from Calibre to the Kobo.
 
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I ended up going with Calibre. It is not perfect, but it gets the job done after you've fought several hours with it, and understod how it works.
 
I have a very large collection of ePubs that is managed within Calibre — which it the best database tool available for this purpose. It is extremely powerful and customizable.

What I do is use Calibre as my main ePub "warehouse." All my books are organized by Author/ Series. From there I use the Meta Plugboard to ensure my books/series information appears as I want it before exporting ePub format only to a temporary transfer folder and then to the Book app on my Mac Studio. From there I import them into the Books app. Since the Books app uses iCloud to sync all my devices they appear on my iPad Mini 7 which I use an eReader.

If you are interested, here is the Metadata Plugboard string I use:
View attachment 2591300
In Apple Books the Title appears as:
View attachment 2591303
You can configure this to appear any way you want.


You can find more information on the powerful Metadata Plugboard syntax here:


I also have a Kobo Libra 2 and can transfer books directly from Calibre to the Kobo.
how would i have my books formatted like this:

series # - Series - title - Author

so something like: 1 - Alex Cross - along Came The spider - James Patterson
 
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