TL;DR: How do you sort your books for your book server?
I’m thinking of reworking my eBook/comic/etc library, and I’m curious how other people structure things.
I don’t want to separate fiction out by genre or anything since some can fit multiple genres, so I’m leaning towards Dewey decimal system categories personally.
I’m also planning a bit ahead since my daughter is now starting to read more than sight words books, so I’m thinking of separating kids fiction and adult fiction.
I also currently have a section for comics, manga, and LNs. Those are separated mostly for who goes to what, and what they do/don’t want to read. So my library right now (plus the kids section) will look like:
- Kids Fiction
- Adult Fiction
- Comics
- Manga
- Light/Web Novels
- Non-Fiction
Simple for navigation, and searchable, but maybe not the best for browsing. So I was thinking maybe the Dewey categories:
- Computer Science, Knowledge, and Systems
- Philosophy & Psychology
- Social Sciences
- Language
- Science
- Technology
- Arts
- Adult Fiction
- Kids Fiction
- History/Geography
Nicely browsable, but some of those sections will be really light on books.
What method of sorting do you use? Any librarians out there with thoughts on better approaches than the Dewey decimal system?
EDIT: I really like what @thayer@lemmy.ca mentioned, which I’ve currently adapted to:
- Instructional (How-to, manuals, gardening, etc)
- Tech (Electronics reference materials, programming reference books, etc).
- Equine (all my wife’s horse stuff)
- Kids Fiction
- Kids Non-Fiction (I’ve got some geography books and such my daughter likes, I’m sure it will expand over time)
- Adult Fiction
- Adult Non-Fiction
- Comics
- Manga
- LN/WN
I can easily allow the kids accounts to have access to the Kids section, not include the comics/manga/tech my wife has no interest in, etc.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
- Instructional (non-tech how-to books)
- Manuals (for actual household items, vehicles, etc.)
- Programming (tech books)
- Books (everything else)