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?

Forget about folders. Use a good metadata schema.

I just use directories but yeah it would be good to have some kind of metadata repo. Calibre is ok if you sit around curating it. Trouble is a lot of my downloads are arxiv PDFs with nuneric filenames and cataloguing them would take some effort. Meh.

I don't organize by folders, I use tagging so a single book can be in multiple categories at the same time.

I tried the dewey decimal system for a while, but that got real tedious. An inbetween platform seems a better solution to this than folder organization, but I haven't looked into that yet. Keeping my eye on this thread for sure!

and thats where a self hosted llm comes in. feed it the files, have it apply the metadata, and bam you've got a library.

iirc calibre has a function like this now, its kinda cool IMO.

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.

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.

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?

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

That sounds reasonable. So you're essentially throwing everything into one folder and let software do the rest? May I ask what software you're using, and how it stores your tags? Does it use metadata files or a database?

Feel free to elaborate. ;) I don't mind ditching folders. The question is: how do I get at said metadata with the least amount of manual effort, how do I make sure that it's accurate (sifting through thousands of files is not fun), and how is the metadata stored - particularly so that does not lock me into one application that can only understand its own metadata scheme, and once it dies or I want to switch to a different one, I lose all the work I've put into curating my collection. That's why I was considering folders as an option: they are a software-agnostic way of organising my library.

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.

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.

Same as I do for music. I use Calibre and do a lot of manual organization. My tree looks like this:

King, Stephen/

Christine/

    Christine.epub

Dark Tower, The - 01 - Gunslinger, The/

    Dark Tower, The - 01 - Gunslinger, The.epub

Dark Tower, The - 02 - Drawing of the Three, The/

    Dark Tower, The - 02 - Drawing of the Three, The.epub

Needful Things/

    Neefdul Things.epub

Of course, most of my books are fiction so I don't use genres, but now I'm rethinking that lol.

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.

I use calibre Web automated (CWA). I don't concern myself much with the filesystem level structure, but it's author/work + metadata for other details.

If you start making the fs the sorting mechanism, you end up with books that don't belong anywhere or have too ma y categories. I"be been down that road.

Naaaah... Bad long terme advice !

Skill issue ! There's a good balance between the 2. If you only rely on one organization logic you will later regret it ^^.

Putting everything in one folder/directory and let the metadata speak for itself is just calling for a nightmare later one (same goes for folder/directory structure without metadata!).

Putting everything in one folder/directory and let the metadata speak for itself is just calling for a nightmare later one (same goes for folder/directory structure without metadata!).

I am not doing that. I'll guess here that you aren't familiar with the way calibre Web and CWA work?

I use BISAC

Lots of varied advice in the thread. I would suggest you choose a software first, then find recommended naming for it. Many will do some organisation for you, or even let you define the structure.

I don't like calibre, but it's undeniably the most complete solution. I'm not a fan of having to remote into a desktop for certain actions that given frontent doesn't support (there are many).

Some other options:
https://selfh.st/apps/?tag=Books